I've been watching a few YT videos recently & got curious about Intel's X-series CPU's & Motherboards... are they the the kind of build that should be avoided unless you intend to use them, if for no other reason than they can tend to get expensive to just sit idle?
I was looking at X79/X99 generation; with no immediate/specific use for the machine, so... are they greatly different to any machine I'm likely to have already built? If not, I'll file the idea under "retirement project".
They will have six or eight cores in those generations I think? They will run hot and are clearly a much older generation. A Ryzen 7 3700X will spank them handily or you can look at the Ryzen 9 3900X if you want a monster that’ll make them look like a dinosaur tooth in an archaeological dig site. I’d suggest it’s entirely impractical and should be fed under retirement project, which is a fair enough place to put things like this I think!
Don't need a new machine - this R5 3600 is perfectly OK. I just like the idea of building machines for fun...
Whilst builds using X79 and X99 can still perform decently, I think they mainly sit in the category of "want to build for fun" rather than "Does this make a good value for money proposition". You can get lucky of course when it comes to availability and pricing but generally Ryzen is the better choice. Please note, the above is coming from someone who builds and messes around with systems purely for fun.
I put my X99 build together just before Ryzen came out... there would be little point doing so now unless you had money to burn. I miss the days when the X-series stuff was king of the hill (X58, I'm looking at you senpai).
If it's just for fun then you can build whatever, doesn't matter what they're 'intended' for. If you enjoy the making/setting up etc though I'd look to get cheaper stuff then you'd be able to do it more often.
One use case for a CPU like the 7900X is if you need to run say 4 GPUs (for rendering, for example) at 8x/8x/8x/8x for which the 44 PCIe lanes would prove most useful.
I must be a bit-tech oddity, I use a lot of older parts on a daily basis... My daily driver is an HP Z600 workstation with 2x X5650 CPUs; my other half's machine uses an i5-2400; my main server is still using a socket 771 CPU! I've got an X58 board with an X5650 that I haven't been able to fire up yet, and I've just bought a Lenovo base unit with a 4th-gen i5 (don't know exactly which CPU yet) which will mostly replace my other half's machine. I'm still GPU-limited in games (running at 2560x1600) and I've yet to find a workload that truly gives both CPUs a workout - other than synthetic benchmarks. I doubt my day-to-day usage would really stress even one CPU tbh; that's what I plan to test with the X58 board with - if it can handle my day-to-day workloads then my Z600 would make a great general-purpose server for dev workloads, media transcode, etc. I don't do any 3D/CAD work, I don't do anything in the way of heavy image manipulation, and I don't work with 4K video (although given the speed of modern hardware, it's arguable that IO speed is more important than raw CPU power for editing 4K footage). It's mostly just games for me and the CPU only gets you so far with gaming, the GPU is what really counts. Power usage is a hell of a lot higher on older kit I'll grant you that - my CPUs alone can suck down 180W! - but the amount I save on not buying the latest and greatest more than justifies the odd occasion when my kit starts to guzzle power.
