Turbo

Maximum power computing.

The reign of the Threadripper 2950X is over! The Threadripper series has long been toeing the line between powerful and overpriced, and with the 2950X stockpile running dry, limited second-hand units are rising in price. So rather than opting for the prohibitively expensive 3rd generation of Threadripper processors, we’re losing a few cores and going for the top-tier AM4 chip instead, the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X. It’s impressively powerful, but not towards the point of redundancy. This means we’ve had to swap out the motherboard, so we’ve opted for Gigabyte’s X570 Aorus Ultra. Our cooler remains compatible with the new motherboard socket, so we don’t have to change that up.

One upgrade we do have to make, however, is the SSD. The move to 3rd-gen Ryzen means we now have PCIe 4.0 support, and we just have to take advantage. To that end, we’ve got a 1TB version of the Corsair Force MP600 SSD, which isn’t too much more expensive than the Seagate BarraCuda drive we had been using but offers incredible 5GB/s read speeds.

We’re also changing up the HDDs in both builds, swapping to a single 6TB BarraCuda hard drive in favor of the dual 3TB drives, which has saved us over $20 on both builds. Both systems are also receiving the EVGA SuperNOVA 850 GA, as we were stung once again by rising PSU prices. Overall we’ve saved a respectable $111 compared to last month’s AMD Turbo build.

Over on our Blue Build (patent definitely not pending), the i9-9900K has dropped by a further $100. It’s still one of the best gaming and multimedia-editing CPUs we’ve ever seen, so snap one up fast if you’re looking to build a high-powered machine. We’ve also made a saving by swapping to the Asus ROG Strix Z390-H Gaming, since the previous mobo is out of stock at the time of writing. It’s left our Intel turbo system over $610 cheaper than the AMD rig, which will perform on a similar level (better at rendering, somewhat worse for gaming). Hopefully next month we can shave a few bucks off the AMD machine too.

“One upgrade we do have to make, however, is the SSD. The move to 3rd-gen Ryzen means we now have PCIe 4.0 support”