(Maybe.) With the Threadripper 1950X, we were able to get the chip stable at 3.9GHz with various tweaks and by bumping up the voltage a fair amount (1.125V to 1.325V). If you are running applications for which memory latency has a large impact on performance, you can force each die to only use its directly connected memory by enabling the "Local" memory option in AMD's Ryzen Master software utility. The Threadripper 2950X is a slightly better gamer at 1080p than its predecessor; and at least in our handful of test games, Creator versus Game mode only mattered sometimes. The Single Core setting tells a different tale. So we then shifted all of our testing to 1080p. It Depends on the App, Apple MacBook Pro 13-Inch (M1, Late 2020) Review. They're the sort of tasks you might use an Intel Xeon-powered workstation for at the office, and you could certainly shell out the amount of money you'd spend on a 2950X build out a Xeon workstation instead. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. This further narrows the gap with Intel's Core X-Series chips, and affords significantly more room for creative expression than you'd get from an off-the-shelf system like the Alienware Area-51 Threadripper Edition. Before, with the 1950X, XFR would operate across only a subset of the cores. We found the best balance at all cores set to 3,950MHz; at that setting, the system ran stably, and we shaved 11 seconds off our Handbrake render time, for a gain of about 4.5 percent. The difference here between the 2950X and the Intels is around 20 percent. Our expert industry analysis and practical solutions help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology. Each of the Threadripper 2950X's two dies is directly connected to two memory channels, and by default also has access to the memory channels connected to the other die thanks to Infinity Fabric, AMD's marketing name for the technology that allows different parts of the chip to talk with one another. During submission, please specify family name, YD295XA8UGAAF part number, and, most importantly, make the … The first is dedicated to the … The first is dedicated to the desktop sector, It has 16 cores, 32 threads, a maximum frequency of 4.9GHz. All rights reserved. An updated version available on the 2950X, called Precision Boost 2, is far more granular. This length is the same as Intel offers for its X-series processors. AMD’s 16 core, 32 thread Ryzen Threadripper 1950X is finally here to seize the throne for high end desktop processors. The awesome name is certainly part of that aura, but so is the fact that you're getting workstation-level performance at a price that, until recently, wasn't possible in a consumer-grade chip. Find over 30,000 products at your local Micro Center, including the Ryzen Threadripper 2950X 3.5GHz Colfax 16-Core TR4 Boxed Processor The Core i7-8700K ($378.99 at Amazon) is the current head honcho for Team Blue on its mainstream socket (if you discount the limited-edition Core i7-8086K, which we're in the process of reviewing), and the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X ($293.20 at Amazon) (also being reviewed at the moment) is the top dog in the new second-generation Ryzen line. We saw a mirror here, more or less, of what we saw with Cinebench. AMD cautions that overclocking on your part, whether manually or using tools in Ryzen Master, still voids the warranty. So clearly, there is some overhead to exploit here. You could also laugh off the name as marketing hyperbole dreamed up in a Madison Avenue board room. During submission, … We're not arguing with the logic of that, but the fact is: 1080p is a popular gaming resolution, and also favored by competitive gamers with high-refresh-rate screens. (A $649 12-core complement, the Threadripper 2920X, will follow in October, along with the 24-core chip.). ), , took about 6.5 minutes to complete this test, and just a couple of years ago that was riding high as a $1,799 CPU whose price—like that of the Core i9-7980XE—didn't budge much for its active life on the market, How to Free Up Space on Your iPhone or iPad, How to Save Money on Your Cell Phone Bill, How to Find Free Tools to Optimize Your Small Business, How to Get Started With Project Management, How to Build a Maxed-Out Intel Coffee Lake Gaming Rig, Report: Apple Is Testing a Chip Design With 32 High-Performance Cores, First Tests: AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper Pro, New Muscle in Workstation CPUs, Despite 7nm Struggle, Intel to Keep Investing in 5nm, 3nm Chip Technologies, Which CPU Should You Buy? The AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper 1950X processor is designed to provide indisputable multi-processing supremacy on the X399 ultimate platform for desktop. In his spare time, he's written on topics as diverse as Borneo's rain forests, Middle Eastern airlines, and big data's role in presidential elections. One of the Threadripper 2950X's few glaring omissions, at least for video editors and photographers, is the X399 platform's lack of Thunderbolt 3 support. Testing from many outlets indicated that at 1080p, for example, the maximum frame rates in many games showed some suppression versus the same games, settings, and video card in use on recent high-end Intel silicon. Ryzen Threadripper 2950X is AMD's new flagship 16-core processor. Easy-to-use Ryzen Master software utility. What's actually happening under the hood is complicated. If you ponder the name "Threadripper" for a moment, you might get the inkling that AMD bestowed it on its flagship CPU to evoke massive thread counts and the ability to burn through pretty much any intensive computing task. Precision Boost Overclock works wonders to further increase its performance while always being stable. Installing a Threadripper