HEDT, or High End Desktop Builds
HEDT Platforms, X299 and X399/TRX40
Well well well… what an interesting time it has been for the HEDT market of late. If I had written this section a few weeks ago, the situation would have been as per the last buyers guide. The Skylake-X refresh (i.e. Intel 9000 ‘X’ series) and the Gen 2 Threadripper chips up to the 32 core 2990WX were sitting in the high core count segment without challengers. Generally, Threadripper had the advantage on price and cores, with Intel retaining traditionally strong performance in clock speed sensitive workloads.
Now, this has all changed. Nobody was expecting Threadripper 3 to be the absolute performance freight train that it was, and the uplift over previous gen parts was staggering. For roughly the same amount of money, the 32 core 3970X absolutely demolishes both the old 2990WX and – in nearly all cases – the new Intel i9 10980XE. Heck, the 24 core 3960X does such a good job of giving the 10980XE a bloody nose that it is – no doubt – the ‘value’ option in the new TR lineup. The only thing that has really changed is pricing. It is now the TR chips that are the premium option, with the 10980XE and lower core count offerings being $1,000 or less.
Sadly, for most, that price cut was not enough to save the new Cascade Lake X parts. Why? Well, AMD have decided to carry on selling their Gen 2 Threadripper CPUs. You can pick up a 16 core 2950X for around £850 in the UK, at the time of writing. How does it compare to the 10980XE? Well, look at charts for it vs. the 9980XE, as – for the most part.- performance between the old and new 18 core flagship from Intel hasn’t really changed.
There is, of course, another option. Whilst not specifically an ‘HEDT’ part, the new 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X is entirely capable of giving the 18 core 10980XE a bloody nose, a run for its money, or – depending on the task – scoring an outright win… with 2 fewer cores. Nice. It is just $750, compared to the 10980XE’s $1,000, and comes on cheaper mainboards. Sure, it lacks some of the HEDT features of the 10980XE (e.g. fewer PCIe lanes, dual-channel memory, etc), but it’s still definitely an attractive option for those wanting raw CPU horsepower than isn’t memory bandwidth or PCIe lane dependent.
You can find reviews of all the above-mentioned products here:
I think it is fairly obvious that this HEDT crown has to go to AMD in 2019… and it’s not over yet. Their new 64 core 3990(W)X chip is due to launch next year, and that will be – doubtless – absolutely blisteringly quick. Zen 2 has done an exceptional job of covering AMD’s old Ryzen weaknesses. For example, do you use Adobe products? Normally, sure, they were better on Intel for a host of reasons. Now, thanks to Zen 2’s power increase and better optimisation, a traditional weak point of the Zen architecture has been patched. Don’t believe me? Read the reviews above…
And, with that, that’s me signing off. I hope you enjoy the read!
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