If you can afford it, definitely invest in the Threadripper 3960x, 3970x or even the 3990x. These things tear through compilation workflows so good there’s not even a contest in that area unless you want to pay $30,000+ for certain Xeon Platinum dual-processor setups.

If that’s way outside your budget (the 3990x famously costs $3990) then a Ryzen 3900x is very adequate as well. Still, have in mind that investing in the current Threadripper generation can definitely last you some 10 years – with the PCIe 4.0 slots on your motherboard you honestly won’t need an upgrade unless you plan on playing 16k VR games.

Sure, that’s fair. I use a different criteria: mostly future proofing. I studied the limits of PCIe 4.0 and honestly? There are NO such SSDs or RAM or GPUs! And there likely won’t be for at least 5 years – very likely 10 or more even.

To me the TR / PCIe 4.0 platform is finally hitting the reasonable limits of what most of us would ever need in a machine. 99% of us don’t have workflows that could require 12 GB/s SSD I/O performance, or 120 GB/s RAM bandwidth.

So, if you figure you can (or want) to invest a bit more money for the next 10+ years, now is a very good time to do so. The TR 3960x / 3970x / 3990x is likely going to last many people for a lifetime, I’d say.

If I build now I may go with Ryzen 7 3700x or I wait for the new generation to be released and maybe the 3900x drops to my prices.

But I will go with the new generation of motherboards, 32GB RAM and 2 m2 SSDs(one for Ubuntu another for Windows). The graphics will be anything that supports 4 monitors, because I don’t play games.

I am really disappointed that the Ryzen Pro versions are not available for the build market, because they are more adequate and have memory encryption: