AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Review

[g-unit1111]

Funny - the most advanced CPU in the entire world that people can actually afford is finally here, and the first question people have is "can we play games on it?". :lol:

 

[James Mason]

Wow, I've never really paid much attention to non-gaming CPU benchmarks, but it's very evident that even highly-threaded software is all over the map in terms of scaling to the number of available cores. I understand that scaling is never perfect, but only a very few applications actually scaled well to 16 cores/32 threads.

the ones that do scale very well, you can see threadripper having like a 50% reduction in completion time. For benchmarks where the slowest is only 120 seconds it may not seem like much, but for huge processing workloads that take hours or days, cutting that in half is very significant.

 

[InvalidError]

I just looked at gaming benchmark and stopped reading there because as i thought Intel CPUs are killing Thread Ripper in gaming.

ThreadRipper is basically two 1800X stitched together. Since practically no game makes full use of the 1800X and equivalents, there were absolutely no sensible reasons to expect TR to fare any better. Simple logic dictates that the extra complexity in workloads where the extra cores are unnecessary would lead to worse performance and TR does indeed perform worse than Ryzen 7 in many games.

Nothing unexpected there.

 

[DDaerborn]

Hmmm

Obviously these benchmarks are completely bogus in terms of actually measuring the true performance of Threadripper. While I wouldn't go so far as to say that Tom and these "numbers" are dishonest, they are at best very, very misleading....

 

[DDaerborn]

Hmmm

I was remiss in failed to mention that a variety of other "testers" like Anandtech show Threadripper crushing Intel in many of these, and other similar workstation benchmarks.

 

[Shotta06]

It performs "worse" at games at 1080P. Who would spend 1.4-1.6k on a CPU and Mobo and play any game at 1080P? This is a pointless test although I understand it leans more on the CPU at that resolution. Where are the 1440P and 4k numbers?

 

[JamesSneed]

It performs "worse" at games at 1080P. Who would spend 1.4-1.6k on a CPU and Mobo and play any game at 1080P? This is a pointless test although I understand it leans more on the CPU at that resolution. Where are the 1440P and 4k numbers?

I do realize why they do the tests just for comparison sake albeit they are as you said mostly pointless. The only test I see with gaming that has much merit is running dual 1080 TI's at 4k to see if the PCIE lanes help or not. I say that because anyone thinking HEDT for gaming really should be going there for the PCIE lanes so what better test to see how much it matters than dual 1080 TI's.

 

[Guest]

Bad gaming performance of Ryzen and Thread Ripper will slowly creep to 1440p and 4k with a new Nvidia cards as it will remove GPU limitation in those resolutions. Gaming performance will just get worse.

My conclusion:

For best gaming experience 7700K or 6/12 Coffee Lake
For best overall experience gaming and content creation is 7900x

Everything else sucks.

 

[gjmoran]

*Heavy breathing*

 

[BulkZerker]

JamesSneed
"Yeah similarly for someone in the US, gaming tests on this are like taking a 18-Wheeler semi and putting it into a NASCAR race, kind of a given how that is going to work out. Now take that race car and try to move the contents of a large house 1000 miles away and the semi is going to smoke it. Different use cases need different tools."

Meanwhile that 18 wheeler is keeping up with that race car, consumes less fuel, doesn't overheat, and costs less to make.

I'll take the semi.

 

[Shotta06]

Bad gaming performance of Ryzen and Thread Ripper will slowly creep to 1440p and 4k with a new Nvidia cards as it will remove GPU limitation in those resolutions. Gaming performance will just get worse.

My conclusion:

For best gaming experience 7700K or 6/12 Coffee Lake
For best overall experience gaming and content creation is 7900x

Everything else sucks.

I'm assuming your a troll. Its annoying seeing your name come up on a thread to praise Intel and bash AMD. Its old.

At higher resolution 1800x for instance is almost equal to a 7700K as it lean towards the GPU. What exactly are you even talking about? At 4k TR will be neck and neck with Intel.

