Even though Intel has the lead in multi-threaded benchmarks with their astronomically priced Core i9 processors, AMD offers a lot of computation power for a relatively cheap price. Which motherboard is best paired with this budget monster? We tested seven X399 motherboards (which was the majority of the available boards at the time of writing).

Back when the first dual-cores for desktop computer were released, few people could imagine how many cores a consumer processor would have at the end of 2017. With the arrival of Ryzen earlier this year, the pressure to offer four cores in the entry-level segment was increased. After that, AMD tried to make Intel's expensive Skylake-X platform obsolete with Threadripper - which apparently started as a hobby project of the developers. They had success: AMD's big competitor changed its lineup and introduced the Core i9 series. The prices of this new series remain higher than AMD's Threadripper, however you should definitely consider the latter platform if you're not dependent on performance per core and if you mainly need a large number of threads.

Video editing and rendering, possibly multiple projects at the same time, are usage cases where Threadripper can definitely prove its worth. In addition, the large amount of PCIe lanes of the processors on the TR4 socket are distinctive. Threadripper can be used if you want to have a beefy NVMe RAID setup. For example: the Ryzen Threadripper 1900X features 64 PCIe lanes, and is available for about 420 pounds, while even Intel's flagship model - the Core i9 7980XE - has to work with 44 PCIe lanes, even though it is four times (!) as expensive.