The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X Review: CPUs on Steroids
by Ian Cutress on August 10, 2017 9:00 AM ESTCivilization 6
First up in our CPU gaming tests is Civilization 6. Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
Perhaps a more poignant benchmark would be during the late game, when in the older versions of Civilization it could take 20 minutes to cycle around the AI players before the human regained control. The new version of Civilization has an integrated ‘AI Benchmark’, although it is not currently part of our benchmark portfolio yet, due to technical reasons which we are trying to solve. Instead, we run the graphics test, which provides an example of a mid-game setup at our settings.
At both 1920x1080 and 4K resolutions, we run the same settings. Civilization 6 has sliders for MSAA, Performance Impact and Memory Impact. The latter two refer to detail and texture size respectively, and are rated between 0 (lowest) to 5 (extreme). We run our Civ6 benchmark in position four for performance (ultra) and 0 on memory, with MSAA set to 2x.
For reviews where we include 8K and 16K benchmarks (Civ6 allows us to benchmark extreme resolutions on any monitor) on our GTX 1080, we run the 8K tests similar to the 4K tests, but the 16K tests are set to the lowest option for Performance.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
1080p
4K
8K
16K
ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6G Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire Nitro RX 480 8G Performance
1080p
4K
On the whole, the Threadripper CPUs perform as well as Ryzen does on most of the tests, although the Time Under analysis always seems to look worse for Threadripper.
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Pekish79 - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Vraybench 1.0.5SanX - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
*** AMD, make 2-chip mobos for upcoming multicore wars, you will double your profit from this at no cost for you +++vicbee - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Off subject: Having just read the article about nVidia's meteoric rise in profits, some of which directly attributed to high end "gamers" video cards purchased expressly for coin mining, I wonder if it and AMD are going to manufacture CPU's and GPU's specifically for that purpose and how that will affect the price of said parts...Avro Arrow - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Hi Ian, thanks for doing this article. It's important to see all possible outcomes because in the real world, anything is possible. I do have one question that has be puzzled. Why do you say that Threadripper only has 64 PCI-Express 3.0 lanes when it's been reported several times by everyone, including official AMD releases (and also including by you) that it has 64? I thought it might be just a typo but you state it in several places and in all of your specs. This is not a new thing so is there something about Threadripper that we don't know?HotJob - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Could someone explain to me what a "2P" system is from the competition section of the article?coolhardware - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link
"2P" system = two processor system, i.e. a system with two physical CPU sockets and two CPUs installed.In the past a 2P (or 4P) system was really handy to get more cores especially back when 1 core, 2 core, and eventually 4 core CPUs were high end. In the consumer realm, way back, the Pentium II was the first 2P system I ever built and people even did it with Celerons as well:
http://www.cpu-central.com/dualceleron/
the Opterons were also fun for dual or quad processor systems including some SFF options like the ZMAX-DP socket 940 system.
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N...
Now fast forward with ThreadRipper already available at Amazon and NewEgg
http://amzn.to/2wDqgWw (URL shortened)
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N...
I do not think I will ever be building a 2P or 4P system again!!!
:-)
rvborgh - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
hi Ian,i think the Cinebench 11.5 benchmarks are incorrect for both ThreadRippers. ThreadRipper is almost equivalent to my Quad Opteron (48 core) system which scores 3229cb on R15... and 39.04 on Cinebench 11.5. if i downclock all cores to approximately 2.9 GHz i end up with around 3000cb in R15 and in the 36 range point range for 11.5.
The fact that you are only scoring in the 18 range makes me wonder if you had the Threadripper set in some mode where it was only using 8 out of the 16 cores. Can you verify this... please? Thanks :) i would think you should see scores in the 36 range with 11.5.
Other than this minor detail... great article.
PS: i've had the same issues with software not liking NUMA on my quad opteron system as well... Cinebench especially does not like it.
Tchamber - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link
Hi, Ian. Thanks for the review. As usual it was in depth and informative. I'm in the middle of building a 1700x system now based on your review. I wanted to say you handle all the nay-Sayers, gloomy Gusses and negative Nacies with aplomb! I think most people's own slant colors how they see your reviews. I appreciate the consistency of what you do here. I took a look over at Ars, and they could be called AMD shills for all the positive things they say... Keep it up!Tchamber - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link
P.S.I loved your Kessel Run reference, it tied in nicely with your Yoda quote.
B3an - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link
Too many plebs complaining about a lack of 3D rendering benches. The fact is a 16 core CPU is still much slower than GPU's at rendering. I'll be getting a 1950X but it wont even be used for rendering when i know for a fact that my two GPUs will still be much faster with things like Blender. Even a single high-end GPU will still easily beat the 1950X at these tasks.Seems like immature moron fanboys are crying over this stuff because they just want to see AMD at the top of the charts.