Hi,
I have both. My personal suggestion is 2990WX being superior as overall package. Now regards to the "ram problem":
- What is it that concerns you ? The fact only half of dies are connected to memory directly ? This affects only single-threaded performance and is alleviated by recent Ryzen software which basically does automatical project lasso, it shuffles processes like 3dsMax and Photoshop into those physical cores that have direct memory access. With PBO, you keep high single-core performance on par with i9, so applications run on the same smoothness.
- Or maybe the fact that affinity fabric within dies together affects the overall performance even multithreaded due to latency. This is very application specific but even with this latency delay, Corona is still faster, and the other workloads where this manifests, like file compression, etc.. are usually very small times regardless. In practical terms, this is more about not using the potential of the CPU to the fullest within certain applications, but still come ahead of the i9.
Now the benefits of 2990WX:
- You can choose from two great boards (MSI MEG and Aorus Xtreme). For x299, there is only recently introduced MSI MEG. Otherwise you're stuck with bunch of 8-phased VRMs for most part.
- In future, next or the following year, you would still be able to upgrade to 48 or even possible 64-core Threadripper. I would say though, that this will only be possible on MSI MEG (or otherwise necessitize X499).
- Excellent thermals. Short of VRMs, for which you have better boards, 2990WX runs much cooler than i9 at comparative clocks. Yes i9 can be clocked slightly higher, but due to AVX instructions, it becomes hell-fire.
- Thus every 2990WX can be overclocked, even on air cooler ! But for i9, you need to win silicon lottery and get a good chip, delid the heatspreader and replace the paste, and then live with terrible accoustics ;- ).
I only kept my i9 because what I am gonna waste time&money now trying to sell it.