Hedt articles

AMD's Threadripper 9000 series pushes Zen 5 to the extreme, with up to 64 cores and sky-high specs. We review the HEDT 9970X and 9980X – powerful, pricey, and not for the faint of budget.

It's not every day that we get to review a $5,000 CPU, so this should be fun. The Ryzen Threadripper 7980X and 7970X pack 64 and 32 cores, two new super-powerful chips part of AMD's latest HEDT lineup.

Today we're looking at the most expensive desktop CPU to ever exist, and shockingly it's not from Intel. The Threadripper 3990X is a 64-core, 128-thread Zen 2-based processor that AMD fully acknowledges is a special purpose processor that combines both high frequency and high core counts into a single package.

As anticipated earlier this week when we tested AMD's HEDT Threadripper, Intel is also coming out with their own new high-end desktop series codenamed Cascade Lake-X. You already saw some preliminary data on the Core i9-10980XE, and now we're bringing you a full series review by testing the 10980XE, 10940X, 10920X and 10900X CPUs.

The latest 32-core and 24-core high-end desktop CPUs from AMD have now landed. And yes, we've benchmarked the heck out of them. The Threadripper 3970X is a 32-core, 64-thread chip with a massive 128MB L3 cache, runs at 3.7 GHz and it's priced at $2,000 making it AMD's most expensive desktop CPU ever. If that's too rich, maybe the 3960X costs $1,400 for 24 cores and 48 threads.