The stuff Hacker News actually recommends.

GPUs and CPUs · AMD Threadripper

AMD Threadripper 3970X

6owners with an opinion
60%of verdicts positive
1/1positive/negative since 2024
2 yrslongest happy owner
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and noise; criticized for reliability.

What people wrote

NeutralOwned 2 yearsStill going
I have a genuine question - in practice on a workstation/developer computer, what sort of protection does ECC ram give me? I've got two daily driver machines - a 3970x threadripper with 96GB ram, and an M1 Macbook Pro - neither of which have ECC ram. I've been using them both for over 2 years, and not once in that period (that I'm aware of) have I found myself with a problem due to faulty RAM, but I do regularly find myself wishing both were faster. What practical benefit would I get in exchange for the performance hit of ECC memory?
Doesn’t like it
You’re advocating for a flawed test. Why is it, when ever someone points out that Microsoft shits the bed on something someone will come out with ludicrous ideas about changing the default environment. The default environment is what you get, all this handwringing about whats potentially possible misses the point entirely; for decades we have, as a community, scoffed at linux for requiring you to understand deeply how your OS works in order for it to function. Now we’re in the situation where the out-of-the-box experience for gaming requires less esoteric knowledge on Linux than Windows, yet people defend Windows still. Do you seriously think the exec running emails even knows what Hyper-V is? Do you think any IT department is going to disable memory integrity? Would any Dev disable WSL? Do the vast majority of gamers want to do this? Should they have to? You’re now arguing that overhead is ok because its mitigated by newer hardware, I don’t believe that to be true as I run W11 on A Threadripper 3970x and an i9-14900k and the fuckers feel leagues slower than my M1 Macbook, its a joke! Like 10x the power/thermal envelope- and sure, some of that is down to the M1 being great, but there’s no benchmark putting it above those CPUs. Stop pretending that this is ok, and stop trying to spread uncertainty about a valid test. I’d prefer newer hardware too, but this is the compromise if we want older OS’s to be included.
Neutral
You're a pretty bad sample, that machine you're talking about probably cost >$2,000 new; and if it's an M-series chip; well that was a multi-generational improvement. I (very recently I might add) used a Razer Blade 18, with i9 13950HX and 64G of DDR5 memory, and it felt awfully slow, not sure how much of that is Windows 11's fault however. My daily driver is an M2 Macbook Air (or a Threadripper 3970x running linux); but the workers in my office? Dell Latitudes with an i5, 4 real cores and 16G of RAM if they're lucky... and of course, Windows 11. Don't even ask what my mum uses at home, it cost less than my monthly food bill; and that's pretty normal for people who don't love computers.
Neutral
Reminds me of this saga I went through as an early adopter of AMD Threadripper 3970X: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/amd-threadripper-3970x-under... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22382946 Ended up investigating the issue with AMD for several months, was generously compensated by AMD for all the troubles (sending motherboards and CPUs back and forth, a real PITA), but the outcome is that I've been running since then with a custom BIOS image provided by AMD. I think at the end the fault was on Gigabyte's side.
Likes it
I have the same chip and it's amazing to see it idle at 75W after growing up on Intel chips that use like 5W at idle. Of note is that Zen 2 (the 3970x's microarchitecture) is 7nm. The new Threadrippers are on a 5nm process. I would expect slightly lower power consumption, but note that the 7000 series of Threadrippers quote a TDP of 350W while the 3000 series quote 280W. So I'm guessing they're using the efficiency for more speed instead of more power savings. To me, it's fine. I'd always prefer paying more for electricity than to wait longer for something to complete. (But I do respect the desktop chips that can blink my cursor with an efficiency core that uses a few tens of milliwatts.)
Neutral
Are they real cores or hyperthreads/SMT? I've found that hyperthreading doesn't really live up to the hype; if interactive software gets scheduled on the same physical core as a busy hyperthread, latency suffers. Meanwhile, Linux seems to do pretty well these days handling interactive workloads while a 32 core compilation goes on in the background. SMT is a throughput thing, and I honestly turn it off on my workstation for that reason. It's great for cloud providers that want to charge you for a "vCPU" that can't use all of that core's features. Not amazing for a workstation where you want to chill out on YouTube while something CPU intensive happens in the background. (For a bazel C++ build, having SMT on, on a Threadripper 3970X, does increase performance by 15%. But at the cost of using ~100GB of RAM at peak! I have 128GB, so no big deal, but SMT can be pretty expensive. It's probably not worth it for most workloads. 32 cores builds my Go projects quickly enough, and if I have to build C++ code, well, I wait. ;)