> I'm planning on my new rig having the Ryzen 5900X. Is the 5950 better? While I've kinda picked that one, I'm open to ideas if it is faster and I can afford it. As it is, I'm looking at between $300 and $350 for the 5900. My last CPU cost a little over $100. >
I'm not going to say one is better than the other. The 5950X has more cores, the 5900X runs at a higher speed. It depends on your workload which will be better for you. I do a lot of things based around machine learning where I felt I was better off having more cores - give 12 to the ML job, keep 4 for my personal use. It's worked out well. However you don't ever talk much about what you actually use your computers for other than having 250 disk drives and moving data around your network. Depending on how you are moving data you might be better off with 5900X going faster. You can use this site to get some comparative data: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Ryzen-9-5950X-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-5900X/4086vs4087 BTW - you probably know both of these CPUs have been superseded by the 7900X and 7950X. THere's also the 3D versions which have faster and larger cache. > While at it. In the past, I always bought the mobo, CPU and memory from the same place. Generally if one of those is bad, it's sometimes hard to know which one is bad. Sometimes even the BIOS beep codes are no help because there may be none. If the mobo doesn't boot up, worst case, send all three back to the same place. Given how far things have come, do I need to worry about a bad one out of the box anymore? I can save some money if I buy from different places. Cannot answer but you need a return policy from every vendor. If it doesn't boot and you cannot figure it out you send everything back to multiple vendors I guess. Until recently I built all my machines myself. My 5900X machine has water cooling and I had cash so I paid a local storefront here to build it. I bought right in the middle of the pandemic and the chip shortage cost me huge dollars. Most expensive machine I've ever owned. Probably could build it today for less than 50% of what I paid.
