Threadripper 7980X & 7970X benchmarks

Niche use for sure, but I feel there are going to be a few areas where these are amazing.
 
Going on the Christmas list.

Dear Grandma,

I would like the AMD 7980X for Christmas. I know you're on a fixed income and meals are hard to come by, but I figure we could work together to scam the money out of the other grandchildren.

So how about it? One more prank for old times sake?
 
Would have been a lot more interesting with a release date of 8/1/2022. At this point, the 8950x is right around the corner...
 
I don't need massive core counts, but I LOVE me those PCIe lanes. The extra memory channels and large L3 caches are great too!

I'd argue more I/O is orders of magnitude more important than a boatload of cores.

The biggest one I'd likely be buying is the 7960x, but I'd even see myself using one of the lower core count Pro models like the 7955WX and 7945WX, depending on how pricing works out.

One of the lower core count options may even be better for me due to a higher base clock. The 7945x may only have 12C/24T, but the base clock is 4.7Ghz, with a boost clock of 5.3Ghz.
 
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Endgame said:
Would have been a lot more interesting with a release date of 8/1/2022. At this point, the 8950x is right around the corner...
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Yeah, but the 8950x will probably be limited to just 28 PCIe lanes, just like its predecessors, making anything above basic use very constrictive.

I agree in a way though. I would like to see Threadrippers earlier in the product release schedule. Maybe even before the latest consumer parts on the same arch. If someone is going to spend the premium these parts demand, they should have priority over the mass market, IMHO.
 
KickAssCop said:
Does it play games faster than 7800X3D?
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Maybe? That's not what they are intended for though.

It will be a tradeoff. The multi-CCD designs tied together by infinity fabric can cause some choke points reducing gaming performance, but they also have pretty huge L3 caches, which we have learned from X3D models help a lot in gaming workloads.

Add that to the quad channel (or octa channel for Pro) memory and in RAM bandwidth constricted titles, this may alleviate some bottlenecks.

My Threadripper 3960x certainly outperforms it's consumer Zen2 approximate similarly clocked equivalent, the 3800x by wide margins. In Starfield - for instance - it performs similarly to a 5800x3d, which is pretty impressive when you compare it to the much newer architecture.

The way I see it is, you don't buy Threadripper for gaming. You buy Threadripper because you want or need more I/O or higher core counts, and if you do get good gaming performance, its a nice little free bonus on top of cores and I/O.
 
Either one you choose, this is going to be steep.

At least $1499 for the CPU, $1299 for the motherboard, and another ~$1,199 for the kit of DDR5 RDIMMs makes your entry point for the lowest spec version about $4k just for CPU, motherboard and RAM.

Yikes.
 
KickAssCop said:
Does it play games faster than 7800X3D?
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Even @ 4K it falls behind the 7800X3D, even though not by much. Not meant for gaming.

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CAD4466HK said:
View attachment 614926

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Even @ 4K it falls behind the 7800X3D, even though not by much. Not meant for gaming.

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Also, if you look at the Hardware Unboxed single core Cinebench scores they all of the threadrippers they test are under performing significantly compared to consumer parts which have the same architecture and similar clock speeds.

I'm not quite sure what is up with that. I Can't help but wonder if they have adequate cooling in their tests and thus are not letting them boost fully. Could also be the added latency of the RDIMMs that is doing it. I had wondered how the downside of increased latency vs. the upside of added quad channel bandwidth would play out Maybe this is the answer right here. But that doesn't explain the low performance of the 3970x. This amount of single core performance drop-off compared to consumer parts is not something I've seen with my 3960x, which performs fairly similarly in single core compared to consumer Ryzen 3000 chips at the same boost clock. Something is different.

I also wonder if these chips would perform better in the game benchmarks if they disabled SMT. Some games engines just get really confused by so many SMT threads.


All things considered though, while the framerates are not going to impress eSports fanatics, at least for my gaming use the 90-100fps they can achieve in most titles is MORE than enough than I need in my single player gaming. I'm probably going to be limited by my 4090 at 4k Ultra before I am CPU limited anyway.

