Question 1

What power supply do i need for this cpu and 2 gtx 1080 ti ftw3s?

Accepted Answer

180W for 1950x, 280W for each 1080ti FTW3. You did not specify motherboard, water cooling pump(s), amount of RAM, case fans, or LED effects.  So, I would say 1000W Platinum absolute minimum, but if you are overclocking or plan to then 1200W Gold or Platinum is the best bet. I reviewed a system with 1950x AIO watercooled , 980ti AIO watercooled, 32GB 3200MHz Ram using a Corsair HX850i and still head some PS headroom but that was only one 980ti. BTW, the 1950x is wicked. The bus throughput is so awesome that there is nearly zero bottlenecks. Gaming is 4K was super smooth. It was a pure pleasure testing that system. Good luck.

Question 2

is the thread ripper the best when it comes to gaming I see some say yes and some say no I am working on a New Gaming build but I do not want to get stuck and have a beast CPU that really is not made for gaming?

Accepted Answer

This is a yes and no answer. Currently, right now you are not going to see a noticeable difference when it comes to gaming nowadays. Ryzen 7 and the threadripper will give you a very similar experience. However, that being said, games are progressing very fast where that are going to need faster processing power. HDR, VR, 3D gaming all become more taxing on the computer. This is where you will notice a big difference with the Threadripper. Additional big multiplayer games now and in the future benefit from the processing speed. I have a threadripper and I am not disappointed at all and I am very confident that this thing is going to be in my rig for a long time giving me quality gaming. Also, I have never had a faster computer using the threadripper + M.2 ssd.

Question 3

will this require liquid cooling?

Accepted Answer

It does not.  You may use a supported air cooler.

There were not many supported cooler types upon release (both air and liquid) and this was an high end CPU worth pushing to the limits, which is why many choose liquid coolers.  Many manufacturers developed adapters for the CPU that you could request upon ordering (again, both air and liquid).  But now you can find many coolers of both types with the appropriate hardware.

Question 4

What motherboard would you recommend with the purchase of the 1950x ?

Accepted Answer

ASUS Zenith Extreme see.s to have more bells and whistles and is the one I bought, but any the Aorus, ASRock, or MSI top end ones are also solid choices. For me it came down to the onboard wifi, I have a Gigabit internet connection and wanted to take advantage of the 801ad.

Question 5

How many PCIe lanes does this support?

Accepted Answer

I am pretty sure its 64

Question 6

Anyone running VMware workstation or Hyper-V? Any problems with virtualization?

Accepted Answer

I am running VMWare player with a Windows 10 virtualized machine, I was noticing a sluggish behavior when I started using it with threadripper, but for some reason I detected that 1 of the gigabyte applications that was running in my host was hogging a core and a half almost all the time, even preventing the cpu from entering the power saving mode, after I killed the related service, I noticed an increase of performance up to an acceptable point. Now, the interesting fact is that the synthetic benchmarks of 7-zip inside the vm, show adequate values for the hardware assigned (I Have 12 cores assigned and the performance is similar to my previous  i7 6900k) but the choppiness was still present before the stated measure was taken, this leads me to believe that the problem was more related to video instead than CPU. TL;DR It's usable although a tuning up would be good from the VMWare guys

Question 7

Can anyone make a qualified recommendation for a good 4x16gb RAM kit for this CPU?

Accepted Answer

Go to Motherboard website and look at compatible RAM vendors. It should give you specific RAM vendors, serial numbers and combo's i.e. 2X16 or 4X16 etc, at least for Asus ROG Zenith Extreme it does. I had an issue with 1950X build where wouldn't boot. Ended up being the RAM, switched to Mobo approved.

Question 8

im 99% sure i want this cpu but i am worried about gaming. how far behind intel will this processor be ?

Accepted Answer

If gaming is your priority, this is not your chip; way over priced with no benefit. Get a 1700/1700x/1800x or 6600K/7700K. If you have productivity requirements like video editing or encoding, 3D rendering, then this is probably the chip for you. This processor should be on par with the 1700/1700x/1800x for gaming, but benchmarks should be released today (Aug/10/2017). Each of the two core inside are similar to the Ryzen 1800X (4 cores within each CCX, 2 CCXs within a die, 2 active dies on the chip (on the 16 core model anyway)); 12 core should be 3 active cores instead of 4. There is no reason to expect it to be worse. It's unlikely to be better since not even all 8 cores on Ryzen were used for gaming, so having 16 won't make a difference. However, it could be slower since the some threads could be distributed to a different die on the chip which means additional infinity fabric communication latency. Go find benchmarks.

Question 9

What are the best x399 MB's for this CPU?

Accepted Answer

One of the most convenient, feature-rich boards is the ASUS Zenith Extreme, which I have personal experience using. One of my favorite features is that it has a DIMM.2 riser card for M.2 SSDs and another slot that shares the heat-spreader for the chipset, keeping the M.2 slots from replacing PCIE card slots and providing better cooling for them. It also comes with wireless built-in, and a 4x pcie card for 10GbE. Note that this board is an EATX board, so it may not fit or may not be easy to install in some smaller cases. Virtually any full or super tower will support it however. --- If you want a small board for a case like the Cerberus, Asrock has announced that it will be releasing an mATX board for threadripper. You only get 4 dimm slots however (one dimm per channel), but all the PCIE lanes are there. This is currently the only known mATX board for threadripper.

Question 10

Has anyone attempted to run Windows Server with ECC memory using AMD's Threadripper?

Accepted Answer

I haven't tried windows server specifically yet, but I can say with confidence that ECC memory is properly supported, at least on the MSI x399 motherboard.

Questions & Answers