My 1950x should be here by Saturday

 

[Blas]

Page 2, "Building The Threadripper", where it says "We can see four separate Zeppelin dies connected via the Infinity fabric, and the four CCXes inside each die." it should probably be "We can see four separate Zeppelin dies connected via the Infinity fabric, and the TWO CCXes inside each die."

 

[JamesSneed]

Bad gaming performance of Ryzen and Thread Ripper will slowly creep to 1440p and 4k with a new Nvidia cards as it will remove GPU limitation in those resolutions. Gaming performance will just get worse.

My conclusion:

For best gaming experience 7700K or 6/12 Coffee Lake
For best overall experience gaming and content creation is 7900x

Everything else sucks.

Only the Sith deal in absolutes.

 

[AgentLozen]

I've enjoyed reading this review of Threadripper.

The benchmarks seem to show that it needs a lot of tuning to draw out performance. I'm glad AMD provided users with different modes that to maximize compatibility, but I just wish Threadripper would work to it's fullest potential out of the box. I wouldn't want to reconfigure my bios every time I wanted to switch between games and content creation. Intel seems to handle this a little better.

For best gaming experience 7700K or 6/12 Coffee Lake
For best overall experience gaming and content creation is 7900x

I think gamers should stay with Intel also. The 7700k tops out most of the gaming benchmarks and I imagine a 6 core variant would do even better. I might just go this route with my next computer.

On the other hand, Threadripper seems to dominate the charts in most content creation benchmarks. I'm not sure where your 7900x conclusion is coming from. We still (best) friends tho.

Edit:
Haha. Who are these people down voting this? I provided rational and original points in this thread.

First rational and original point: It doesn't seem to bother anyone that you have to set your CPU into game mode to get the best results in games. When have you ever had to do that before with any CPU in the past? Don't you wish it would just work 100% without the micro management?

Second rational and original point: Gamers are better off using Kaby Lake for now and Coffee lake in the future. This was even implied in the article. Do you think the author was wrong?

BONUS AWESOME POINT: freak777power is the kindest and most generous person I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. He got literally carried me out of Vietnam on his shoulders and he introduced me to my wife.

 

[FormatC]

Yes, this was not fair.

@Tesetilaro:
As you know, we are writing this in coop. Everybody does his part and each part is important.

 

[Aspiring techie]

Hey, competition finally. Lets grab some popcorn and watch the new AMD vs. Intel CPU slugfest.

 

[elbert]

Only thing I could think of while reading the article is I really want to see the 1900X in thses benchmarks. Dont get me wrong the 16 core does great but I really want to see how the 8 core 1900X stacks up against the 1800X. I would like to see a 1900 for around $450 in the next month or 2.

 

[salgado18]

Is there any possibility you could add to your testing methodology code compiling? And I don't mean just gcc and stuff, maybe Unity 3D and Unreal projects as well. Should I buy Threadripper to build my games? Are they any good in importing textures, compressing audio, converting code and all the different tasks it takes to build a game?

 

[takeshi7]

For your price efficiency graphs on the conclusion page please start them at 0 on both axes. It makes it so much easier to visualize price/performance!

 

[zippyzion]

That was a fairly good write up on Threadripper. In programs that can unleash it's full power the thing is a monster. If they could just half the difference in clock speeds AMD would be in an amazing place. As it is the chips are competitive and cheaper than Intel's offerings.

Is it bad that I was amused by the "so many cores the game wouldn't launch" comment? I just imagine this little game that is used to playing with normal sized CPUs, then this giant sumo wrestler, with Threadripper's logo on it's stomach and AMD print loin cloth, smashes through the door and yells "YOU! LET'S PLAY!" and the game drops to the ground in terror screaming at the top of it's lungs before passing out.

Anyways, I don't think I'd mind gaming on a Threadripper. It is slower than Intel's offerings, but it still has respectable performance. I don't know why people are so hung up on MAXIMUM GAMING!!! but it's kinda old. Give me something that can play games but does other things really well too.

