Gaming Performance
Time for a few quick gaming benchmarks before we look at power consumption and temperatures. Here we're testing Battlefield 1 using the DX12 API with the ultra quality preset enabled. All the games have been tested using the GTX 1080 Ti and Vega 64 GPUs, and we have the GeForce results up first.
Here we see that Threadripper doesn't look particularly impressive but it has to be said with over 100 fps at all times the game was incredibly smooth. Please note I'm not bothering with the gaming mode, resetting your workstation to play some games isn't practical or realistic so we're only testing the distributed memory mode.
As for the 7960X and 7980XE, they do quite well despite trailing the lower core parts but that was pretty much to be expected.
When we drop in Vega 64 Liquid Cooled the frame rates don't change drastically for the quad-core Core i7-7740X compared to what we saw with the GTX 1080 Ti installed. However, the AMD processors perform much better and we're now seeing significantly more competitive performance across the board with Vega.
Moving on we have Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation and again we are testing with the GTX 1080 Ti first. Here the Core i9 processors deliver the best results while Threadripper is comparable to the Core i7-7820X.
However, when we retest with Vega we again see much more competitive results from all the tested CPUs. The 1950X matches the 7820X but they are not much closer to the Core i9 models.
Next up we have Civilization VI and here the Ryzen 7 1800X is competitive with the Core i7-7740X when using the GTX 1080 Ti. Meanwhile, the 1950X matched the R7 1700 and both were much faster than the Intel Skylake-X CPUs, particularly the new 16-core and 18-core parts.
Switching the Vega 64 Liquid Cooled again provides quite different results and this time the AMD CPUs are able to pull much further ahead of the Skylake-X parts and even the 7740X falls behind the Threadripper 1950X.
Finishing up the gaming benchmarks we have F1 2017 and this is the only DirectX 11 titles we're testing. Here the Core i9-7960X and 7980XE look weak though keep in mind they're still pushing over 100 fps at all times. Meanwhile the 1950X offers considerably better minimum frame rate performance than even the 7900X, though it's worth noting that the quad-core 7740X is the real hero here pushing over 200 fps for the most part.
Switching to Vega doesn't change too much here though the average frame rate of the 1950X is now much better than any of the Skylake-X parts and in fact Ryzen is the king of the big core count CPUs here.