Hmm, my experience has been resolutely great; we just upgraded to 64 thread 3970x's with 256GB of RAM, and pretty much everything worked smoothly out of the box

Hmm, my experience has been resolutely great; we just upgraded to 64 thread 3970x's with 256GB of RAM, and pretty much everything worked smoothly out of the box; I'm very pleasantly surprised by the lack of tuning necessary. We did do the math and decided that for us 4GB per thread is likely safe up front; 2GB per thread might have been pushing it. Another reason to avoid the 3990x (for us) was the tricky scaling of the previous generation's 2990WX; We don't have faith that all of our code would run well on the more memory-channel constrained machine. I mean, if you're just running a single fairly small build, sure, it's likely overkill...