Actually I’m surprised how cold these Zen3 cores are. I’m coming from i7-3930K which was my main daily workhorse till I replaced it with this 5950X. I’m water cooling it with a custom loop along my GTX1080 that I used with the previous Intel build and this AMD CPU is staying at low 60c at full load! I considered getting TR but did not want another space heater lol
I may want to come back to my 24k seconds estimate for your madmax k.34 plot… Guessing you have a Gen4 NVME drive installed which will be considerably faster than my Gen3 Firecuda it could well be below my initial estimate. Let us know!
(You need over 1TB of free space for the temp directory but that speaks)
I’m using Gen3 CS3030 2T NVMe for temp and not sure it will be <1h for K34 when not using a RAM drive but we will find out.
My calculations were of terribly before, but since my 8core/16threads does close to 4 hours I would expect a 16c/32t 5950x at roughly the same clockspeed combined with gen3 nvme somewhere between 2 and 3 hours for k.34. We’ll see;-)
I just finished testing few runs of K33 and K34 with the build-in MadMax and the results are below. The CPU was snoozing at ~50% avg load so the limiting factor here is the tmp space for sure. I did fstrim in between each test and left the SWAP on during 1st run only while disabling it for remaining tests. During fist run SWAP filled to ~1.5G during P1 and stayed there for remainder of plotting. I used the Gen3 CS3030 2T NVMe with Ext4 (no tweaks) for tmp. This is still A LOT faster than the classic plotter 
Run 1: -k 33 -r 16 -u 256 (swapon); 5804.86 sec (96.7477 min)
Run 2: -k 33 -r 16 -u 256; 5693.85 sec (94.8975 min)
Run 3: -k 33 -r 32 -u 256; 6917.06 sec (115.284 min)
Run 4: -k 33 -r 16 -u 128; 5898.85 sec (98.3142 min)
Run 5: -k 33 -r 16 -v 128; 6014.67 sec (100.244 min)
Run 6: -k 34 -r 16 -u 256; 13574.3 sec (226.238 min)
Nice 
And no hanging at stage 3!
Indeed it must be the NVME as the bottle neck, my i7-9700 is just slighty slower (14524s for k.34) in my setup but no match for the 5950x.
I looked at that brand/model you mentioned earlier and almost clicked on the buy button because of its very attractive price but checked some more to find out it’s not the best choice for plotting chia. Sustained writes are not it’s strong point…
https://www.pcworld.com/article/398917/pny-xlr8-cs3030-nvme-ssd-review.html
Yea the sustained writes are not the best on this drive for Chia which they don’t tell you on the spec sheet and I think my Samsung Evo 970 Plus 2T and Sabrent Rocket 2T (SB-ROCKET-2TB) are better on sustained writes. I got the CS3030 after I created a lot of plots with my Samsung and Sabrent drives already and because of much higher TBW which PNY quietly changed since I purchased 2 of these drives! I specifically looked at the TBW & MTBF on their spec sheet before purchase 
. I will stay away from PNY in the future just because they did this.
FYI, I had reliability issues with Sabrent drive. I had to RMA the first one because I found out that a large block of last cells was bad. This came up when I filled the drive past 90% and started to get errors and system hangs. SMART on the drive was not trigged 
by this issue and the way I confirmed that a block of cells was bad was with a special tool that ran a check on cells via the onboard controller. Their RMA was easy and quick though but don’t trust SMART report on their drives.
Have you considered setting up a raid-0 with the samsung and sabrent drives?
I understand you’re finished with large scale plotting but want to optimize disk usage with some k.34’s / k33’s, also for fun? Don’t know the term OCD to be honest…
Using raid-0 could be part of that fun;-)
Both drives will share the writes so maybe there is enough live left in them to plot the higher k’s for you somewhat faster again.
OCD = obsessive-compulsive disorder 
Funny that you mentioned RAID. I originally used Samsung for OS + plotting and Sabrent was dedicated to plotting. I left Samsung with Win OS on it so was not planning on using this for plotting anymore especially because I switched to plotting on RAM when MadMax came out, but before MadMax I got 2 of these CS3030s and this adapter which allowed me to set them up in software RAID0 and the performance was decent but other drives with better sustained writes would likely do better. Also, to use this adapter your motherboard has to support bifurcation. With 128G of RAM I no longer had the need to use multiple NVMe drives for plotting so I repurposed them.
Also, the reason I wanted 2 same drives for RAID is because drive space between models/manufacturers is different:
Sabrent: 2048408248320 bytes
Samsung: 2000398934016 bytes
PNY: 2000398934016 bytes