The AMD Threadripper 2 CPU Review: The 24-Core 2970WX and 12-Core 2920X Tested
by Ian Cutress on October 29, 2018 9:00 AM ESTTest Bed and Setup
As per our processor testing policy, we take a premium category motherboard suitable for the socket, and equip the system with a suitable amount of memory running at the manufacturer's maximum supported frequency. This is also typically run at JEDEC subtimings where possible. It is noted that some users are not keen on this policy, stating that sometimes the maximum supported frequency is quite low, or faster memory is available at a similar price, or that the JEDEC speeds can be prohibitive for performance. While these comments make sense, ultimately very few users apply memory profiles (either XMP or other) as they require interaction with the BIOS, and most users will fall back on JEDEC supported speeds - this includes home users as well as industry who might want to shave off a cent or two from the cost or stay within the margins set by the manufacturer. Where possible, we will extend out testing to include faster memory modules either at the same time as the review or a later date.
| Test Setup | |||||
| AMD TR4 | TR2 2970WX TR2 2920X |
ASUS ROG X399 Zenith |
1501 | Enermax Liqtech TR4 |
Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 4x8GB DDR4-2933 |
| TR2 2990WX TR2 2950X |
ASUS ROG X399 Zenith |
0508 | Enermax Liqtech TR4 |
G.Skill FlareX 4x8GB DDR4-2933 |
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| TR 1950X TR 1920X |
ASUS ROG X399 Zenith |
0508 | Enermax | G.Skill FlareX 4x8GB DDR4-2666 |
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| TR 1900X | ASUS X399-A Prime |
0407 | Enermax Liqtech TR4 |
Crucial Ballistix 4x4GB DDR4-2666 |
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| AMD EPYC | EPYC 7601 | GIGABYTE MZ31-AR0 |
F07 | Gamerstorm Fryzen |
Micron LRDIMM 8x128GB DDR4-2666 |
| AMD 2000 | R7 2700X | ASRock X370 Gaming K4 |
P4.80 | Wraith Max* | G.Skill SniperX 2x8 GB DDR4-2933 |
| Intel HEDT | i9-7980XE i9-7960X i9-7940X i9-7920X i9-7900X i7-7820X i7-7800X |
ASRock X299 OC Formula |
P1.40 | TRUE Copper |
Crucial Ballistix 4x4GB DDR4-2666 |
| Intel 9th Gen | i9-9900K | ASRock Z370 Gaming i7 |
P1.70 | TRUE Copper |
Crucial Ballistix 4x4GB DDR4-2666 |
| GPU | Sapphire RX 460 2GB (CPU Tests) MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G (Gaming Tests) |
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| PSU | Corsair AX860i Corsair AX1200i |
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| SSD | Crucial MX200 1TB | ||||
| OS | Windows 10 x64 RS3 1709 Spectre and Meltdown Patched |
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| *VRM Supplimented with SST-FHP141-VF 173 CFM fans | |||||
All of AMD’s Threadripper 2 processors are unlocked, allowing users to push the frequency and voltage higher for extra performance. Due to time constraints, we will hopefully examine this in a later review.
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our multiple test beds. Some of this hardware is not in this test bed specifically, but is used in other testing.
| Hardware Providers | |||
| Sapphire RX 460 Nitro | MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X OC | Crucial MX200 + MX500 SSDs |
Corsair AX860i + AX1200i PSUs |
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| G.Skill RipjawsV, SniperX, FlareX |
Crucial Ballistix DDR4 |
Silverstone Coolers |
Silverstone Fans |
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The Hardcard - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
I am not clear on this: can I get a 4-active-die TR for rendering and then turn off the 2 parasite dies when they are a disadvantage. Say make the 2990X operate as a 2950X with the same performance and power?I am not clear if that is what the dynamic local mode is offering. I’d like to be able to do that, whether there is an official AMD path, or if the community finds another way.
BikeDude - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
<blockquote>Please note, if you plan to share out the Compression graph, please include the Decompression one. Otherwise you’re only presenting half a picture.</blockquote>Many moons ago I made a request to internal IT to adopt 7-zip so that I could save on bandwidth whenever I needed to pull a largish database (this was several years before GDPR obviously).
No go. It turned out that compressing the backups every night eats a lot of time. (decompressing these files was very fast regardless of setup) Well, actually they did use 7z.exe, but only as a normal zipper.
So sometimes the only relevant part of the equation is the compression time. (I do plan on purchasing AMD regardless for my next upgrade)
GreenReaper - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link
Use a threading-capable version of xz with the -T parameter so it uses all available threads and you'll find it flies on the default compression settings. It has a Windows version, too: https://tukaani.org/xz/GreenReaper - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link
Incidentally, you can probably run it something like xz < "input command" > output.xz, which should mean you don't actually have to write the dumps out, just the compressed version.PaoDeTech - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
I need 13 cores and 26 threads. Now what? I returned the 32 cores 64 threads one since it could not run FAR CRY at 60fps. But boy could it blend! Sarcasm aside, I write multi-threaded server software and unless I code an infinite loop by mistake (I'm NOT admitting to it) I can never max out 8 threads before hitting I/O limitations (on NVMe PCIe disk). But I can see how some number crunching parallel software would go to town with it.peevee - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link
"I can never max out 8 threads before hitting I/O limitations (on NVMe PCIe disk)"Do you know these are IO limitations or do you assume this? Because lack of scaling after 8 threads does not mean IO limit at all. For example, if you write in Java/C#/Python/JS etc (heap-mandatory languages), or even use heap alloc/dealloc in critical thread sections in fast languages like C++, this is what you are going to get (heap mutex = no scalability). And this is just 1 of a thousand pitfalls of massive threading.
PaoDeTech - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link
No locks, every client call gets its own thread (REST- IIS -WebAPI -.NET "stateless" server - Entity Framework - SQL Server with read committed snapshot isolation). Async all the way down. Under load I can see the disk active >50% and write speed maxes out at 7 MB/s (Toshiba NVMe PCIe 1TB SSD M2). All processes running on the same PC (i7 6700k - 32GB RAM): server, test clients, SQL server. Plenty of free ram.Of course performance optimization is in the details and I was referring to a specific write intensive test case. My point is that parallel scaling is not easy and may stop sooner than expected (for many reasons). On the other hand, I can always use faster single thread performance...
29a - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
Please replace EgoMark (3DPM) with something else, anything else.danjw - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
Are there any motherboards out there that support the security features of the Threadripper platform?SLVR - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
This review is a bit more useful: https://www.techspot.com/review/1737-amd-threadrip...