Price/performance is great for the CPU, but you have to spend hundreds of dollars on the motherboard, RAM, power supply, and case for each one.
You need to look at the overall system cost. If you’re building new, it could be cheaper overall to put 12-core or 16-core CPUs into a smaller number of machines than it would be to put a lot of $100 budget CPUs into many machines.
Unless your goal is to build a cluster for the sake of building a cluster, you might have a better price/performance ratio by building a single 16-core 7950X box than you would with three separate Ryzen 4500 or 5500 machines.
Even with perfect scaling, you would need at least 4 separate Ryzen 5500 machines to have a chance at beating a single 7950X for CPU-bound tasks. The 7950X CPU alone is barely more than 4X the cost of a Ryzen 5500, but you only need to buy one motherboard, one power supply, and so on.
> - Ryzen 4500/5500 (seems best perf/$)
Price/performance is great for the CPU, but you have to spend hundreds of dollars on the motherboard, RAM, power supply, and case for each one.
You need to look at the overall system cost. If you’re building new, it could be cheaper overall to put 12-core or 16-core CPUs into a smaller number of machines than it would be to put a lot of $100 budget CPUs into many machines.
Unless your goal is to build a cluster for the sake of building a cluster, you might have a better price/performance ratio by building a single 16-core 7950X box than you would with three separate Ryzen 4500 or 5500 machines.
Even with perfect scaling, you would need at least 4 separate Ryzen 5500 machines to have a chance at beating a single 7950X for CPU-bound tasks. The 7950X CPU alone is barely more than 4X the cost of a Ryzen 5500, but you only need to buy one motherboard, one power supply, and so on.