Yeah, but I got a pretty good deal on some parts and it just kind of happened. I'd been looking into doing a small Ryzen 7 build to run as a server.
Amazon Warehouse was selling the Asus Zenith Extreme motherboard for $280 as "used - like new", and then had a 20% off coupon for a couple days bringing it down to $230. I bought it because the board is normally like $400-560 and is supposedly going to be compatible with TR2, so I figured I could either keep it for a build or flip it later on (it comes with a 10gb PCIe NIC, which sells for $130 used on its own). I received the board and it was missing a few tiny screws for the m2 mounts and it came with some Gigabyte branded SATA cables (none of this matters much, but....). I talked to Amazon about it and they gave me a 50% discount, so I basically ended up paying like $125 for this bad ass motherboard.
I started looking at the cost of CPUs and most places had the 1950x for $900+, but I found that Microcenter was selling it in-store only for $699. I decided to go ahead and get it since I saved a lot on the motherboard. Then I started looking at cooling and the AIO watercooler that seems to be popular was around $140, but conveniently Fry's was having a one day sale that same day where it was $89.
I used the 50% refund from Amazon to buy a Corsair Carbide Air 540 case.
So I saved something like $500 across the board on this. If TR2 turns out to be insanely better than TR1 I'll probably sell and upgrade, but I'm not super concerned about it. I've got a 7700k I use for games and mainly wanted this many cores/threads for virtualization, Plex transcoding, etc., so it should have a pretty long lifespan and work very well for home lab purposes.
That's a good deal. TR2 will probably end up being 5-10% faster, depending on the application. Going by the 2nd gen Ryzen models released so far, the largest gains are to be found in games, which doesn't appear to affect you. The 7700k is nice for games for the time being. I'm on 1950X with Zenith Extreme, too. Make sure to get decent RAM to go with that setup, preferably modules with Samsung B-die. TR benefits from fast RAM even more than regular Ryzen.
These arrived first thing this morning:
And then the Parcel Force man showed up with this after lunch:
Off to get another micro SD card once I finish me cuppa...
Awesome stuff. What will the evening bring?
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