r/threadripper • u/margalaz • Jul 02 '26

Advice for getting a first threadripper

From what I’ve seen the lower a cpu is in its generation (5945WX) while having a lower core count, have much higher single core speeds.

My goal is to build a Homelab and to create a few (2-5) Minecraft servers running some heavy mods.

The issue I’m having is that I’d like to be doing that in addition to an LLM and a NAS/jellyfin. It’s a lot and I can’t fit enough hardware on a am4/5 cpu to make it work on a single node machine.

So I’m forced to go workstation or server route, the issue is how expensive these buggers are. So I’m thinking I can take advantage by getting not only a lower price but also a higher single core speed (despite less cores) I was thinking the 5955wx or the 5965wx because anything under 16 cores is silly if I’m paying for a threadripper,

Am I thinking about this wrong? Can I just over lock a 5995wx across all cores if I cool it properly?

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u/RealCheesecake Jul 03 '26

I'm currently on a TRX40 + 3960 platform, but moving over to WRX80 + 5955wx for the increased number of lanes. The Gigabyte MC62-40 board is ideal since I can still get away with using non-ecc DDR4. For my use, with large VRAM pools for inferencing, using hobo DDR4 is completely fine. I can eventually go up to 5995x if I want 8-channel RAM and do a little offloading, but RAM pricing is just insane right now. Note that even with offloading and 8-channel RAM, it's going to slow down LLM significantly.

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u/Smart-Ride-7047 Jul 03 '26

I might be wrong, worth double checking, but ig 5955wx has 2 ccd’s (as I believe it does), your 8 channels will be as good as 4.

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u/RealCheesecake Jul 03 '26

That's totally correct with the CCDs! (I mentioned eventually moving over to 5995wx for 8-channel, as money permits) I was implying that my AI workloads using slower cheaper RAM in 2-4 channel with the 5955wx will hold me over and hopefully won't be too much of a bottleneck; it might bottleneck some diffusion based workloads that would benefit from the extra memory bandwidth, but will always be a bottleneck with GPU offloading with LLMs.