Lenovo ThinkStation P620 Review: A Vehicle for Threadripper Pro

IIRC, these workstations are made for VFX houses where they'll probably render scenes nearly 24/7, weekends included, so Lenovo didn't fuck around with the cooling for such a demanding use case.

If you're on a crunch to finish that epic 30 second shot worth six-figures for that upcoming Hollywood blockbuster then you want the best pro-grade tools you can get that you can leave running for days and sleep soundly knowing they'll do their job and not hang up or throttle. Any major downtime in this racket is worth more than that workstation.

>If you read the enthusiast forums, it's something that most everyone makes fun of

True, because most "enthusiasts" on forums are just well-off gamers or posers showing off their expensive setups for upvotes, that are just used 2-6 hours a day for video games and scrolling through reddit instead of 24/7 workloads responsible for a business's revenue stream.

I think you're a bit over-exaggerating here as it really depends on what you do with your PC and where you're coming from.

If you've only been running Intel this whole time and all you do is light workloads then you won't notice much progress since they haven't made much, but if do CPU demanding tasks and were to try a Ryzen 3xxx/4xxx, or better yet, a 5xxx, you'll notice a huge leap forward (if you could find one in stock, that is).

However, your "new" 7700 is a bit old in the tooth now and, despite Intel's lack of major progress, it will still be left in the dust by a newer 10th/11th gen chip.

My old faithful Intel Q6600 still serves my parents just fine after 14 years of age, but I'm not gonna pretend it isn't slow by today's standards on the modern bloated web and with all the electron crap.

sort of an odd thing to say when you just bought a machine with the last i7 desktop part to have only four cores. i7-7700 is only about 20% faster than an i7-2700k, but the 9700 and 10700 parts are way faster in any multi-threaded scenario.

If you need it, you need it, and there's no competition in that space, so it's expensive. But, if you aren't doing whatever GV100s are good at (machine learning? raytracing?) then you can probably get a C++ compilation rig and web browser with 64 cores for ~$10,000. (I suppose that's another "if you need it, you need it" case. But at least more straightforward to the software engineers among us -- if you have more than 64 C++ files to compile... the 64 core chip can be useful. Even "go test ./..." in a moderately-sized project uses all 32 of my non-pro threadripper cores. Briefly. Not doing as much work as the C++ compiler. :)