Im telling you guys... Wait like 3 more weeks. Threadripper will be finalized and we may see another knee jerk Intel reaction and a price drop might happen. To me with another big boy HEDT cpu about to drop its an idiotic time to purchase an higher end x299 chip. Unless you totally are committed and informed then of course spend your dollars.
After recent events another Intel´s kneejerk reaction would not surprise me, then again, they dont exactly have history of dropping their prices in a kneejerk manner, do they? Did not bother to price drop BW-E line-up either, even though it was pretty much for everyone to see that Ryzen is more or less on par with it for half the price... so i am not holding my breath. And even if they dropped the price eventually, i would expect it to happen the moment they start selling those 14,16,18C chips, rather than when Threadripper drops.
Other than that, you are clearly right. This is not a good time to buy, for all the aforementioned reasons. But for me, this time around, its not about that i need it, i just want it, cause hardware enthusiasm, but i guess no need to explain that on these boards Anyway, its difficult to hold on and wait any further, especially given the uncertainity, what will happen next - if at least there will be some leaks about the 12core i9, its frequencies, solder or TIM, exact release date instead of just August... and Threadripper (performance, pricing), one would at least know what exactly is he waiting for and decide whether its worth it or not, and if the answer would be yes, then it would be easier to wait, that being deliberate choice.
Yeah, I'll wait and Timmah brings up another good point - what if Intel drops a soldered 12 core in August? Like him, the 10 core was my original target but I was horrified by the reviews and gave up on it. With any luck, TR will force a price war and Intel will have to solder the 12+ core CPUs.
In all honesty, i actually was looking at 7920x, when i thought its the top LCC die. The fact its going to be more likely HCC die with 1/3 of its cores disabled sort of soured my enthusiasm for it. Then i saw the performance reviews of 7900x, seeing its almost 2x faster in Cinebench than my current 6850k (2200 to 1150 both stock) and i thought to myself, great, that would do, and it will actually be 200 bucks cheaper and i dont have to wait another month or 2... and then all the thermal issues started to pop-up, motherboard VRM issues, etc... and here i am once again waiting.
I already sort of regret buying my current setup last August, cause if i waited that one year longer, and i guess i could, i could have go for SKL-X and 2 1080Ti´s (instead of regular 1080s i have now) and have no afterthoughts. But i kinda did not believe AMD would price the Ryzen that low, given its eventual performance - especially after seeing the prices of HW to grow in recent years by each passing generation... well, my bad. Bottom line, i dont want to have regrets like this again.