I was going to jump in on launch day on one of these, but I have to admit, I am having second thoughts. I may wind up passing. I just wish I could get at least a few more PCIe lanes in one of the consumer models. 40 lanes like my old x79 system would be adequate.
 
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Zarathustra[H] said:
Also, if you look at the Hardware Unboxed single core Cinebench scores they all of the threadrippers they test are under performing significantly compared to consumer parts which have the same architecture and similar clock speeds.

I'm not quite sure what is up with that. I Can't help but wonder if they have adequate cooling in their tests and thus are not letting them boost fully. Could also be the added latency of the RDIMMs that is doing it. I had wondered how the downside of increased latency vs. the upside of added quad channel bandwidth would play out Maybe this is the answer right here. But that doesn't explain the low performance of the 3970x. This amount of single core performance drop-off compared to consumer parts is not something I've seen with my 3960x, which performs fairly similarly in single core compared to consumer Ryzen 3000 chips at the same boost clock. Something is different.

I also wonder if these chips would perform better in the game benchmarks if they disabled SMT. Some games engines just get really confused by so many SMT threads.
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You could be right about the cooling since they had to use a 240MM AIO, but then again the temps were rather good, still their results don't jive with the GURU's.

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Endgame said:
Would have been a lot more interesting with a release date of 8/1/2022. At this point, the 8950x is right around the corner...
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Yeah but it’s still only going to have 2 memory channels and at best half the PCIe lanes while topping out at the 16/32 thread count unless they throw some low clocked C cores in there than maybe we get something like an 18/36. But for workloads that can use those Threadripper features the 8950x or 9950x if it’s true they are using the 8000 name for the mobile lineup still won’t hold up.

Give me a Ryzen 9 that’s 1 CCD of X3D, 1 of ZenC, and 4 memory channels and I’ll be a happy camper.
 
I want to see someone throw one of these at Doom Eternal paired with a 4090 at the lowest possible settings and resolution.
 
I'm done with these super chips. I'm done with the obsolescence as soon as you buy it. I'm done with the inflated hyper expensive prices. I'm cool with a desktop class chip. They are already super as is. Unless these can make a genuine living, and don't bullshit yourselves, tons of people are like but I can edit videos and make money, no you won't, and if the chip can't pay for itself in 1 month or less you're wasting money.

I had 3 generations of TR chips. And all of then were simply enthusiasm with nothing to show for them in the end.

Save your money people.
 
socK said:
I want to see someone throw one of these at Doom Eternal paired with a 4090 at the lowest possible settings and resolution.
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They will be outperformed by consumer CPU's that cost a fraction of what they do.
 
I'm kind of disappointed. These are all more workstation platforms than they are HEDT platforms, even the non-PRO.

Really starting to think they are not for me.

All I want is something like a 7800x3d or i9-14900, but with enough PCIe lanes to support a motherboard with a 16x GPU slot and an 8x secondary slot at the same time without degrading to 8x-8x and without losing performance in client workloads compared to consumer platforms.

And I'm willing to pay for that.

This is what we had with Intel's x58, x79 and x99.

I just find it incomprehensible and somewhat depressing that this kind of HEDT/Enthusiast platform simply no longer exists.
 
At current AMD product positioning, the threadripper is a niche market. Having said that, the threadripper family holds its value much longer than the same consumer grade cpu of similar generation in terms of $/core. I think this is due to its large availability of pcie lanes and memory channels for specific application needs.

Well if you wait longer, everything will depreciate to almost "free", regardless of the cpu family.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I just find it incomprehensible and somewhat depressing that this kind of HEDT/Enthusiast platform simply no longer exists.
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It exist no, you mean the price is depressing ?

8 performance core-64 cpu lane W3-2435 MSRP is around $670 USD, the 10 Pcore 840 and the unlocked 12 around $1000
 
KickAssCop said:
Does it play games faster than 7800X3D?
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No.
RDIMM adds memory latency regardless of the speeds presented and games don’t stretch out to a place where the cores or extra memory channels will do much. And honestly because Windows doesn’t know what to do with itself when it has that many resources your 1% lows will be all over the map while it fumbles with CCD thread allocation and priority.

