Review: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X

Very good performance for AMD. In actual fact I will go as far as to say the best there is atm. The thing is this is a workhorse CPU and that it does pretty well. Better than any competition can offer for that matter. Looking at the gaming side of things, if you want the best gaming fps and that is your soul goal, get yourself a 7700K or 7740X and over clock it. Nothing out there will be able to match the fps that those 2 CPU's bring to the table. Oh, don't forget the 6700K that is basically a 7700K.
Anyway it is good to see AMD at the top again and shake Intel up a bit. Good work.

 

@Hilbert: If you have the time, would it be possible to do some test with half the cores disabled? It might provide a good indication of how the 1900X will perform.

 

I'm a bit wary about the 1900X's gaming performance. Unless you're doing 3x Crossfire or SLI (note Nvidia seems to be leaning toward dropping triple-GPU support) the extra PCIe lanes will not contribute toward any significant or measurable difference. As stated in my last post, games don't utilize enough cores to warrant the need for the additional memory channels. Overall, the benchmarks seem to suggest the extra bandwidth has very little impact.
The real concern is the [N]UMA situation. For the 1900X, enabling NUMA means you'd get 4c/8t for a game, where if a game demands more than that you might lose performance. But with UMA you might get latency issues. I figure a Ryzen 7 may end up being the better choice for gamers, but I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Well, it's the best in terms of price point and class. But there are Xeons that are more powerful, albeit, with price points not for the faint of heart.

Also, it wouldn't surprise me if the POWER9 ends up being a serious contender to both AMD and Intel offerings. Even POWER8 (which is already available) goes up to 96 threads at 4GHz with 96MB of L3 and 128MB of L4.

 

It's a consumer grade cpu that costs $1000. In aus It's over 1400. If you think that being disappointed that the gaming performance in the case of the game I mentioned being more than 10% slower than a cpu that has been superceeded by maybe 5 successors, all of which cost a third of the cpu reviewed today is unfounded then that just isn't true.

This cpu has jumped light years ahead of what intel was spoon feeding us, and is also a big step backwards in gaming. As someone who really wanted this to be my next cpu, I am very disapointed. I never thought it was a ' gaming chip'. But I didn't expect that bad performance for the whopping $1400aus + the extremely expensive motherboard cost for ot, plus the cost of a quad channel ram kit.

And the argument that buying an 8 core zyzen instead because of slightly higher clocks also doesn't hold up because they suffer from the same gaming performance. So here we have amd shaking the market up.....and still are left with intel ad the only rational choice for a gaming minded person. I really thought intel would see some true competition, but instead we just have 2 different target markets.

Maybe the entire market will split that way, who knows, but for me as a gamer first it would have been nice to have options in terms of the best performance. Not just different levels of compromise in order to get insane performance doing things I will never use.

 

I am quite sure that Zen 2 ( or Zen+ ) will not have higher IPC, but instead will clock much higher ( 4.5+ Ghz ), closing the gap in these gaming workloads (or eliminating it).

It wouldn't surprise me if next year they'll release a TR version that will have equally or better multi-threaded performance, but also the low-threaded turbo to high clockspeeds.

At this point it's all about fabrication tweaks.
Who knows, they might be producing them right now... ?

 

I was hoping for a bit more as well but I reckon that Hilbert was a little overwhelmed with all the reviews he had to do.

 

Frankly, I think you are the only person who was expecting some ground-breaking improvements in gaming with Threadripper. It was plainly obvious that TR's gaming performance would be more-or-less similar to the other Ryzen chips at the same clock speed. Really now, what made you think that it would be different?

 

The tidal wave of industry hype where every big hardware site made out like like AMD was going to steal majority market share and bury intel.

Look at the comments in this thread. You have frenzied people saying 'R.I.P Intel' for the first whole lage and then 2 pages of people saying they are either disappointed or expected more...I think as the dust settles people will realise that almost everyone will buy the 6-8 core intel chips from either coffee lake or skylake x and only the absolute most fringe buyers will shell out the 1x kidney cost of threadripper.

I wasn't expecting miracles from threadripper. I just wasn't expecting the same poor performance in gaming that ryzen has for $1400+ aus

 

HH, thanks for the review. I am sold on Threadripper.

