If you are a content creator or someone who’s into CAD modeling or rendering, then the AMD Ryzen Threadripper is what you should have in your system. The Intel equivalent of these chips are twice as expensive and still don’t come with as many PCIe lanes and L3 cache. Regardless of what you own, Newegg is selling AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 2950X for $100 less than the retail price of $899 for a limited time duration of 24 hours.
The 2nd Gen Threadripper 2950X is a 16-Core behemoth with SMT bringing the thread count up to 32. Based on the 12nm Zen+ architecture, it’s perfect for multi-threaded tasks like 4K video editing and color grading, playback of high-resolution 4K, 5K, and even 6K RED footage in real time using tools like DaVinci Resolve. In fact, some people are even reporting successful playback of multiple 4K streams simultaneously in real-time. However, be informed that for single-threaded tasks like gaming and other multi-media, Intel’s 9th Gen i9-9700K will probably be faster due to higher clock speeds and better IPC.
The CPU comes with a base clock of 3.5GHz and a boost of 4.4GHz, and a total cache memory of 40MB to feed all those cores. The 2nd Gen Ryzen Threadripper chips come with support for quad-channel DDR4 RAM and an astounding 64 PCIe lanes (in contrast Intel’s recently released Cascade Lake processors have only 48) for adding as many expansion cards as you want. The 2950X has a TDP rating of 180W which isn’t as high as it sounds when you consider the fact that you’re getting a 16-Core part.
There are only 6 units left in stock at the time of writing, so don’t hold off for too long if you want one. And of course, the upcoming Zen2 based 7nm Ryzen 3000 and Epyc lineup will be considerably faster, but it’ll be a while before they hit retail shelves.
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