Blogs The upcoming high-end CPU battle could depend on motherboard prices

Yup, it will come down to pricing, I already have x399, so lack of compatibility is a real pain but if it is because I am getting something I want for it in terms of features then I might bite but as I don't need a load of cores just loads of lanes, either will do, if Intel is cheap and performs well, I can see the 10 or more likey 12 core taking place of my x399, though looking at cheap x299 boards they don't support all chips that fit the socket, so looks like the x299 boards really start at ~£250 so not that much cheaper than x399 was when you consider the chips you had to buy to actually get lanes and also the extra you had to pay for raid key.

Chips for x299x seem to fix this lane restriction which is good but only time will tell if the boards are any cheaper, not so amusingly one of the things that swung me to TR was I got fed up with new chip, new board with Intel and AMD had said about supporting their sockets for a few years, I did not see that comment as only being desktop makes the choice for what to buy next a bit more open I suppose, if both companies are going to force platform upgrades on new designs I can go with either and switch next time around.

Of course my other option is just pop in a 2xxx TR chip but it doesn't really have the IPC bump and I doubt prices will drop if there's no backwards/forwards compatibility.

I don't see 3950x as competition, it still has lane issues, been dealing with that on my daughters b450 trying to offload a lot of my old hardware in there, though I suppose if I had x570 I could at least have PCIe lane bifurcation to put some of my old NVMe in the PCIe slots.

 

TR 3xxx is going to be closer to the Xeon W-3175X than the i9-10980XE.
Mainboards for that 28 core from Intel are well over a £1000, so I don't really see the problem (for the ultra uber high end market).

For the regular high end market however, the cut price HEDTs from Intel could actually pose an interesting alternative to the 3950x and expensive X570 mobos.