Hope Santa will be nice this year. I know what to ask.

Merry Christmas everybody !

 

I still don't get why you'd expect any different. Not even all the cores in a Ryzen 7 are fully utilized by any games. Adding more cores to a task that will not use them will have a 0% performance improvement.

Look at it in this way:
Let's say you're a runner and you want the most comfortable, breathable, and durable shoes to handle your trek, do you buy sneakers or steel-tip shoes? Steel-tip shoes are more durable and more expensive. They're grippy and can handle all sorts of terrain. You can do a lot more with them than you can with sneakers. But despite all of this, you will not run as fast.

Much like shoes, there is no CPU model that fits all needs. You can't just keep adding cores and expect that everything will scale linearly with absolutely no regressions. But also, how much does it really matter to you to shave off those extra seconds in your run time, if you get to use the same shoes for work and daily use? People who buy Zen-based CPUs are willing to sacrifice a few FPS here and there while dramatically increasing the productivity in their other tasks, without paying more. Is a 2% loss in gaming performance really that big of a dealbreaker to you?

That's really only said by fanboys who have no clue how the market works. Everyone else knows to take AMD's claims with a grain of salt (though apparently, they were pretty spot-on with TR). Intel wouldn't have to release a new product for over a year and they'd likely still get more sales than AMD.

I actually expect the exact opposite. The GHz limit seems to be due to a manufacturing issue, so unless AMD adjusts all the transistors to compensate for it (which would likely be WAY too complicated), or, if the facilities adjust their fabrication process (which they ought to do anyway), the OC potential is likely going to remain the same. Meanwhile, Zen was not a perfect launch, and it was somewhat rushed - there are many adjustments AMD needs to make that they can only learn from via experience. Usually whenever a new CPU architecture is released, it seems to get a substantial ICP increase after it's 2nd generation.

 

That goes without saying. This is a chip for the HEDT market, which is a niche market - it is NOT intended for the general consumer or gaming market. Just like the Core i9, Threadripper is for those consumers who need a lot of cores (e.g., content creators) and only a small number of people ever buy them. Chips like Ryzen 5 and 7 are supposed to compete in the consumer market for 6-8 core chips, not Threadripper.

 

And Intel's $2000 cpu is way worse in gaming than the 300$ 7700K. So what's your point? price has nothing to do with performance in gaming. Look at intel's i9 10 core vs 12 vs 14 vs 16 vs 18. The higher the cores the lower the frequency. And you can expect less performance in gaming even though you will be paying more.
Again this CPU is made with multitasking in mind and it excels on that. For gaming you should be looking elsewhere.

 

Good read, and great review :thumbup:

I think throughout the review and especially in the last page of final thoughts/conclusion: the target market and what TR is supposed to be used for was addressed. I would definitely buy into this platform if I were upgrading.

 

It's not as if AMD has been hyping these up as Intel killers for games?

The only hype swirling in relation to games that comes to mind was about the possibility of quad channel memory improving things a little. With that not being the case it's presumably latency and a need for patches.

 

Up until EPYC is released. At that point, a 32 core 2.2Ghz EPYC 7601 should hover around the same performance for $4200 vs Intels highest end 28-core 2.5Ghz Xeon Platinum 8180 $11,722 processor.

Not to mention EPYC's 7551P, 32 core, 2.0Ghz for $2100

But wait, weren't these already released?

This, so this, like, i can't stress how much THIS

Honestly, it's just sad people don't hold Intel to the same nonsensical scrutiny when it comes to "My higher-frequency/lower-core count processor does better at gaming then AMDs more expensive processors!"

 

Amazing! This will be my next upgrade and CPU.

Massive thanks for the review as always.

 

Yeah, you can tell in several games that it´s a bottleneck even at 1080p...

... this processor is a beast

 

Hats off to AMD, they really pulled a phoenix on the cpu market. They really at it i tell you. Massive win here. Respect.

 

A lady V? :banana:

On a serious note: 56, 64 or both?

I bet Linus will do that (and get hate again for it)

AMD said it was keen on improving Zen through the life of AM4 platform. What that means, we have to wait and see.

They're certainly working and pushing 7nm research, so we might see more good tech in the next 2 years.