In April, I built a new PC out of these parts:

  • Threadripper 3970x
  • MSI TRX40 PRO
  • G.SKILL Trident Z Neo Series 64GB (2 x 32GB)
  • EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 8GB GDDR5X
  • Samsung 970 EVO
  • EVGA 1000 GQ
  • Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3
  • Fractal Design Meshify C

Total cost: $3863.98

Why did I build it? I'm a software developer, and I spend all day in Visual Studio. I had just gotten hired at a new employer, and I expected to be doing a fair amount of C++ compilation. For the rest of my development tasks, I wanted to be comfortably over-provisioned.

Do I like it? Emphatically yes. Developing on it is a dream. I am spoiled to work on any other machine. It is fun to watch all 64 logical processors max out in Task Manager during compilation. I love spinning up a virtual machine and whimsically assigning 16 cores and as many gigabytes of RAM. I feel like a teenager with a 500hp engine under his foot.

Image: All cores maxed out compiling open-radART. Vroom!

It is worth it? I find the performance-per-dollar to be very high. I was pleased to see that Linus Torvalds himself praised his 3970x. I find performance to be a good balance between the cheaper 3960x and the pricey 3990x. I literally could not find any prebuilt machines of this caliber, but if I could have, they would have easily cost over $6000.

Image: The 3970x sits equitably on the performance-price curve, but its performance is way ahead of the competition. Source: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/