An 14900 is a very hot chip, meaning you need a top of the line watercooling solution and it will use a lot of electricity. If you buy the PC purely for Boinc, an AMD 7950x is both cooler and more efficient in it's use of electricity.

The 9950X is coming in July. Any improvements in speed or efficiency are currently unknown.

The 7950X is on sale for around $480 now. It typically sold for as low as $510 on a rare sale like Prime Day and as high as $600.

Any hard numbers pertaining to Boinc/WCG on that 'meaningful increase'? Does the 7950X3D run 10% more MCM tasks in a day compared to a regular 7950X, for example?

Link64 makes a very good point about these top-end processors not really being designed for the sort of constant relatively heavy compute load (and it applies to Intel as well as AMD, of course...)

Whilst the boosted performance will probably lead to higher RAC values, the power usage has to be considered as does the need for high-end cooling solutions to try to avoid thermal throttling (or worse!)

In the thread about mini-PCs there was a suggestion that running a high-performance CPU with a [very] low PPT would be better than running one or more mini-PCs (because of reliability?) -- I'm not sure how low one could take the PPT before the performance became unacceptable, but I will note that I shaved about 10% off the PPT on a 3700X and got significant temperature and power-draw benefits with no obvious drop in performance :-) [That seemed to be a common talking point back when the 3xxx systems were new...]

Similarly, I have a couple of mini-PCs, one with a 5060H (6C/12T) and one with a 7840HS (8C/16T) and although their BIOS interface doesn't allow me to set PPT I've used software control to turn boost off on both of them (bringing temperatures down by 15C or more and probably prolonging fan life as a side-effect!) -- the 7840HS still outperforms my 3700X despite the older machine being able to reach higher peak GHz rates, and even the 5060H outperforms my Intel 7700K (which I've pegged at 4GHz...) so the newer processors are worthwhile even if throttled!

Cheers - Al.

P.S. I never allow BOINC to have access to more than 75% of available CPU threads, so I'm not hammering the CPU quite as hard as some users might be -- however, I suspect that if the workload isn't all MCM1 access to memory might act as a throttle in its own right on most hardware (regardless of cache sizes!) :-)