Sorry if this is a dumb question. My current gaming setup is a Intel I7-4790k, 32Gb ram and a RTX 2080 Super. I came across a AMD Threadripper 1920x, mobo, 64Gb ram for free basically.
Is that worth the time/effort to swap over? It seems to me it would be, but when I search around for info I get conflicting opinions. So any input/insight is appreciated.
Edit: Thank y’all very much! I think I was overthinking single threaded performance.
Is this just specific motherboards, or is it a bug with the actual CPUs? I’m looking to upgrade my old server which is similar to OP, an old i7-4770 and probably going to be buying AMD for next upgrade, haven’t heard of this USB dropouts as I haven’t really been paying attention.
It’s a CPU and chipset bug. AMD CPUs have built-in IO chipset that provides USB among other things. Most chipsets other than X570 use a different IO chip with different performance characteristics. The X570 chipset contains the same IO chip that the CPUs have so it’s got the same characteristics. Depending the board some ports might be wired to the CPU others to the chipset. It’s hard to know. The only certain combination is that a X570 boards have this issue. I don’t know what USB chip is contained in the Threadripper boards. Either way, you use your board and if you notice USB dropouts when using high-bandwidth applications, get a PCIe controller for that. There’s no other solution and there’s no point spending time trying to workaround it. You can find many reports on the web. I was hit by this and tried even different boards till I finally gave up and got a add-in card. The AM5 platform seems to not suffer from this. I’m using the onboard USB controller on a X870 board at the moment. There’s ptobably not much point of getting Intel just for this. I considered that and the performance per dollar was still much better on AMD even if having to buy a USB PCIe controller.
Awesome, thanks for the answer!
Another trick to keep in your arsenal if you need more ports is to get a very high-speed USB adapter and split it using a hub. E.g. 20 or 40Gbps port split via 4/7-port hub still gives you 3-10Gbps per port. Note that over 5Gbps cable quality starts to really matter.