Question 1

180W?  Assuming I get some decent cooling, just how loud would this box be?

Accepted Answer

Obviously this depends entirely on your cooling. I have an AIO 360mm rad for this processor and it's silent at full load 24/7.  If you go with less than 360mm it will be much louder I would imagine.  The enermax AIO coolers look appealing but I've heard a lot of negative things about them.  I have the thermaltake water 3.0 360mm which has lasted me over 5 years.

Question 2

does the 2950X come with a cooler mounting bracket as it does with the 1st gen 1950X?

Accepted Answer

yes it does..I bought Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 Premium-Grade 140mm CPU Cooler for AMD TR4/SP3 and it was a breeze to install....ok ...my wife helped...working like a charm..love this CPU..

Question 3

I use my pc for sneaker botting which is cpu intensive, would someone recommend this over the i9 (i have an intel mbo) and would have to get new mbo?

Accepted Answer

CPU intensive, really? I just have a hard time imagining either class of processor not being complete overkill. But yes, you would have to get a new motherboard for this chip and the good ones aren't cheap.

Question 4

Is there a practical advantage to having more PCI-E lanes?  The latest Intel chips only have 16 lanes,  could this be the reason my 6850k with 40 lanes is holding its value so well?  I guess what I'm asking is if you had a 16 lane chip,  with two cards in SLI and a PCI-E SSD, would the graphics or SSD suffer performance loss?

Accepted Answer

It all depends on what your putting into your motherboard. For example with just a GPU in, its already going to utilize all 16 of those PCI-e lanes. If you go to connect any additional cards or PCI-E SSD/M.2 the GPU will have to go down to 8 lanes effectively cutting its bandwidth in half. To be fair GPUs today will see little (less than 1%) to no difference when running off of 8 vs 16 PCI-E lanes when only using 1 GPU. But, if you plan on using two GPUs in SLI/NVlink/Crossfire being able to run both in 16x will show noticeable gains in performance. Additionally if you are connecting enough things to your motherboard that would result in you GPU going to 4x PCIE lanes that would start to negatively impact GPU performance on a single card.

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