Thanks for the feedback, it's reassuring. As other posters said, I am worried because it's a workstation which means it won't have consistent load, and material stress is much more destructive in the thermal conditions of expanding and contracting. So if in your ~8h workday your station gets stressed for 2 or so hours in irregular intervals, how destructive is that, objectively?

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As for the Zen 3 TRs, well, to be fair, I am not looking to blow $50k on a workstation. :) I am more interested how -- and if -- they will drive down the prices of the TR 3900 SKUs...

It probably won't drive down prices that much. You won't want the old thing, and the incremental cost between generations is not the expensive part of a workstation. I have bought old parts before (to replace broken parts), and my experience is that the price didn't change much. What was a $130 motherboard when brand new, is $130 when a generation old. Does it make any sense? Nope. But that seems to be how it is.

You won't spend $50,000 on a workstation just by using current-generation parts. I think when you see a workstation that costs that much, it's because it has multiple GPUs in them. Pro GPUs are always artificially overpriced, and given the GPU shortage, they're now even more overpriced.

I did a quick pcpartpicker expedition and found that using last-gen parts saves you about $1000 on a $6000 32 core Threadripper workstation. I compared last-gen SSDs, consumer GPUs, processor, and motherboard, and picked relatively high-end parts. You will save more money by dropping to 24 (or heaven forbid, 16) cores, not getting an extreme motherboard, getting 64G of RAM instead of 128, etc.

This could all be invalid in a few months. It is hard to separate "market is always crazy" from "this whole COVID thing is going on". Building a workstation during the pandemic was a pain -- I bought a used GPU, and didn't get ECC memory because nobody would sell me any. If you wait a year, that is likely to improve, and there will be newer hardware. But, if you need to do some computing between now and then, you don't have much choice but to buy what's available now, and it certainly makes for a very good computer.

Thanks for the check! Much appreciated, it did put my mind at ease.

I realized I was looking at several custom-made TR Pro workstations and they of course have a hefty markup on top -- custom cases, custom cooling, pre-added several PCIe NVMe riser cards, plus style price tag I suppose, etc. Should have looked in PC Part Picker indeed.

And yeah, last-gen tech very rarely gets discounted even by normal people who just post ads in local Craigslist-like websites (like OLX). Stuff that's 2 or more generations ago is discounted, but not last gen. Puzzling indeed, especially having in mind that this last gen tech is very soon going to be "two gens ago". Oh well.

As for ECC RAM, I hear you. I was unable to find such anywhere officially but lucked out that one guy in the local OLX was having loads of it but just didn't post the ads due to being very busy (we communicated because of other ads) and then I just bought 64GB ECC DDR3 RAM from him for a home NAS that I am gradually expanding.

I'm definitely very interested in having a TR Pro workstation; started getting sick of Macs and their artificial slowness. I got the iMac Pro and granted, I have it connected to my TV where it plays Twitch streams all day but hell, a lot of stuff on the terminal (that's not Python) just works slower than it does on a meager i3 Linux machine that I have lying around.

So I do want a TR Pro machine but I am very curious about TR 5000. A release is expected in August which isn't that far away. On the other hand, the TR Pro 5000 might take several more months on top. Hmmm. Decisions, decisions. :)

I wouldn't focus too much on the Pro SKU. It has a slower base frequency and boost frequency, with the upside that it has 8 memory channels and supports 2TB of RAM. If you need 2TB of RAM and 8 channels, it's what you need, but quad channel memory is still very good. Most desktop-class machines are still 2 channel.

There is something to be said for the prebuilt workstations from reputable vendors. It shows up in a box, and starts working. I have strongly considered that angle; being a system integrator is tough. If something doesn't work, it's a week cycle time where you find a new part, organize the RMA of the faulty part, etc. and there is a potentially unbounded amount of time spent tweaking. Meanwhile, HP or Lenovo just ships you a computer; they tested it and it works. You pay several thousand dollars for the privilege, but it might be worth it. (And if you want a TR Pro, you have no choice. AMD doesn't sell them to consumers.)