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The 10 core i7-6950X is competitive for full build compilation with a 24 core Xeon from the same generation and is substantially better for most incremental builds where it's heavily bottlenecked on a couple threads. It was really good for a couple years but it's awful now.
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When Zen 3 Threadripper comes out, I'll happily pay thousands of dollars to get a 64+ core CPU, nice motherboard and 256GB+ memory to go with it. Could not wait any longer though, and I'll happily turn this into a replacement for my badly aging gaming PC so it won't be wasted.
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Also, for the time being, I'm going to switch to dual booting on this machine while still also using my older workstation. So, I can either have 2 workstations doing builds or I can be doing gaming on this while also switching over regularly to test new builds on the other, etc.
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Threadripper chips are massive with massive power usage and heat spread across the huge die. They need special coolers and you need a really good one to truly take advantage of them. They bypassed chip density limits with die size. It's a massive server CPU but with high clocks.
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NH-D15 works as well as icegiantcooling.com for a more typical CPU. It's as good or perhaps even a bit better at taking away heat from a smaller, denser CPU. They only have noctua.at/en/nh-u14s-tr4 for Threadripper though and even an NH-D15 version wouldn't be enough for 64c.
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The chips make sense for AMD since despite being very low volume, they're surely extremely high margin products. It's hard to get a proper motherboard and cooler ecosystem to develop around them since the volume isn't high enough. Motherboards were largely fine though.
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