Hey all! I'll be building a beast of a workstation in a couple months when the 5000 series nvidia GPUs launch (I will be getting either 1 or 2 5090's). I have planned on going with a Threadripper 7980x (64 core, 128 thread), but recently I've been seriously considering the upcoming 9950x instead, as I feel the single thread performance will be much more useful for me. Primary applications will be Unreal Engine 5, Houdini, 3ds Max, and maybe some After Effects and Photoshop. Occasional gaming too (another reason I'm leaning towards 9950x), and might also dabble with local machine learning/AI computing.

I have been a professional Unreal dev for about 8 years now, so UE5 usage will be on the extremely high end, but I'm still fairly new to Houdini. However I want to have the headroom to eventually do some really heavy simulations with fast render times.

My max budget for this machine is $10k, and the 7980x alone would be $5k, so if I went with a 9950x, I could go for two 5090's instead of 1, which I think would be pretty nice to have. I will be getting very fast SSDs (Crucial T705) and plenty of RAM (at least 128gb).