The Big Gun: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X Workstation Performance Review

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] If you're interested in Linux performance, you may want to take a look at our experiences with the 3990X here. In our look at AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 3990X in Linux, we saw many occasions where the monstrous 64-core chip rose to the occasion, and delivered compelling scaling. It did quickly become clear, though, that much of the software industry hasn't caught onto the idea of CPUs having so many threads. We can hope that AMD's latest offering will encourage more developers to take many-core chips into greater consideration going forward. Not all workloads require as many threads as the 3990X provides, and that's important to acknowledge. In some cases, having so many threads could act as a detriment to performance in workloads that won't scale so high. If you're a gamer, this chip is almost certainly not for you. If you're a workstation user whose workload can use as many threads as you can throw at it, then you will see a benefit. You can't mention "core counts" without hearing someone shout "rendering!", so that's of course a big focus of AMD's for a chip like this. We remember at its EPYC 2 launch event last year, AMD had shown Blender rendering taking place on a dual-EPYC 256-thread machine, which highlighted the fact pretty well that it's not only servers that can take good advantage of a huge number of threads. For video encoding, scaling to such large CPUs has been challenging for a while, and not a great deal has improved since the release of the 2990WX in late 2018. As we'll see in our Premiere Pro tests later, though, codec choices do make a difference. As for other workloads, we'll be tackling those as well. With its niche focus for the market's biggest performance hounds, it should come as no surprise that the Threadripper 3990X carries a price-premium versus the other Threadrippers, coming in at $3,990 USD. Expensive, yes, but not when compared to the Intel competition. It was only a few years ago when Intel charged nearly $2K for an 18-core - and today we have a 64-core for $4K. Despite being such a bleeding-edge processor, there's nothing special a user needs to do for the 3990X that they wouldn't have to do for the 3960X or 3970X. The officially max supported DRAM speed is 3200MHz for 128GB of memory if four DIMMs are used, and 2666MHz if eight are. We tested 64GB at 3600MHz, so the answer is "yes, you can go higher". Of course, your mileage will vary. Here's AMD's current Ryzen lineup for reference: AMD's Ryzen & Ryzen Threadripper Lineup Cores Clock (Turbo) L2+L3 Memory TDP Price Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64 (128T) 2.9 GHz (4.3) 288MB Quad 280W $3990 3970X 32 (64T) 3.7 GHz (4.5) 144MB Quad 280W $1999 3960X 24 (48T) 3.8 GHz (4.5) 140MB Quad 280W $1399 Ryzen 9 R9 3950X 16 (32T) 3.5 GHz (4.7) 72MB Dual 105W $749 R9 3900X 12 (24T) 3.8 GHz (4.6) 70MB Dual 105W $499 Ryzen 7 R7 3800X 8 (16T) 3.9 GHz (4.5) 36MB Dual 95W $399 R7 3700X 8 (16T) 3.6 GHz (4.4) 36MB Dual 65W $329 Ryzen 5 R5 3600X 6 (12T) 3.8 GHz (4.4) 35MB Dual 95W $249 R5 3600 6 (12T) 3.6 GHz (4.2) 35MB Dual 65W $199 Ryzen w/ Radeon Vega Graphics R5 3400G 4 (8T) 3.7 GHz (4.2) 0.5+4MB Dual 65W $149 R3 3200G 4 (4T) 3.6 GHz (4.0) 0.5+4MB Dual 65W $99 Although we tested the 3990X with just 64GB of memory, AMD suggests that 128GB should be considered a minimum, and for the biggest workloads, 256GB is even better. Naturally, you will have to scale your configuration according to your needs, but if you are buying a CPU like the 3990X, then it's safe to say that 128GB+ should be the target. Thanks to the fact that the Zen 2 architecture is a lot more accommodating to high-frequency memory than the original Zen, you may want to consider going for a DDR4-3600 kit, as long as it's been validated to work in this platform. The safe choice is 3200, since that's officially supported - but remember, four sticks are better than eight. We often receive reference performance numbers when we tackle a new CPU for review, and in the case of the 3990X, we haven't quite been able to match what AMD has shown. Even after swapping motherboards, we haven't been able to catch up to AMD, but as always, we'll continue to test after-the-fact, and see what improves as software or firmware updates come out. It's worth noting that we sanity checked with a few reviewer friends, and none of them are experiencing the same under-performing results as us. For now, we shall blame gremlins. A fun, but unstable 3.6GHz all-core 3990X overclock Because we ended up spending so much time tweaking our system to try to catch up to AMD's reported numbers, we decided to spend some time overclocking, and were left surprised by the potential overall. We're still exploring what's stable, but we can say that you can easily gain a few hundred MHz to reach some impressive scores (+10% to Cinebench, for example). The shot above is of a 3.6GHz overclock, but to be clear, that was just to reach high scores. It is not at all stable for general operation. On the next page, you can peruse our test systems and methodologies; or jump straight to the tests on page three. