[account42]

> (Once you're willing to spend $2000, you might as well just get a 3970 and have twice as many cores, if you can tolerate higher latency in exchange for higher throughput. I have a 3970 and definitely benefit from the throughput more than I would benefit from lower latency, even if it's quite noticeable. For example, some games are bottlenecked by the CPU, which is annoying. But, if you want consistent 360 fps in every game, you're spending an infinite amount of money for no financial gain anyway, so the cost-based reasoning goes out the window.)

I also love my 3970X, but this really depends how much of what you do is limited by single-thread speed and how much can actually make use of > 32 threads for sustained periods of time. Remember the 5950X is 20-30% faster in single-thread benchmarks.