There are a couple of things to keep in mind about the 2990WX result vs. 1950x. First, 4.4 is going to be faster than 4.3 and the only 2990WX result we have so far is from 4.3. A 4.4 result from the same CPU would probably be 45 seconds faster, which doesn't sound like much, but is ultimately a good deal faster percentage-wise. Second, there are some scheduler and potential memory bandwidth/routing issues with the 2990WX, yes, but as far as I understand much of this is down to problems in how Windows handles thread management for Threadripper CPUs. It's something that can and should be improved over time. And if you happen to be able to render on Linux, those problems seem to mostly disappear (better thread management).
All that being said, of course a past generation CPU will be much cheaper, and unless the newer CPU really doubles performance (unlikely to happen in a single generation), then the *value* is usually with the past generation. This has been true of Intel for a long time, even more so in fact. I bought my dual Xeon workstation (currently #7 result on the list) on eBay for about $1800, and it nearly equaled some brand new Xeon workstations of the time for less than half the price. Since Intel was making only marginal improvements year to year with performance prior to AMD's Zen chips coming out (Ryzen and Threadripper), you had this glut of older but still close-to-current performance level hardware that was selling at much lower used prices. It made for a very interesting used market.
- Oshyan
