Blogs Threadripper versus Core i9: How did the battle end?

I'd posit the i7-7820X as a good all-rounder, but with it's current weirdness in some lightly threaded workloads, and the potential for a highly clocked i7-8700K to come close in multi-threaded performance even lacking two physical cores, it's mostly attractive for being able to run 3x NVME drives in addition to a 16x slot for a GPU crammed on an ITX board. The closest you can get on LGA115x is with the proprietary mini-STX boards, and you need to splash out on an MXM GPU with those.

 

Coffelake and Ryzen 7 will/do offer more than enough multi-threaded performance for 99% of people. Intel still has the IPC crown, obviously, but AMD having unlocked CPU's through the entire range and access to dirt cheap B350 boards for single GPU solutions (still 99% of people) means there is a genuine fight on.

As for HEDT - Intel fanboys will buy X299, AMD fanboys will buy X399, no-one will be able to convince either to do otherwise, regardless of the numbers or prices.

 

I bought X399, far from AMD fanboy, it offers me platform parity with what I had before, z77 + PLX for lanes I needed and then some, up to this point Intel/AMD didn't offer me a cost effective upgrade solution for that, z270+PLX boards are more expensive than x399 and offer no onward path, just like when I bought z77&3770k there was no where to go with it and when the chip failed I had to scour secondhand markets as it was obsoleted, they expect you to throw it all away when you upgrade, great, the Intel HEDT boards are cheap but chips with lanes are not, TR was, made it simple, I didn't even go big, just the 1900x, so probably slower than a 1800x when similarly clocked but all the IOs means I can add more nvme when needed and not have to do the slot juggle to get the right combination of things working on the bloody system.

Is it a shame it's only just a bit quicker than my overclocked ivy in single thread, yup of course, but it's enough grunt, I'm mostly waiting for GPUs to push my pixels. 16 threads is 2x more than I've had, it will be interesting to see how my encodes go and if I feel I need more I can always upgrade, I doubt I will, until the refresh, which should drop in with a BIOS update

 

for 99% of users both flagships are heavily over priced and offer nothing to them.

Convincing the masses to upgrade from whatever is in there dell desktop pcs is AMDs biggest concern going forward.

Sales to enthusaists are a tiny % of the market.

 

TL;DR - If you need Thunderbolt, you are forced to Intel for now.

One major consideration for me and many other content creators that is missed in this article and virtually all other coverage I find: Thunderbolt 3 compatibility. Intel has it, AMD doesn't. I require TB3 to plug-in professional parts (Blackmagic video i/o, hard drives, audio interface) that are part of my work. I had to build a system *now* and so it ruled-out AMD for me and I went with X299. Even if it cost $300 more for same performance, it didn't really matter since Thunderbolt is a requirement, not an option.

I saw that Gigabyte has an X399 board hopefully coming soon with Thunderbolt, but it's not out yet. Also, it remains to be seen if there will be compatibility issues with TB devices, as in the past they have been fussy with non-Intel thunderbolt on PCs.

I find reviewers paying little attention to Thunderbolt, they just mention it if it's included. I wish they would test it and benchmark it, as assuming all Thunderbolt ports perform the same is not the case. For instance, some recent ASRock boards only work at half-speed.

 

$50 adds thunderbolt to a PC though doesn't it for those that need it, like 10GbE I'd rather it wasn't there TBH and have a cheaper motherboard.

 

Only if the motherboard has support for it and a Thunderbolt header, which the AMD boards do not (and not all Intel boards do, either).

 

It looks like this board: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11847/gigabyte-announces-x399-designare-ex will have Thunderbolt 3 compatibility at some point.