Games are not built to take advantage of the hardware Threadripper could throw at them, and the AMD drivers aren’t optimized for the scenario even if they were.
It’s like gaming with a Workstation GPU it might have all the right numbers on paper but it will consistently fail to deliver.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I'm kind of disappointed. These are all more workstation platforms than they are HEDT platforms, even the non-PRO.

Really starting to think they are not for me.

All I want is something like a 7800x3d or i9-14900, but with enough PCIe lanes to support a motherboard with a 16x GPU slot and an 8x secondary slot at the same time without degrading to 8x-8x and without losing performance in client workloads compared to consumer platforms.

And I'm willing to pay for that.

This is what we had with Intel's x58, x79 and x99.

I just find it incomprehensible and somewhat depressing that this kind of HEDT/Enthusiast platform simply no longer exists.
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Just curious about what you need a second PCI-E slot with x8 lanes for.
 
LukeTbk said:
It exist no, you mean the price is depressing ?

8 performance core-64 cpu lane W3-2435 MSRP is around $670 USD, the 10 Pcore 840 and the unlocked 12 around $1000
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No. They don't exist.

Max turbo on that W3-2435 is 4.5 Ghz.

max turbo on the i9-14900k is 6Ghz.

Taking a 25% clock/performance hit to add some PCIe lanes is not what I'd consider "no compromises" and "client-like performance" with added PCIe lanes.

In the x58, x79 and x99 that wasn't the case.

Heck, my i7-3930k overclocked to 4.8Ghz rock solid in 2011. Absolutely nothing on the consumer side could touch it for years after launch. (Ivy and Haswell came close by upping the IPC, but they wouldn't clock as high.)
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I'm kind of disappointed. These are all more workstation platforms than they are HEDT platforms, even the non-PRO.

Really starting to think they are not for me.

All I want is something like a 7800x3d or i9-14900, but with enough PCIe lanes to support a motherboard with a 16x GPU slot and an 8x secondary slot at the same time without degrading to 8x-8x and without losing performance in client workloads compared to consumer platforms.

And I'm willing to pay for that.

This is what we had with Intel's x58, x79 and x99.

I just find it incomprehensible and somewhat depressing that this kind of HEDT/Enthusiast platform simply no longer exists.
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I get it, they don’t straddle the line like they used too.
Threadripper of old was the perfect feature set for using it for whatever you wanted.
The current iteration has very much picked a lane.
 
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Armenius said:
Just curious about what you need a second PCI-E slot with x8 lanes for.
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Flexibility and added I/O.

If I want to drop a enterprise NIC or SAS HBA in, they are all going to be 8x.

Sure, many high end consumer boards have on board 10gig ethernet ports now, but they usually only have one of them, and the other is some shitty 2.5gig chip, that barely works half the time.

Meanwhile I have been running 10gig LAN (at least between my desktop and my NAS) since 2014. I'm starting to plan my transition to 25gig SFP28 networking at home. I can't do that without an additional 8x slot. And I don't want to nerf my GPU down to 8x just to accomplish that. And yes, I know that going from 16x to 8x on the GPU usually isn't a big deal, but still, I don;'t want to risk it.

PC building is all about flexible expansion. Being able to install whatever hardware you want and do whatever YOU want with your system. Only problem is the PC industry seems to have forgotten this. Now it's just a vast wasteland of mediocre on board bullshit, most of which is so shitty I just want to disable it all and use none of it.


If I had my way, every last motherboard would look like this. Eight glorious full length 16x slots.

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...and there would be no on board devices. Except maybe USB. Everything else the user would select themselves based on which expansion cards they install.

I absolutely HATE the modern PC industry where everything is bundled on a motherboard. You can't customize shit anymore. You can only select from a limited set of pre-configured turds someone else has designed for you, and while there are about 100 different motherboards, they all use the same 2-3 configurations, meaning our hobby has turned into a vast wasteland of sameness.

That's why I got into this hobby. Because I like configuring my PC myself rather than just buying some Dell from Best Buy.

If I just wanted to buy pre-configured garbage, I would have been an Apple fanboy decades ago.
 
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I ve
Zarathustra[H] said:
Flexibility and added I/O.

--snip---

That's why I got into this hobby. Because I like configuring my PC myself rather than just buying some Dell from Best Buy.

