Just built a Threadripper PC for my wife who uses 3DS Max & Corona Renderer and had dropped in on this forum prior to picking parts to see what others had done.
So just some feedback from us.
Went with the following build:
7980X (picked the 7980X over the 7970X based on reviews - chip layout seems to favour better cooling over the 7970X (more cores (plus), but higher cost (minus), of course!)
Asrock TRX50 mobo
128 GB Kingston Fury RDIMM RAM (RDIMM not UDIMM and thanks to whoever pointed that out earlier in this thread as it saved me ordering the wrong RAM!)
RTX 3090 (from existing build)
Corsair SF1000L (from prior build - given the air cooler and mostly rendering use should be fine for now - if she ends up using GPU heavily in parallel with rendering then this might need upgrading)
Noctua NH-U14S TR5-SP6 (fits the 7980X without any further adapters)
Fractal Design Pop Air - reasonable size without looking like a garden shed stuck in the living room.
Two fans on the cooler (push pull) and four case fans (two front intake and one roof exhaust and one rear exhaust)
Corona benchmark 32,800,000 (350 W power draw)
Cinebench R23 93,000 (350 W power draw)
Went with air cooling instead of an AIO. There are a couple of good Youtube videos on the 7980X (gamer channels) and it seemed that to get 10-20% extra performance on Cinebench R23 you'd need to overclock and use an AIO and power consumption would be about 600-700 W i.e. double to power, so to me didn't seem worth it. An air cooler is simpler in the long run and easier to install. We're running pretty much stock settings in Ryzenmaster. No undervolting. Stock EDC/TDC/PPT (PPT = 350W). I did however reduce max temp from 95°C to to 85°C, just to be safe.
Today it is 29°C in the flat and the CPU is running at about 79°C while rendering an animation. The rest of the year I would hope it will be running mid to low 70's during rendering. On light loads it's around 40°C. In any case, the CPU temperatures are far better than my wife's prior i9-14900K - even after undervolting that thing was running 80°C with an AIO when rendering - the case was smaller though.
Took the lazy route and just transferred the M.2 C drive from the old build in to the new build. No fresh install of windows. No fresh install of 3DS Max / Corona or any of her other 3d visualisation programs. Updated chipset drivers. Didn't update BIOS. Used RevoUninstaller (free) to fully uninstall Intel / ASUS programs from the old build and used Wise Registry cleaner to clean up registry files. I'm not saying this is the pro way to do things but probably saved half a day of reinstalling everything and another two days of piecemeal installing all the plugins, scripts and miscellany that got forgotten along the way.
The only niggle was Ryzen Master conflciting with HWMonitor, HWInfo64 etc - we were checking temps, clock speeds, voltages etc closely the first couple of days. Now all stable and running fine but now only run Ryzen Master and don't run any other monitoring in parallel. There is no doubt a clever fix to the Ryzen Master conflict but can't be bothered to spend the time resolving it.
It's a great processor, the 7980X. Well impressed with it. Stable and the Noctua fans keep the sound levels reasonable even today.
Anyway, just thought I would share because I found this thread useful in preparing for my wife's build.