You know, after seeing the trouble that CPUs are having scaling performance to higher core counts, I'm not sure that the 18 core Intel chip will be as impressive as some people might believe. I don't think anyone in software land was ready for 16 or 18 core chips to drop. There is going to need to be a lot of optimization. For the programs that can field 12-18 cores properly the performance is phenomenal, but too many programs are still stuck in single core land. I know people say that we need to give programmers time, but we've had 4 core processors for over a DECADE, 6 cores since 2010, and programmers have lagged behind for years.

 

[mapesdhs]

"Dual graphics cards are becoming more of a rarity in high-end gaming machines, but there are plenty of workloads still constrained by I/O. For instance, many taxing content creation workloads require hefty storage accommodations, and streamers often employ dedicated capture cards."

Paul, you forgot to mention content creators who also make use of multiple GPUs for render acceleration, eg. CUDA with AE, the type of task that can hammer the whole system (CPU, RAM, GPU, I/O). Such users may mix the use of multiple GPUs with storage solutions and other cards such as PCIe digvid, or even external PCIe splitters (the current top-spot for OctaneBench uses eleven 1080 Tis). I'm helping someone atm build such a system; their requirements rule out AM4 Ryzen and mainstream Intel (nowhere near enough PCIe lanes), and their budget level means the "affordable" X299 CPUs don't have enough PCIe lanes to support the desired I/O potential. This makes TR attractive, or X79/X99 depending on what's available.

Ian.

 

[mapesdhs]

The first rule of Tom's Hardware Rules of Conduct and Terms of Use should be DON'T LIE READERS! ...

Where exactly are the falsehoods? Specifics please, with facts/evidence to demonstrate your point; otherwise, not an argument!

Ian.

 

[Guest]

To summarize

180W TDP
No overclocking
Not suitable for ITX and All In One Solution - too big
Sucks in gaming
You have to use software to switch between gaming and content creation mode...enable legacy gaming support which disables cores ? What?
$999 too pricey for what it does
Content Creation, very small performance difference despite having extra 6/12 threads. Performance difference in content creation is much bigger between Intel 10/20 and 1800x even though it has only 2/4 extra threads. It tells me that IPC on Ryzen and Thread Ripper rather sucks. Content Creation single core benchmark shows that in fact does suck.
That's why i said 7900x is better CPU all around, more balanced.

No software to do some magic between gaming and content creation mode
Very fast in gaming, pretty fast in content creation despite having 6/12 threads less.
Overclocks well. A price of $999 really justifies it.
i9 18/36 will be faster for around 50% than 16/32 in content creation which justifies its price of $2000.

 

[jp0wns]

Obviously there will be some particular merit to the 1950x it has 6/12 core/threads over the Intel 7900K. I don't see how the 1950x would apply more so to streamers than the 7900x though. The 7900x can deliver better game performance whether marginally or not and the 20 total threads are surely up to the task of streaming, not leaving room for 32 threads to make a difference in this case. In the case of I7-7700k vs 1700-1800x I can see the case as the 8 vs 16 thread count allows better streaming. Going beyond 16 threads likely doesn't yield a difference. I think the 7820K is great for gamers/streamers and if you want to save some money snag an AMD 1700-1800x. Gamers/streamers need not buy $1k processor. I look forward to 1920x and 1900x review. I am curious how the 1900x compares to the very similar 1800x.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Why we wouldn't test gaming? So you just said what i said....7900x is better all around CPU, so you get more value for the same amount of money. It is not blowing away Intel offering in multi threaded cases because we are comparing 16/32 setup vs. 10/20 setup and from what i see AMD numbers are not that impressive.

If you're looking at value for money as you claim, then the fact that the 1950X has a thread advantage over the 7900X is irrelevant. The only important facts are their respective performance and price. They cost the same, and the 1950X pulls ahead in multithreaded benchmarks (and I would assume anyone in the market for these CPUs would use heavily multithreaded apps), and performs good enough in games.

I have Xeon 18/36 Broadwell-E based CPU and that thing is faster than Thread Ripper. Funny thing is i got that CPU for $800 on eBay, retail version. And what is even more funny is that Xeon 18/36 Broadwell-E runs games better too.

I'm assuming this is used, and regardless this price isn't available to the majority of people. So I don't see how it's relevant.