TLDR: 3950X is the general winner for most people. It's great at gaming, really good at work loads.
i9-10980XE is shockingly good when it's overclocked to +5Ghz, but it eats +500 watts to get there so yeah... It's a solid gamer when overclocked and well rounded when doing production workloads.
TR 3970X is the best of the best for multi-thread workloads by a mile, BUT.....
TR 3960X the BUT is that the 3960X exists and gives very similar performance to the 3970X relative to all the other competition AND it does perform a bit better in gaming as well than the 3970X (gotta game when you're done w/ work) so the $600 price jump to the 3970X actually doesn't scale so the better price/performance buy is the 3960X. Also thinking down the road, if you spend "a little bit" now on the 3960X, you may feel better about upgrading to something like a 3990X or higher down the road if your enthusiasm or workloads require that.
If you have an intel HEDT motherboard right now, the smart choice is to just get the i9-10980XE and overclock it for $1,000. This will save you a good chunk of change.
For the 3960X at $1,399 + say a $500 motherboard (Gigabyte Aorus Master) that's $2k w/ tax.
For the 3970X at $1,999 + MB, you're looking at about $2600 w/ tax.
3950X w/ motherboard can be done for sub $1,000.
****** The 1 game I actually play, Battlefield V @1080p, apparently the 3960X & 3970X gets better performance than the 9900K.... How crazy is that? I'll probably get the 3960X.
but realistically the TR 3960X 24 core chip looks like a monster with a reasonable price tag.