CPU is a unique process because of its large size (remember, it's essentially two regular Ryzen chips fused together). PCMag Digital Group. Our review of the 2950X presents four data sets: stock, manual OC, PBO enabled and PBO with Local Memory Access mode. Luckily, all X399 boards support USB flashback, which means you can update the BIOS from a file installed on a USB stick, instead of having to boot up with a different CPU first. Best X399 Motherboards for Threadripper 2 (2990WX/2950X). This is AMD’s first Ryzen 9 processor and it is a 12-core, 24-thread CPU based on their latest 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture. The first is dedicated to the desktop sector, It has 64 cores, 128 threads, a maximum frequency of 4.5GHz. Blender is an open-source 3D content-creation program that can be used to design and create visual effects, animation, and 3D models for use in video games or 3D printing. The Core i7 is a six-core/12-thread chip, while the Ryzen 7 features eight cores and 16 threads. Some games prefer more cores; others benefit more from less latency. The difference isn't immense, but it has gotten smaller and varies significantly depending on the game you're playing. That said, the Core i9-7980XE has a suggested price of $1,999, more than twice that of the top Threadripper chip, and it hasn't budged much from that rarified price spot since its debut in 2017. The 2950X's $899 retail price still classes it as a luxe-level CPU, but it's still $100 less than both its Threadripper predecessor and its nearest competitor, Intel's Core i9-7900X. The only issue with that approach is that you may run into the occasional game that won't launch without some cores disabled, which will require enabling Game mode. AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X is a good example of beating the competitor’s product. That would be a shame in this case, because one of the Threadripper 2950X's most notable ancillary improvements is an expanded ecosystem of complementary components. These two new CPUs are overkill for most PC-building enthusiasts both in terms of raw compute power and price, so we're focusing on the Threadripper 2950X for our initial second-generation Threadripper review. If that's you, this is the best chip of its kind that you can buy. Keep an eye on your inbox! It continuously adjusts the clock speed in increments as small as 25MHz to allow the CPU to run at the highest possible frequency based on the capabilities of the power supply and cooler. AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core, 16 … Given the mostly under-10-percent difference between the two modes, though, unless you're a frame-rate stickler, you may want to just leave Creator mode enabled, especially since you need to reboot when switching between the two modes. Let's see if it's worth it. But where's the fun in that? Although the Ryzen Threadripper 2950X doesn’t get a core-count boost or feature four-core complexes, like the Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX and 2970WX, it’s still a beast of a chip. We then switched over to our venerable iTunes Conversion Test, using version 10.6 of iTunes. AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX & 2950X Review: The good news is the more affordable Threadripper 2950X becomes the ultimate high-end desktop CPU.We feel many like us … This arrangement would be tighter, or in some cases impossible, on an Intel Core X-series chip and the current X299 platform. AMD Ryzen 9 3900X vs 3900XT: What are The Key Differences? Aside from support for basic technologies that every cutting-edge CPU should have, such as USB 3.1 Gen 2 and PCI Express NVMe for lightning-quick storage, the 2950X is capable of handling 64 PCI Express lanes. Handbrake, a commonly used utility for converting videos from one format to another, benefits from having lots of cores and threads at your disposal. Follow him on Twitter @branttom. Comparison of the technical characteristics between the processors, with the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X on one side and the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X on the other side. AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X Processor - (16 Core/32 Threads) 16 cores provide an astonishing 32 threads of simultaneous multi-processing power, while 40MB of combined cache and vast I/O from the … Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Ryzen Threadripper 2950X Socket TR4 TR4 Cores / Threads 16 / 32 16 / 32 Reply. The chip itself is huge, essentially comprising two ordinary Ryzen chips fused together, which means that it is bigger than most of the liquid cooling heat sinks that were on the market last year. We had some modest successes in our Cinebench trials, but ultimately it didn't matter as much as the full manual mode, tweaking the voltage and core clock across all cores step by step. The 2950X isn't any smaller, and it has the same 180-watt thermal design power (TDP, a measure of required heat dissipation), but new solutions like the Wraith Ripper should do a better job of covering a larger portion of the CPU's heat spreader. After that, again to get a sense of how the chips handle single-core performance, we ran the same benchmark using the "One CPU" setting. ), As with the 1950X, the Ryzen Master software also lets you toggle between Creator and Game modes. The 10-core Core i9-7900X, however, should be in the same league as the Threadripper parts (for the most part) given its pricing, while we expect the 18-core Core i9-7980XE Extreme Edition to be the alpha dog in tasks that gobble up cores and threads. Because it supports the same X399 chipset as the 1950X ($855.78 at Amazon) , it's compatible with any X399 motherboard, even those that were designed before it was