Upgrade Prep for RTX 3080 Ti/3090

[Dirtjelly]

Budget (including currency): AUD$8,000-$9,000

Country: Australia

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: A lot of the upcoming AAA games, Photoshop, Unity, Blender, music making programs, VM-related work, Premier Pro

Hey guys, bit of a long one here.
Short story: I'm trying to decide on an Intel or AMD CPU for gaming and workstation purposes.

Long story:
My current PC kicked the bucket so I'm looking for parts for a new PC, however I'm facing a dilemma; I'm going off of the rumour that the new 3000 Series of cards will be PCIe gen 4-focused, or at least compatible with it. So it would make sense to me to go with the high-end AMD CPUs as they're compatible. Intel gives much greater performance in games and single-core applications, but it's still tethered to PCIe gen 3 (at least for a while yet). I also do work that would benefit from multi-threaded performance, however having better gaming performance is also an enticing argument. I'm also interested in if AMD comes out with a newer CPU that beats Intel's single- and multi-threaded core performance that will be compatible with whatever AMD motherboard I can buy, so if so I might end up going AMD if that's the case.

Any advice on which I should go for? And if there are any suggestions on the other parts included in my planned build I'd love to hear them too, thanks!

Intended build

• CPU Cooler: Gigabyte Aorus Liquid Cooler 360 ARGB AIO Cooler
• PSU: Corsair AX1200i 1200W Power Supply (rather overshoot the power requirements than undercut it)
• Primary Storage: Seagate FireCuda 520 2TB NVMe M.2 SSD
• Case: Phanteks Eclipse P500A Airflow D-RGB Tempered Glass Black
• Memory: 2 x Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB 32GB (4x 8GB) DDR4 3200MHz 
• AMD CPU: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X Processor | Intel CPU: i9-10900X (or Intel Core i9-10900K on a different motherboard)
• AMD Motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix TRX40-E Gaming AMD 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen Threadripper sTR4 ATX Motherboard | Intel Motherboard: ASUS ROG X299 Rampage VI Extreme Encore LGA 2066 E-ATX Motherboard
• Graphics Card: 3080 Ti/ 3090
   

[Shimejii]

I feel as if this is another one of those Look i can put a insane budget together pls look and never actually accomplishes anything.

 

Seems fine, you dont need a 1200W PSU for a 10900k. Also x299 does not work with the 10900k.

[Guest]

A middle ground would be to get a 3950X, it's almost as fast as a 10900k for gaming, but has 6 more cores than it.

 

Also I doubt that Ampere will need PCIe 4 to work properly, it may have support for it but won't need it.

[Dirtjelly]

1 minute ago, Shimejii said:

I feel as if this is another one of those Look i can put a insane budget together pls look and never actually accomplishes anything.

 

Seems fine, you dont need a 1200W PSU for a 10900k. Also x299 does not work with the 10900k.

The PSU would be for the GPU (apparently it's a power hog), and I already have the storage, PSU, RAM and case ordered as they're not really dependent on the other specs so it would be a bit of a waste lol. It's for 2 jobs related to what it'll be used for and my own projects.

Also thanks, I didn't notice the different sockets.

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, Dirtjelly said:

The PSU would be for the GPU (apparently it's a power hog), and I already have the storage, PSU, RAM and case ordered as they're not really dependent on the other specs so it would be a bit of a waste lol. It's for 2 jobs related to what it'll be used for and my own projects.

Also thanks, I didn't notice the different sockets.

We don't know enough about Ampere to make definite statements. I'd wait 2 weeks for actual specs of the new GPUs before ordering things.

[Dirtjelly]

Just now, Darpyface said:

We don't know enough about Ampere to make definite statements. I'd wait 2 weeks for actual specs of the new GPUs before ordering things.

Thanks, I might do that.

[JayBe]

1 hour ago, Darpyface said:

A middle ground would be to get a 3950X, it's almost as fast as a 10900k for gaming, but has 6 more cores than it.

 

Also I doubt that Ampere will need PCIe 4 to work properly, it may have support for it but won't need it.

PCIe is downgradable. So as you said, it will support it but won't need it, since you can put a pcie4 nvme into a pcie3 slot and will still work, just a bit slower. 
But buying a 1k+ GPU that supports PCIe4 without having a pcie4 ready system is dumb imo, since you want that additional speed when purchasing such a beast. 

[Guest]

7 minutes ago, JayBe said:

PCIe is downgradable. So as you said, it will support it but won't need it, since you can put a pcie4 nvme into a pcie3 slot and will still work, just a bit slower. 
But buying a 1k+ GPU that supports PCIe4 without having a pcie4 ready system is dumb imo, since you want that additional speed when purchasing such a beast. 

Supporting PCIe 4 is not the same thing as needing it. A 2080Ti barely uses the bandwidth of a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot, so it is very very unlikely that the bandwidth needs will more than double in one generation. Having PCIe 4 support could be useful for 8x slots, but I find it very unlikely that Nvidia would release a product that most of their consumers can't use properly.

[gloop]

10900k/x is the best bet, considering it’s a fair bit ahead of a 3950x in gaming, along with the fact that stuff like Unity and Premiere Pro are single-threaded.