The AMD Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core and 2950X 16-Core Review
by Dr. Ian Cutress on August 13, 2018 9:00 AM ESTOverclocking: 4.0 GHz for 500W
Who said that a 250W processor should not be overclocked? AMD prides itself as being a processor manufacturer that offers every consumer processor as a multiplier unlocked part, as well as using a soldered thermal interface material to assist with thermal dissipation performance. This 2990WX has an X in the same, so let the overclocking begin!
Actually, confession time. We did not have much time to do overclocking by any stretch. This processor has a 3.0 GHz base frequency and a 4.2 GHz turbo frequency, and in an air-conditioned room using the 500W Enermax Liqtech cooler, when running all cores under POV-Ray, we observed each core running around 3150 MHz, which is barely above the turbo frequency. The first thing I did was set the all-core turbo to 4.2 GHz, the same as the single core turbo frequency. That was a bust.
However, the next stage of my overclocking escapades surprised me. I set the CPU to a 40x multiplier in the BIOS, for 4.0 GHz on all the cores, all the time. I did not adjust the voltage, it was kept at auto, and I was leaving the ASUS motherboard to figure it out. Lo and behold, it performed flawlessly through our testing suite at 4.0 GHz. I was shocked.
All I did for this overclock was turn a setting from ‘auto’ to ‘40’, and it breezed through almost every test I threw at it. I say almost every test – our Prime95 power testing failed. But our POV-Ray power testing, which draws more power, worked. Every benchmark in the suite worked. Thermals were high (in the 70s), but the cooler could take it, and with good reason too.
At full load in our POV-Ray test, the processor was listed as consuming 500W. The cooler is rated for 500W. At one point we saw 511W. This was split between 440W for the cores (or 13.8W per core) and 63W for the non-core (IF, IO, IMC) which equates to only 12.5% of the full power consumption. It answers the question from our Infinity Fabric power page - if you want the interconnect to be less of the overall power draw, overclock!
We also tried 4.1 GHz, and that seemed to work as well, although we did not get a full benchmark run out of it before having to pack the system up. As stated above, 4.2 GHz was a no-go, even when increasing the voltage. With tweaking (and the right cooling), it could be possible. For anyone wanting to push here, chilled water might be the way to go.
Performance at 4.0 GHz
So if the all-core frequency was 3125 MHz, an overclock to 4000 MHz all-core should give a 28% performance increase, right? Here are some of the key tests from our suite.
Overclocking the 2990WX is a mixed bag, because of how it does really well in some tests, and how it still sits behind the 2950X in others due to the bi-modal nature of the cores. In the tests were it already wins, it pushes out a lot more: Blender is up 19% in throughput, POV-Ray is up 19%, 3DPM is up 19%. The other tests, is catches back up to the 2950X (Photoscan), or still lags behind (app loading, WinRAR).
Overclocking is not the cure-all for the performance issues on the 2990WX, but it certainly does help.
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3DVagabond - Wednesday, August 15, 2018 - link
When did you switch to this new benchmark suite?Lord of the Bored - Wednesday, August 15, 2018 - link
Still writing...mukiex - Friday, August 17, 2018 - link
Looks like it's no longer a problem! They deleted all those pages.GreenReaper - Saturday, August 18, 2018 - link
They're back again now.abufrejoval - Wednesday, August 15, 2018 - link
Separating CPU (and GPU) cores from their memory clearly doesn't seem sustainable going forward.That's why I find the custom chip did for the chinese console so interesting: If they did an HBM variant, perhaps another with 16 or even 32GB per SoC, they'd use the IF mostly for IPC/non-local memory access and the chance of using GPGPU compute for truly parallel algorithms would be much bigger as the latency of context switches between CPU and GPU code would be minimal with both using the same physical memory space.
They might still put ordinary RAM or NV-RAM somewhere to the side as secondary storage, so it looks a little like Knights Landing.
IF interconnects might be a little longer, really long when you scale beyond what you can fit on a single board and probably something where optical interconnects would be better (once you got them...)
I keep having visions of plenty of such 4x boards swimming immersed in a tank of this "mineral oil" stuff that evidently has little to do with oil but allows so much more density and could run around those chips 'naked'.
Alaa - Wednesday, August 15, 2018 - link
I do not think that testing only a single tool at a time is a good benchmark for such high core count architecture. These cores need concurrent workloads to showcase their real power.csell - Thursday, August 16, 2018 - link
Can somebody please tell me the difference between the ASUS ROG Zenith Extreme motherboard rev 2 used here and the old ASUS ROG Zenith Extreme motherboard. I can't find any information about the rev 2 somewhere else?UnNameless - Friday, August 17, 2018 - link
I also want to know that. I have the "rev 1" Asus rog zenith extreme and can't find any difference.spikespiegal - Friday, August 17, 2018 - link
Companies buy PC's to run applications and don't care about memory timing, CPU's, clock speed or any other MB architecture. They only care about the box on the desk to run applications and ROI, as they should. AMD has historically only made a dent in the low end desktop market because Intel has this funny habit of not letting chip prices depreciate much below $200. AMD does, so they occupy the discount desktop market because when you buy 10,000 general purpose workstations saving $120 per box is a big chunk of change.I'm looking at the benchmark tests and all I'm seeing is the AMD chips doing well in mindless rendering and other synthetic desktop tasks no one outside multimedia would care about. The i7 holds it's own in too many complex application tests, which proves that once again per core efficacy is all that matters and AMD can't alter the reality of this. Where is the VMware host / mixed guest application benchmark consisting of Exchange, SQL, RDS, file services, AD and other? You know, those things that run corporate commerce and favor high core efficacy? Nobody runs bare metal servers anymore, and nobody reputable builds their own servers.
Dragonrider - Friday, August 17, 2018 - link
Ian, are you going to test PBO performance with these processors (I know, it was probably not practical while you were on the road)? Some questions popped up in my mind. Can PBO be activated when the processor in partial mode (i.e. 1/2 mode or game mode in the case of the 2990)? Also What does the power consumption and performance look like in those partial modes for different application sets with and without PBO? I know that represents a lot of testing, but on the surface, the 2990 looks like it could be a really nice all-round processor if one were willing to do some mode switching. It seems like it should perform pretty close to the 2950 in game mode and 1/2 mode and you have already established that it is a rendering beast in full mode. Bottom line, I think the testing that has been published so far only scratches the surface of what this processor may be capable of.