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5+ year old i7 are potato and would be a massive time waster today. Build times matter.



I have a seven year old ThreadRipper Pro and would not significantly benefit from upgrading.


The Threadripper PRO branding was only introduced 3.5 years ago. The first two generations didn't have any split between workstation parts and enthusiast consumer parts. You must have a first-generation Threadripper, which means it's somewhere between 8 and 16 CPU cores.

If you would not significantly benefit from upgrading, it's only because you already have more CPU performance than you need. Today's CPUs are significantly better than first-generation Zen in performance per clock and raw clock speed, and mainstream consumer desktop platforms can now match the top first-generation Threadripper in CPU core count and total DRAM bandwidth (and soon, DRAM capacity). There's no performance or power metric by which a Threadripper 1950X (not quite 6.5 years old) beats a Ryzen 7950X. And the 7950X also comes in a mobile package that only sacrifices a bit of performance (to fit into fairly chunky "laptops").


I guess I should clarify: I am a rust and C++ developer blocked on compilation time, but even then, I am not able to justify the cost of upgrading from a 1950X/128GB DDR4 (good guess!) to the 7950X or 3D. It would be faster, but not in a way that would translate to $$$ directly. (Not to mention the inflation in TRx costs since AMD stopped playing catch-up.) performance-per-watt isn’t interesting to me (except for thermals but Noctua has me covered) because I pay real-time costs and it’s not a build farm.

If I had 100% CPU consumption around the clock, I would upgrade in a heart beat. But I’m working interactively in spurts between hitting CPU walls and the spurts don’t justify the upgrade.

If I were to upgrade it would be for the sake of non-work CPU video encoding or to get PCIe 5.0 for faster model loading to GPU VRAM.


sTR4 workstations are hard to put down! I'll replace mine one day, probably with whatever ASRock Rack Epyc succeeds the ROMED8-2T with PCIe 5.0.

In the meantime, I wanted something more portable, so I put a 13700K and RTX 3090 in a Lian Li A4-H2O case with an eDP side panel for a nice mITX build. It only needs one cable for power, and it's as great for VR as it is a headless host.


I don’t notice myself sitting and waiting for a build. I don’t want to waste my time setting up a new workstation so why bother?




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