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Test Methodology & Systems][Top Ad] Benchmarking a CPU may sound like a simple enough task, but in order to deliver accurate, repeatable results, strict guidelines need to be adhered to. This makes for rigorous, time-consuming testing, but we feel that the effort is worth it. This page exists so that we can be open about how we test, and give those who care about testing procedures an opportunity to review our methodology before flaming us in the comments. Here, you can see a breakdown of all of our test machines, specifics about the tests themselves, and other general information that might be useful. Let's start with a look at the test platforms, for AMD's TRX40 (ASUS Zenith II Extreme), and AM4 (Aorus X570 MASTER), along with Intel's LGA2011-v3 (ASUS' ROG STRIX X299-E GAMING), and LGA1151 (ASUS' ROG STRIX Z390-E GAMING). On our Intel platforms that use ASUS motherboards, we disable the "MultiCore Enhancement" feature, which effectively operates the CPU beyond stock speeds. The same feature doesn't exist on our AMD platforms. We validated our configuration with AMD, Intel, and ASUS before settling on it. On the mitigation front, nothing is explicitly done outside of having the most up-to-date EFI and chipset driver installed on every motherboard. Systems are effectively default, and whichever security mitigations are applied will be automatic ones applied by the motherboard firmware or driver vendor. All platforms are run with 64GB DDR4-3600 (16-18-18) memory configurations. Here's the full breakdown of the test rigs: Techgage's CPU Testing Platforms. AMD AM4 Test Platform Processors AMD Ryzen 9 3950X (3.5GHz, 16C/32T) AMD Ryzen 9 3900X (3.8GHz, 12C/24T) AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (3.6GHz, 8C/16T) AMD Ryzen 5 3600X (3.8GHz, 6C/12T) Motherboard Aorus X570 MASTER CPUs tested with BIOS F11 (December 6, 2019) Memory Corsair VENGEANCE (CMT64GX4M4Z3600C16) 16GB x4 Operates at DDR4-3600 16-18-18 (1.35V) Graphics NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti (12GB; GeForce 441.66) Storage WD Blue 3D NAND 1TB (SATA 6Gbps) Power Supply EVGA Bronze 600B1 (600W) Chassis Fractal Design Define C Cooling Corsair Hydro H115i PRO RGB (280mm) Et cetera Windows 10 Pro (1909, Build 18363) AMD TRX40 Test Platform Processor AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X (2.9GHz, 64C/128T) AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X (3.7GHz, 24C/48T) AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X (3.8GHz, 32C/64T) Motherboard ASUS Zenith II Extreme 3970X/3960X tested with BIOS 0702 (December 12, 2019) 3990X tested with BIOS 0021 beta (December 30, 2019) Memory Corsair VENGEANCE (CMT64GX4M4Z3600C16) 16GB x4 Operates at DDR4-3600 16-18-18 (1.35V) Graphics NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti (12GB; GeForce 441.66) Storage WD Blue 3D NAND 1TB (SATA 6Gbps) Power Supply Cooler Master Silent Pro Hybrid (1300W) Chassis Cooler Master MasterCase H500P Mesh Cooling NZXT Kraken X62 AIO (280mm) Et cetera Windows 10 Pro (1909, Build 18363) Intel LGA1151 Test Platform Processors Intel Core i9-9900KS (4.0GHz, 8C/16T) Intel Core i7-8700K (3.70GHz, 8C/16T) Motherboard ASUS ROG STRIX Z390-E GAMING CPUs tested with BIOS 1401 (November 26, 2019) Memory Corsair VENGEANCE (CMT64GX4M4Z3600C16) 16GB x4 Operates at DDR4-3600 16-18-18 (1.35V) Graphics NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti (12GB; GeForce 441.66) Storage WD Blue 3D NAND 1TB (SATA 6Gbps) Power Supply Corsair RM650X (1200W) Chassis NZXT S340 Elite Mid-tower Cooling Corsair Hydro H100i V2 AIO Liquid Cooler (240mm) Et cetera Windows 10 Pro (1909, Build 18363) Intel LGA2011-3 Test Platform Processors Intel Core i9-10980XE (3.0GHz, 18C/36T) Motherboard ASUS ROG STRIX X299-E GAMING CPU tested with BIOS 2002 (September 25, 2019) Memory Corsair VENGEANCE (CMT64GX4M4Z3600C16) 16GB x4 Operates at DDR4-3600 16-18-18 (1.35V) Graphics NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti (12GB; GeForce 441.66) Storage WD Blue 3D NAND 1TB (SATA 6Gbps) Power Supply Corsair Professional Series Gold AX1200 (1200W) Chassis Corsair Carbide 600C Cooling NZXT Kraken X62 AIO (280mm) Et cetera Windows 10 Pro (1909, Build 18363) Testing Considerations. For our testing, we use Windows 10 build 18363 (1909) with full updates. Here are some basic guidelines we follow: Disruptive services are disabled; eg: Search, Cortana, User Account Control, Defender, etc. Overlays and / or other extras are not installed with the graphics driver. Vsync is disabled at the driver level. Power profiles used: High / Ultimate Performance for Intel, Ryzen Balanced for AMD. OSes are never transplanted from one machine to another. We validate system configurations before kicking off any test run. Testing doesn't begin until the PC is idle (keeps a steady minimum wattage). All tests are repeated until there is a high degree of confidence in the results. Benchmarks of modern workloads matter, so we always try to use up-to-date software. Encoding Tests. Adobe Lightroom Classic Adobe Premiere Pro Agisoft Metashape Blackmagic RAW Speed Test HandBrake LameXP (You can...

The Big Gun: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X Workstation Performance Review

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Rob Williams