Are there any reasons you WOULDN'T buy a high Core Count i9(12c+) discounting Money?

[LaCuNa]

If it's just a dick measuring contest then get the 32c/64t Threadripper? x299/i9 can't match that, and you can brag about all 64 PCI-E lanes you have as well. Fuck it, run 12 NVME drives in raid 0 because you can. That's your untouchable bragging rights there if you don't care about price at all and don't have any particular workload in mind.

Otherwise money & usage definitely matters, and just to hit 12c+ you may be compromising on the things you actually care about. Intel's X-series don't clock as high, primarily, meaning things like gaming will be slower on the more expensive chip. As will many other things that don't scale out as well.

Wait....what? I thought the I9's trumped the AMD's? All the benchmarks i've seen always pointed at the Intels' for maximum performance. AMD would only come out ontop in a couple random ass games/tests that I didn't even care about anyways.

 

[kllrnohj]

Wait....what? I thought the I9's trumped the AMD's? All the benchmarks i've seen always pointed at the Intels' for maximum performance. AMD would only come out ontop in a couple random ass games/tests that I didn't even care about anyways.

At the same clock speeds Intel has a ~10% advantage (Zen2 seems to be changing that), and on the low-core count CPUs Intel can clock higher (again, Zen2 appears to be changing that).

But once you hit HEDT territory where Intel can't clock as high as they can AMD's raw core count advantage just shits all over Intel in multithreaded workloads. The i9 tops out with the i9-9980XE at 18c/36t @ 3.0ghz base, 4.5ghz boost. Threadripper's 2990WX at 32c/64t @ 3.0ghz base, 4.2ghz boost straight up body slams it in parallel workloads while being $200 cheaper and with way more PCI-E lanes.

So this gets back to it depends on your workload. And if you're just gaming the high-core count HEDT i9's are worse than their lower core count brethren since they can't clock as high. But if your goal is just to win at the cinebench dick measuring contest you want threadripper.