If I just wanted to buy pre-configured garbage, I would have been an Apple fanboy decades ago.
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So. Much. This.

I don't want anything onboard except USB and some NVME slots and fan headers. I don't want the crappy NIC, the crappy sound card, crappy integrated video. I'll buy those things if I need them and happily carry them from system to system for a decade.

In my HEDT, I want something well supported by the manufacturer that will clock as high as the fastest consumer part as the same generation at low utilization. I'd like high quality motherboard (excellent power delivery, appropriate number of layers, but none of the BS integrated stuff), 16(ish) Cores, 48 PCI Express lanes, and 4 channel memory. Oh, and I want it released first in the release cycle so I'm not buying something that is ecliplsed in some fasion a couple months after release.
 
tangoseal said:
I'm done with these super chips. I'm done with the obsolescence as soon as you buy it. I'm done with the inflated hyper expensive prices. I'm cool with a desktop class chip. They are already super as is. Unless these can make a genuine living, and don't bullshit yourselves, tons of people are like but I can edit videos and make money, no you won't, and if the chip can't pay for itself in 1 month or less you're wasting money.

I had 3 generations of TR chips. And all of then were simply enthusiasm with nothing to show for them in the end.

Save your money people.
Click to expand...

Why does it need to pay for itself in a month?

If you've cut a half hour out of your day, it's pretty much paid for itself over a year at a software developer.

Zarathustra[H] said:
They will be outperformed by consumer CPU's that cost a fraction of what they do.
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I know but I Eternal is probably the threadiest game out there and I'm morbidly curious on how it'll scale when handed the illogical extreme.

There's so much spare compute that I guess the overhead will start to dominate thanks to individual cores doing such miniscule amounts of work
 
I wonder if Civilization could leverage it, a core for every civ should speed up those turns late game :)
 
Gideon said:
I wonder if Civilization could leverage it, a core for every civ should speed up those turns late game :)
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pendragon1 said:
IF multithread use is implemented right, it could.
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Maybe. Civilization is a better candidate because it is turn based, but assigning a CPU to every Civ is probably not the way, as you will get thread locked when their actions depend on eachother.

I've been playing both Civ 5 and Civ 6 on a 24C48T Threadripper 3960x for years now, and despite all the hype about Civ5 (and Civ6 ) being highly multithreaded, I have rarely seen them use more than a handful of threads (except for the noise from the distributed DX12 draw calls)
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I've been playing both Civ 5 and Civ 6 on a 24C48T Threadripper 3960x for years now, and despite all the hype about Civ5 (and Civ6 ) being highly multithreaded, I have rarely seen them use more than a handful of threads (except for the noise from the distributed DX12 draw calls)
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yeah my googling was turning up that civ6 tops out around 20 threads....
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Maybe? That's not what they are intended for though.

It will be a tradeoff. The multi-CCD designs tied together by infinity fabric can cause some choke points reducing gaming performance, but they also have pretty huge L3 caches, which we have learned from X3D models help a lot in gaming workloads.

Add that to the quad channel (or octa channel for Pro) memory and in RAM bandwidth constricted titles, this may alleviate some bottlenecks.

My Threadripper 3960x certainly outperforms it's consumer Zen2 approximate similarly clocked equivalent, the 3800x by wide margins. In Starfield - for instance - it performs similarly to a 5800x3d, which is pretty impressive when you compare it to the much newer architecture.

The way I see it is, you don't buy Threadripper for gaming. You buy Threadripper because you want or need more I/O or higher core counts, and if you do get good gaming performance, its a nice little free bonus on top of cores and I/O.
Click to expand...
I miss using Crossfire on HEDT and having everything run at X16 with effectively boundless I/O left over for any hard drives.
 
pendragon1 said:
yeah my googling was turning up that civ6 tops out around 20 threads....
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Honestly, I don't even remember it hitting that many, but I could be wrong. It's been a while since I tested it, so the menory is vague. I did all my testing back in 2019 after first buying the threadripper. I probably posted it on here somewhere :p

What I do remember was that it was WAY fewer threads than I expected based on all of their bragging about multithreading.
 
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