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by tymm 2058 days ago
So should I get the 5900x or the 5950x as a programmer who likes compilation-heavy languages like Scala and Haskell and that also play games?
3 comments

At least there is no reason not to. You get the very best gaming performance + the best multithreaded performance on a consumer platform. Only the price speaks against that choice. 5900X and 5800X are more reasonable alternatives from that perspective (still very strong).
You'll see little meaningful difference in games (the 5950x has better single core speed than the 5900x but the 5900x is already fast enough to not be the bottleneck in almost all situations). It might be more future proof though, there might be game engines in future which can properly saturate all 16 cores/32 threads. (Ashes of the Singularity is one that can now, but it's uncommon).

If you're compiling really large projects and want to cut those times down it could be worth it though.

I'm in a similar situation and i'm going with a 5900x FWIW. The 5950 feels a little overkill, I don't expect to be fully taking advantage of the extra cores.
So far my thinking is that I'll go with the 5950x since it's more or less on par with the 5900x for gaming performance but has slightly faster single core performance. Also more cores are nice for running tests.