[lliamander]

Go with the 3970X. Threadripper will be both cheaper and faster. It has between a 30%-50% clockspeed advantage, which should be fairly noticeable.

The 7502p is better in situations where you need more memory (either bandwidth or capacity) or you need to to consume less power (such as in a server deployment or a fanless case).

[greggyb]

> The 7502p is better in situations ... (such as in a server deployment or a fanless case).

There are almost no cooling solutions that can passively dissipate the heat from a 180W TDP CPU. I am not aware of any commercially available at present. Fanless is not really in the cards for any of these CPUs.

[lliamander]

Oh, they're rare, but they exist: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15261/turemetal-fanless-pc-ep...

[greggyb]

Neato! I had seen a demo of one of their cases, but didn't realize they were actually in production, and covered up to 180W.

Thanks for sharing!

Ninja edit: Ooof $700-$1400 for the chassis and custom fab for the CPU block. If I'm going for silence, I'd probably just spring for the radiator case instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfbcD248n4Y&t=361s

Ninja edit 2: Looks like there's a retailer (rather than going through the manufacturer to Taobao) in the US selling it for $1090. Unsure where to price out a custom CPU heat spreader to integrate with this (per the Anandtech article, that was a custom component Turemetal made for one customer). Either way this is awesome to see available.