Right? I assembled a number crunching machine for $1200 a few months ago. The 3900X was under $400 at the time. I can’t imagine spending an extra 50% on a comparable machine just say I can say it has Intel Inside.

I was upgrading a year or so ago, after the Spectre and Meltdown were discovered and patched by essentially slowing down CPUs. Went with AMD and never looked back.

At this point though intel has slashed their price/core to be competitive if not better than threadripper. They don't have anything that compete in core count, but if you look at the 9980/10980 series with 18 cores, its very competitive on a price basis per core with the 24/32/64 core threadrippers. If you want max cores then you still need to go with threadripper but if 18 is enough, i don't get all the hate 10980 gets. There are certain linear algebra related workloads where the intels excel and why I would probably go with the 10980x were I to upgrade (which im probably not, 4 year old pc doing fine)

Practically every review for the 3960X shows it's significantly faster at productivity applications than a 10980XE. Leaving six cores on the table is significant. If you have a primarily single-threaded task, then you should just go for a 10900K.

>They don't have anything that compete in core count, but if you look at the 9980/10980 series with 18 cores, its very competitive on a price basis per core with the 24/32/64 core threadrippers.

That's not a fair comparison, considering that price per core usually goes up the more cores there are. Also, if you check pcpartpicker you'll see all the i9s with greater than 12 cores are either sold out, or well above their MRSP.

I was very hesitant due to past experiences with AMD over 20 years, especially drivers.

I ended up going with a Ryzen 9 though & it's been flawless so far. Great performance. Wouldn't look at an Intel anytime in the near future for a CPU.

If I build a new computer to replace my Ivy Bridge hackintosh, the only thing that would keep me on Intel at this point is the desire to build one last hackintosh before Apple goes full ARM. At the middle level, say Ryzen 3700X vs i7-9700, they're pretty close.

Its quite possible to build an AMD-Hackintosh, its quite in stlye really.

I would absolutely love to do this but AMD is somewhat annoying when running MacOS.

1. Really bad VM support. No Hypervisor framwork, which means problems with Docker (apparently some workarounds for Docker specifically, but not 100% stable). Things like Parallels Desktop, Android VMs, etc won't work.

2. Problems with Adobe suite apps crashing on boot. Some patches exist but last I checked there was nothing for Lightroom (which I use a lot).

3. Things like iMessage, Facetime, Siri, etc won't work

4. Uses a custom kernel and there can be hassles related to power management.

etc.

My use case would have lots of problems, but it's definitely a great option for people who don't need VMs or Adobe.

iMessage works in my experience, not sure where you heard that.

depending on your workload you will have some troubles with an amd hackintosh (e.g. logic plugins)