Retesting AMD Ryzen Threadripper’s Game Mode: Halving Cores for More Performance
by Ian Cutress on August 17, 2017 12:01 PM ESTCPU Office Tests
The office programs we use for benchmarking aren't specific programs per-se, but industry standard tests that hold weight with professionals. The goal of these tests is to use an array of software and techniques that a typical office user might encounter, such as video conferencing, document editing, architectural modeling, and so on and so forth.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Chromium Compile (v56)
Our new compilation test uses Windows 10 Pro, VS Community 2015.3 with the Win10 SDK to compile a nightly build of Chromium. We've fixed the test for a build in late March 2017, and we run a fresh full compile in our test. Compilation is the typical example given of a variable threaded workload - some of the compile and linking is linear, whereas other parts are multithreaded.
For our test, we compile a version of v56 under MSVC and report the time in 'Compiles per Day', a more scalable metric to represent over time. Other publications might perfom this test differently (Ars Technica uses a clang-cl compiler with VC++ linking, for example).
One of the interesting data points in our test is the Compile. Because this test requires a lot of cross-core communication and DRAM, we get an interesting metric where the 1950X still comes out on top due to the core counts, but because the 1920X has fewer cores per CCX, it actually falls behind the 1950X in Game Mode and the 1800X despite having more cores.
PCMark8: link
Despite originally coming out in 2008/2009, Futuremark has maintained PCMark8 to remain relevant in 2017. On the scale of complicated tasks, PCMark focuses more on the low-to-mid range of professional workloads, making it a good indicator for what people consider 'office' work. We run the benchmark from the commandline in 'conventional' mode, meaning C++ over OpenCL, to remove the graphics card from the equation and focus purely on the CPU. PCMark8 offers Home, Work and Creative workloads, with some software tests shared and others unique to each benchmark set.
Strangely, PCMark 8's Creative test seems to be failing across the board. We're trying to narrow down the issue.
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zodiacfml - Monday, August 21, 2017 - link
I agree with the conclusion, just disable SMT and be done with it. With 16 cores, it is overkill for all desktop tasks except for full tilt rendering/encoding.MrRuckus - Tuesday, August 22, 2017 - link
Now overclock it with half the cores enabled and do it again?Thats the only benefit I see from going to TR, is the top 5% of Ryzen cores go on threadripper chips, so its basically the best binned cores. What you can reach with half the cores overclocked would be interesting to see. How much better are the top binned cores compered to say a 1800x? HOCP did a overclocking article on TR, but not with half the cores disabled. They saw better performance by underclocking because if the heat and so many cores. Cut the cores in half and see what it'll do?
Ian Cutress - Friday, August 25, 2017 - link
Android Password Breaker hacking tutorials hacking ebooks hacking news hacking tools android technology https://myhacker.netdruuzil - Tuesday, March 6, 2018 - link
This was quite useful to me. I wasn't aware of the Ryzen Master software prior to this article, and I was having SLI scaling issues/poor performance in gaming (not horrible, but not what I would have expected from a $700 CPU, the 1920x). Using Gaming Mode has helped tremendously.. My 3dMark Firestrike score went up about 4500 points simply by engaging Gaming Mode, and a bit more after a modest overclock. The ability to swap back and forth is pretty handy, as I can re-enable the full set of cores when I want to encode a video for example with the push of a button (and a quick reboot).