I paired up a 5950x with a $200 TUF 570 board - a middle of the road offering. One thing to consider is the BIOS version of the motherboard. The Asus one had

I paired up a 5950x with a $200 TUF 570 board - a middle of the road offering. One thing to consider is the BIOS version of the motherboard. The Asus one had a sticker with the build version, and what they were stocking in Microcenter was just new enough to support zen3 OOTB. A better board would allow for BIOS flashing without the CPU, and a few folks have struggled with that first flashing. Check the version first. The threadripper boards are starting at $400 for the current generations. I regret spending what I did on the first generation boards, as they dropped support for them on the third generation. I'm waiting to see a zen3 series threadripper before I'll replace my old 1950x. The even older 3930k i7 was able to keep up on single threaded processes... which surprised me. Funny it really took 10 years before I got that wow factor again. The number of cores that I'd consider 'normal' has certainly gone up. Think the 3930k was around $600 in 2011, the 1950x around $800 in 2017, and the 5950x at $800, so that price point has not changed much. The first two were picked up at launch date, the last was a paper launch that took till January to find.