Wednesday 6th March 2019: 9.01pm. Just pulled the trigger on the guts of a new workstation to replace my six year old Ivy Bridge workstation:
- Four core Intel i7-3770K @ 3.9Ghz ("overclocked" to turbo always on).
- 16Gb of DDR3-1600 RAM @ 21Gb/sec.
... with this instead:
- Sixteen core AMD Threadripper 2950x @ 3.5Ghz, turbo 4.5Ghz.
- 32Gb of DDR4-3200 RAM @ 64Gb/sec.
So four times the CPU cores and three times the memory bandwidth. Should be a nice upgrade, I might even notice the difference. I can see that so many CPU cores will be memory starved under load fairly often, but the AMD chip is half the cost of the equivalent from Intel. Or, rather, for the same money you get twice the CPU cores, even if they are around 10-15% slower than the equivalent Intel chip at full load (single threaded things are rather better, only 5% slower or so).
It'll be going into the same case, PSU, graphics card et al, with the old parts going on to eBay to recoup whatever I get. I'll be sad to see my vastly overkill Noctua NH-D14 HSF go, it is so overkill a cooling solution that even under full load, that quad core CPU didn't spin up the fans. Case ventilation was sufficient. The new HSF is also a Noctua, but with just one radiator block and fan. That said, it actually weighs more than the old one, despite being much smaller. We shall see how it fares.
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