introduced. We then shifted over to a few games that we had tested using the same GeForce GTX 1080 video card in our Core i7-7700K video-card testbed. Last, we fired up the popular 7-Zip file-compression software and ran its built-in compression and decompression benchmark, which is another useful test of a CPU's multi-core abilities. With incremental improvements to multi-threaded performance, thermal management, and overclocking, the Ryzen Threadripper 2950X makes AMD's flagship consumer CPU lineup even better than it was before. The former is the default and used under most circumstances, while Game mode is a special state that disables half the cores and changes the memory state to accelerate performance in certain games. Only the 18-core Core i9-7980XE could catch the new Threadripper or its parent, and that not by a whole lot. On this last test, the Threadripper chips dominated, with the Threadripper 2950X in particular pummeling almost all takers, with the exception being the much pricier Core i9-7980XE. $1500 RTX 3070 Build for 1440p High FPS Gaming, $2100 Ryzen 7 5800X + 6800 XT Gaming Build. This is thanks to an update to AMD's Precision Boost feature. That said, with the 2950X, the Intel lead has been halved. Aside from the satisfaction of assembling your own PC, there's a certain aura to a build with a Threadripper inside of it. Assuming you don't overclock, you'll enjoy the three-year warranty that AMD includes with boxed versions of the Threadripper 2950X. Threadripper Technologies. In addition to the Threadripper 2950X, Asus X399 Zenith Extreme, and Thermaltake Floe Riing RGB 360, our testbed includes the following components: This is an identical testbed to the one we used for the 1950X, with the exception of faster memory. On the Intel side, Team Blue's 10-core Intel Core i9-7900X is going to be Threadripper's chief competition, though for our formal comparisons we also dropped in the eight-core Core i7-7820X ($913.92 at Amazon) (a Core X-Series chip, too) as the step down from the Core i9-7900X. Like the 1950X before it, it earns our Editors' Choice award. © 1996-2020 Ziff Davis, LLC. Cinebench is a fully threaded test that's one of the best at-a-glance measures of a task making use of all available processor cores and threads. John is PCMag's executive editor for hardware. (The software allows for 25MHz up-steps.) Your … Discounts and product refreshes are mainstays of consumer technology, of course, so if you wait around for the next one you could end up never buying a single component. If you have this processor please use our CPUID tool to submit CPUID information. With incremental improvements to multi-threaded performance, thermal management, and overclocking, the Ryzen Threadripper 2950X makes AMD's flagship consumer CPU lineup even better than it was before. You can use Ryzen Master to tweak clocks and voltages from within Windows, versus the usual BIOS-level approach. (You'd be right.) 16 cores provide an astonishing 32 threads of simultaneous multi-processing power, while 40MB of combined cache and vast I/O from the enthusiast-grade AMD … Looking back to the previous AMD generation, we're also charting in the Threadripper 1950X (the forebear to the 2950X) and the Threadripper 1920X, AMD's step-down 12-core model. The Threadripper 2950X's first showing is an impressive one, and about what we'd expect from a Threadripper generational step-up. Just like their Ryzen desktop CPUs, AMD’s Threadripper has two different generations with the first featuring the 1900x, 1920x and 1950x with up to 16 cores on the Zen architecture and the second with the 2920x, 2950x, 2970WX and 2990WX featuring up to … Of note, as mentioned earlier, Threadripper has both a Creator mode and a Game mode that you can switch between using the Ryzen Master software. Precision Boost Overclock works wonders to further increase its performance while always being stable. First, we fired up Rise of the Tomb Raider in DirectX 11 mode at the game's Very High detail preset and ran the built-in benchmark. And the better performance usually comes with a lower price thanks to AMD. That's a lot of extra moolah to pay for a few extra cores. Based on 419,480 user benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X and the Ryzen TR 2950X, we rank them both on effective speed and value for money against the best 1,276 CPUs. Get Yours. Series: Ryzen Threadripper 2nd Gen L3 Cache: 32MB L2 Cache: 8MB Cooling Device: Cooling device not included - Processor Only Model #: YD295XA8AFWOF Return Policy: View Return Policy $1,399.99 – Most first-gen Threadripper 1950X CPUs tap out between 3.9 and 4.0 GHz. Like every Ryzen CPU, the Threadripper 2950X is overclockable, and AMD's Ryzen Master software utility makes it easy to adjust clock speeds directly from Windows instead of using the BIOS. Just cpu. The Threadripper 2950X turned in an average frame rate of 121 frames per second (fps) in Creator mode. The Ryzen Threadripper 2950X will cost $799, and the Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX will cost $1799. Now that the Threadripper ecosystem has had a year to mature, you can also select among dozens of motherboards, coolers, power supplies, and other components to suit your tastes and budget. And if single-core tasks are primarily what you do, Threadripper and Core X are not what you ought to be looking at; check out a much cheaper Intel Core i7-8700K. The former is the default and used under most circumstances, while Game mode is a special state that disables half the cores and changes the memory state to accelerate performance in certain games. Overclocking, per AMD and a message right in Ryzen Master, does void your warranty. Boasting 12 high-performance cores capable of harnessing 24 parallel threads, the Ryzen™ Threadripper…