AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX & 2950X Review

AMD is still quite poor in handbrake. Presumably Intel's AVX extensions there doing the business, maybe handbrake needs some work itself. This is the one application I use extensively at home and would like to have a machine that chews through encodes a bit faster.

The 2950X does a decent job with it but I have my suspicions that it won't turn out much faster than a mainstream i9 9900k with some speedy DDR4 on that particular application for the workloads I would use. Incredible value as the 2950X is, it'll still probably end up more than twice the price of the highest end mainstream intel part. My search for an ideal encoding machine continues.

Overall elsewhere AMD will dominate for most workstation style or prosumer workloads, the bang for buck is unbeatable and that doesn't look like changing any time soon now.
 
The 2950X is clearly the real world winner here as the review mentions. It’s impressive stuff for the money. I’m actually somewhat disappointed with the 2990. It’s almost as if AMD just wanted to be able release 32 cores for a headline, with results like this I can’t see it selling much, maybe to users who were considering a dual Xeon setup for home? I’m curious as to how it would compare to a 28 core Intel part at its stock clocks.

If money was no object I’d still want a 7980XE over anything else though, it appears to dominate a lot of tests and shows as the best all rounder. Even if it falls short in rendering and cinebench, it’s a trade off I’d give for adobe and gaming. I don’t think the same people buy them though. In fact I only think rich youtubers and enthusiasts buy the Intel extreme parts these days.

Also bewildered at the idle power consumption of an overclocked 2990! If you’re a home user living in a part of the world with expensive energy you could actually noticeably put your bill up with that kind of power consumption without even using the thing!
 
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I only mentioned that because at that price, I would expect a cpu that could dominate EVERY category. Of course nobody would buy 1 if all they plan to do is game, but it's at a price point that I would expect the highest level of capability in every possible scenario.
 
My dual 2680 v2s Xeons give me 2680 Cinebench score for $400. Not going to change my rig anytime soon. This CPU is very limited in its uses. IMHO, it's crippled by memory bandwidth and really limited to a rendering machine/server for very specific tasks, or for people who truly are hardware addicts and like to brag about the size of their engine... :))
 
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Good start for perf on 2990WX tuning is de8auer he spent his time just focused on IPC/Boost balance. Worth a look.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD66CSR8mnU

Just try running multi tasks at the same time like two benchmarks or converting 4K video to multiple formats at once. Buy this if you will actually use 32/64.
 
I like the 2950X part, but I already own a delidded i9-7900X system that performs quite well for me.
Honestly, my two i7-8700K boxes game just as well and cost much less to own.
Once the 2950X part comes down in price I may get one of them.
 
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pcnthuziast said:
I only mentioned that because at that price, I would expect a cpu that could dominate EVERY category. Of course nobody would buy 1 if all they plan to do is game, but it's at a price point that I would expect the highest level of capability in every possible scenario.
Click to expand...
A $400k diesel truck can haul a lot of cans of beer very efficiently whereas a $400k ferrari can haul a lot of *** very efficiently. Pick your tool for the appropriate job and go with it. A jack of all trades will be a master of none.
 
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I wish somebody doing benchmarks would include a really large Visual Studio solution build in the benchmarks - or is this completely limited by disk and not CPU?
 
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I was looking Linux tests at Phoronix for the 2990WX. A totally different chip. it destroys everything and anything. Makes Windows 10 looks bad.
 
dj2017 said:
I was looking Linux tests at Phoronix for the 2990WX. A totally different chip. it destroys everything and anything. Makes Windows 10 looks bad.
Click to expand...

Yeah, there is a performance uplift for the 2990WX, but guess what, there's also a performance uplift for the Intel CPUs and you can see that by comparing the two Phoronix articles, they probably should have included the 7980XE alongside the 2990WX. That would have helped with the confusion ;)

Pov-Ray: Our results on Windows: 36.3% lower completion time for 2990WX, Linux 34.2%.

Blender: Using Windows, we found the 2990WX to complete Blender in 20.3% and 30.8% less time than the 7980XE. Phoronix found on Linux a margin of 40.2%, 32.1% and 26.8%, in different tests of course.

So yes the 2990WX is faster using Linux, but the Intel CPUs are equally faster ;)

Ohh 7-zip is the only odd result but I'd say it's a Windows bug.
 
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OortCloud said:
I wish somebody doing benchmarks would include a really large Visual Studio solution build in the benchmarks - or is this completely limited by disk and not CPU?
Click to expand...
Agreed. I'm in Visual Studio 8-14 hours a day. I would love to see benchmarks of general workloads or better yet, several instances of VS. Often I'll be running 3-4 instances of various projects when doing migration work. Would be excellent to see how these CPUs handle instances like these. Interestingly too, it would be nice to see benchmarks that note, not just one application running a certain test (standard benchmark), but how a system runs multiple applications such as Visual Studio, 5 seperate browsers (with multiple tabs) and Photoshop opened.
 
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ctm17 said:
2950X hangs pretty close (both ways at times from reviews all around web) to 2700x - so are you saying all AMD products offer less than desirable gaming results?
Click to expand...

I'm saying exactly what I said, if you are building a gaming PC and buy 2950x instead of a 2700x then you can't complain about the lack of gaming performance difference between the two chips.
 
@dirtyferret:
Many of us build Gaming rigs with a lot of high-end parts inside. All of mine have dual GPUs in them for better gaming performance in a lot of games. At least 32GB of RAM and most often 64GB in them. (GTX-1080FEs, GTX-1070s, and GTX-1070Ti pairs)
I can't see anyone complaining about TR2950X gaming performance because it's going to have good minimum performance that is gonna work for most of us. If you're a game benchmarking freak (like me) then you will see that it isn't the sharpest tool in the shed. But it will work for you nonetheless when you game. My Ryzen 1700X works great, even if my i7-8700Ks and i9-9700X work better.
I've heard a lot of good about the Ryzen 2700X part, but the 1700x works fine for me already.
 
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Steve, your Cerulean Blue Bars are soothing to the soul.

Any insight on to why the simulated 2970wx test that you did on Hardware Unboxed showed 80-95% of the performance of the 2990wx when it should have been 75% of the performance?

It would be really neat to see more tests on this.
 
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Nightfire said:
Steve, your Cerulean Blue Bars are soothing to the soul.

Any insight on to why the simulated 2970wx test that you did on Hardware Unboxed showed 80-95% of the performance of the 2990wx when it should have been 75% of the performance?

It would be really neat to see more tests on this.
Click to expand...

Better utilized, less bandwidth chocked, those are my initial guesses.
 
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