Hardware setup workstation

[bobbybob]

I am about to buy some new hardware for a workstation that primarily are going to be used for working in Houdini.

I am thinking of putting a Ryzen Threadripper 1950x in it, for the high amount of cores, and the relative low price in relation to some other Xeon CPU's.
All my rendering is done in Octane, and the CPU will primarily be used for simulations.

Are the 1950x, the right choice, for Houdini work?. For what I know, does Houdini support multithreading in almost every aspect, but does the high core count make up for a lower core speed. The alternative is a I9-7900X, where the cores are faster, but the number of cores are lower.

Are there any other CPU alternatives in the price range (or a bit more expensive) that would give better performance?

[lukeiamyourfather]

The Ryzen Threadripper 1950X is by far the best value in that range. To get discernibly more performance than that price jump is significant.

[Emixam]

As a layman on this matter, yet having done some researches on the subject, I read here and there that the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X is definitely the way to go but only as far as rendering speed is concerned.

However, for anything related to a good performance / speed when actively working in Houdini itself (as well as in most 3D packages), my understanding is that it would be far better to rely on the best single threaded performance possible (i.e., getting the fastest clock speed possible on a single core basis -> see for example the Intel i7-8700k which - for the time being - seems to be one of the fastest CPUs on a single core basis if I'm not mistaken) rather than to seek core-dense CPUs like the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X.

Unless I am missing something?