Ryzen 7 3800x or 3950x

Cleffy

I am planning to upgrade my 1700x. The mobo has been listed as compatible with the 3950x. The main reason is 30% higher average performance and compatibility with 3200mhz ddr4.
I am still trying to decide if the 3950x is worth it. I have a workstation that I double for my other computer related stuff. I have a use case for 16 cores, but only load my cpu like that once a week. On the other hand the 3800x is listed as slightly faster than the 3900x since most applications don't scale beyond 8 cores. But more than doubling the maximum theoretical performance would be a worthy of an upgrade. 

Ridelynn

I’m in the same boat - could use the cores but only like a handful of hours a week. The rest of the time is light use and gaming.

Ive sat on my existing CPU (4970) since I would need a total system overhaul to replace.

I have no easy answer. My gut tells me to go with fewer cores and throw the saved cash at other system upgrades. My ego really wants to see a Task Manager full of available cores.

Vrika

I think only you can decide if it's worth it. 3950x would give you really good speed boost for situations that scale well to huge number of threads, but that's only for some special cases and outside those most of the stuff doesn't scale. Only you know how much time you spend doing stuff that scales.

Imho if you use CPU intensive program that has a lot of micro-waits as the CPU does calculations even one day a week, then it's likely worth it because those micro-waits add up taking a lot of time. But if you're just running something that takes a lot of time once a week then it's usually not that important whether it takes 30 minutes with fast CPU or an hour with slower CPU because you'll plan something else for the duration anyway.