Gurus, First off, hello g3d community. I've been pretty inactive since the mid 2000s; grew up, went off to college, that kinda thing. I last built a PC in Summer 2010 (I7-930, GTX480, 12GB RAM). I used this thing continuously until the last couple months when it started hanging at the Windows logo screen during boot with the infinite dotted circle, even when booting from CD. It'll do it for days if I let it. I believe I eliminated RAM as the issue, neither here nor there, but figured maybe it's time to build new. I have a Dell XPS 15 laptop with an I7-6700hq, 16gb RAM and I like it overall, was a nice upgrade when I got it last year. So, boring backstory aside, I'm looking to build a capable workstation that will likely be primarily for day trading. What does this mean? Likely running mamy instances of charting and stock scanning applications along with a ton of web activity and other applications running on 3+ 4K monitors. I also do VM work, coding, web development, database stuff, etc from time to time. Not too worried about the GPU decision, lookin at a GTX 1060 atm, but AMDs recent offerings throw a wrench in making the CPU decision straightforward like it used to be. I have been looking at the I9-9700 and 9900k based on the past 10 years of Intel dominance, but I find the new AMD Threadrippers interesting. The 2950x would cost me 3-400 extra, but may be a beast for my expected multitasking needs between the cores and quad channel memory. That said, it's tough for me to say for sure I won't appreciate having the I9's IPC advantage since I haven't used either processor. The 2700x is not off the table, though I don't see a strong reason to prefer it over the I9 options or even the 8700k, which is also not ruled out. Essentially, I'm looking for CPU recommendations. Price not necessarily a huge object, but price per dollar is. If I spend more, I want to know I'm getting more performance to justify it. I will likely use this PC for many years to come given that my last one lasted 8 yrs. Feel free to ask me clarifying questions and let me know your experience on higher end workstation pros and cons. Thanks Gurus.
Depends how much power you want, if money really isnt an issue go the ryzen 2920X. However for half the price you can get the Ryzen 2700X and looking at reviews vs 2920x its not like your getting half the performance. its actually a very capable processor.
Well if you want to run some VMs, run DBs and can use 32GB or more of ram and expect running a lot of threads in parallel Threadripper is probably best choice. You can even use ECC memory if needed. 2950x or 2920x depending on how many cores you think you can use, but would avoid WX variants as in certain workloads their unorthodox architecture can be issue. Another advantage for AMD is future upgrade-ability with zen 2 and 3 where next gen Intel likely require new mobo/chipset again. As for GPU GTX 1060 is fine, but would probably rather get RX590, as it have more performance. more memory and is even slightly cheaper. (thats unless you want use gsync monitor or run some nvidia specific GPU accelerated app)
Voted Ryzen 2950X but as said the 2920X is an option just as well. Though if money is no objection then 2990WX will give you double the cores / threads of 2950X still. IMO the Intel options are off the table because you are indeed looking at performing lot of parallel workloads so thread amount is a major factor. IPC difference I dare assume is negligible for your needs, especially given the huge concession you'll make in core / thread count taking the Intel route.
I'm starting to look seriously at going with a 1950X @ $450 for performance per dollar and maybe moving to a 2950 or even 3950 in the next year. It looks like Gen 3 Threadrippers might not work with the X399 chipset though, which would mean a MB replacement as well to upgrade. Are we waiting for the X499 announcement at CES to figure out whether we will have to upgrade for Gen 3?
Ryzen hands down. With your workflow and budget, it will make more sense to aim for Ryzen 2950x (for which I voted) instead of 1950x. This will be ideal for the workflows and multitasking without a delay. Allows you to upgrade the CPU down the road (grab a solid tr4 mobo) + you can even do some 4k gaming on it without any problems. Make sure you grab a decent AIO cooler. Besides that from what you have written, RAM will be a key component for your workflow. I would aim for at least DDR4 2900 32gb
AMD for Zen2 specifically stated that it will be backward compatible, it will just not support PCI-e gen4 on old mobos and maybe miss some advanced functions support as it was with Zen+.
So far you received only theoretical answers. I mean not from people who actually tried that specific workload on proposed HW.
I actually moved from 2600k to 1800x and now to 2950x and I do on top of gaming work with VMs and Databases, just not an stock market fan, but have a lot of browser tabs opened and run sometime a lot of apps at once. Dont know how much workload OP can do at once, but so far I am quite happy with 2950x, it even to my surprise run cooler and beat 1800x in gaming. All OP can get are just our opinions because unless we know to the details exact specific workload data about what he plan to do its all we can do.
With the 1950X available for $450, it looks like my best option is an Asrock X399 Taichi and a 1950X with room to upgrade down the road. I can't justify 2x the price for the 2950X just to get 10-15% performance improvement at best. Any logical fallacy here? I plan to do 64GB DDR4 -- anyone have experience with ECC? I have read a lot of articles on the use cases for ECC. The last 15 years of my PC building life I've never used it and it's never been an issue. But if anyone has used it and has opinions, I wouldn't mind hearing. Many thanks.
More or less you want ECC only if you run calculations and cant afford any error or long complex calculation and want to make sure you stay stable. For regular usage it have little benefit, errors are relatively rare and in most cases they are not even detected by user. Its different if you use 8-32GB or xxTB of ram. Also there's big penalty on performance as they run on far lower frequency and have loose timings and that affect a lot of performance especially on Zen based CPU.
In regards to Ram, what do you 'guys' think about 64gig quad running a 2666 or 32 gig at 3200 dual ? I heard that Threadripper has problems with quad channel running faster than 3000?
If it were me, I'd want the quad channel. I have 4x 16GB of G.Skill 3200c19 running at 2933... Couldn't easily get stable at 3066 or higher and haven't jumped through any hoops yet to try.
For the record here in this thread, I ended up with an open box Asrock Taichi x399 for $220 @microcenter and a $450 TR 1950X from Newegg along with a 4x 16GB set of G.Skill 3200c19. So far, I have been very happy with the decision for the price.
