Vayra86 There are no clockspeed or platform advantages to be had for gaming on HEDT... These CPUs don't run better because they lack one. All you get is paying premium for a different segment without extracting any advantage out of it. Quad channel RAM, more PCIE lanes, etc. It has no use except for them warm fuzzy HEDT feels, or something :D

We still know very little about Intel's upcoming Cooper Lake-S , other than it sharing the platform with Ice Lake-S and it should bring "architectural improvements".There is certainly an overlap between mainstream and HEDT where you can question the usefulness of HEDT, but it all comes down to usage. For purely gaming, a good 6-core is more than plenty, unless you're doing dual streams. I would argue that Intel's 8- and perhaps 10-core HEDT CPUs doesn't deserve to exist, I would start the HEDT lineup on 12 cores.But HEDT have a number of advantages, not only a wide selection of core configurations, also memory bandwidth, PCIe lanes, more efficient cache, AVX-512 and dual FMAs, better featured chipsets, etc. which do have significant benefits for various workloads, including heavy encoding, CAD, modeling, programming, VMs etc. These do have little to no benefit for gaming though, but Intel's HEDT lineup have the benefit over Threadripper of being good enough for gaming, making them an excellent choice for (semi-)professionals who also want to do some gaming.My largest annoyance with HEDT is the overlap between i7/i9 and Xeon-W. In my opinion these platforms should be merged.