AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X & 7970X Review: Revived HEDT Brings More Cores of Zen 4
by Gavin Bonshor on November 20, 2023 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- HEDT
- ThreadRipper
- Zen 4
- Threadripper 7000
- TRX50
TR 7000 vs. Intel: Rendering
Rendering tests, compared to others, are often a little more simple to digest and automate. All the tests put out some sort of score or time, usually in an obtainable way that makes it fairly easy to extract. These tests are some of the most strenuous in our list, due to the highly threaded nature of rendering and ray-tracing, and can draw a lot of power.
If a system is not properly configured to deal with the thermal requirements of the processor, the rendering benchmarks are where it would show most easily as the frequency drops over a sustained period of time. Most benchmarks, in this case, are re-run several times, and the key to this is having an appropriate idle/wait time between benchmarks to allow for temperatures to normalize from the last test.
Some of the notable rendering-focused benchmarks we've included for 2024 include the latest CineBench 2024 benchmark and an update to Blender 3.6 and V-Ray 5.0.2.
We are using DDR5-5200 RDIMM memory on the Ryzen Threadripper 7980X and 7970X as per JEDEC specifications. For Intel's Xeon W9-3495X, we are using DDR5-4800 RDIMM memory as per Intel's JEDEC specifications. It should be noted that both platforms are run with their full allocation of memory channels, eg, TR7000 in 4-channel and Sapphire Rapids in 8-channel.
Below are the settings we have used for each platform:
- DDR5-5200 RDIMM - AMD Threadripper 7000
- DDR5-4800 RDIMM - Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids WS
- DDR5-5600B CL46 - Intel 14th Gen
- DDR5-5200 CL44 - Ryzen 7000
Now we come to where the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 (and Xeon W9-3495X) excel, rendering. In all of the multi-threaded rendering benchmarks, the Threadripper 7980X makes the desktop chips look fairly insignificant in comparison. Interestingly, the Threadripper 7970X ($2499) with 32C/64T performs relatively close to the Xeon W9-3495X ($5889) with 56C/112T. This shows AMD's Zen 4 core not only performs exceptionally well in rendering from a price to performance point of view compared to Intel, but the Threadripper 7980X ($4999) with 64 Zen 4 cores is very well suited to users looking to render videos and other rendering based workloads.
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GeoffreyA - Thursday, November 23, 2023 - link
Yes. Deceptive everything.boozed - Monday, November 20, 2023 - link
"While it's clear in multi-threaded workloads such as rendering, the Ryzen Threadripper 7980X and 7970X are more potent with higher core counts, there are certain situations where the current desktop flagship processors still represent a better buy."Good to know if I ever start playing Dwarf Fortress?
FatFlatulentGit - Monday, November 20, 2023 - link
One test I'd like to see is encoding 4+ videos at once. One 4K AV1 or HEVC encode is not going to top out all of the cores on the 7980X, but enough parallel encodes will blast the thing.I also wouldn't mind seeing how they stack up against the WX series, especially in regard to RAM channels when the CPU is saturated.
garblah - Tuesday, November 21, 2023 - link
So, even with a 5,000 dollar CPU, encoding an hour of 1080p AV1 video at 30fps with the medium quality preset would take nearly 2 hours? I guess AV1 software encoding is still pretty slow.GeoffreyA - Tuesday, November 21, 2023 - link
Just raising the presets a few steps can cut down the time considerably, without too much of a loss of quality. On my system, SVT-AV1's fastest preset, 12, approaches x264 preset medium, if I remember right, and the quality is still better than the latter.GeoffreyA - Tuesday, November 21, 2023 - link
And preset 6, which is medium, is roughly similar to libaom's fastest, cpu-used 8.FatFlatulentGit - Tuesday, November 21, 2023 - link
A single AV1 encode is not going to saturate 64/128 cores. The advantage is being able to do multiple simultaneous encodes.GeoffreyA - Thursday, November 23, 2023 - link
Or splitting into scene-based chunks.SanX - Wednesday, November 22, 2023 - link
These new processors are just the BS and utter ripoff. Look at supercomputers which use very similar processors: You can find there a lot of different models and test them. What these tests show is that during simulations they almost always stay around base frequency which is for this article's 64-core 2.5GHz processor equivalent to 32-cores of standard consumer ~5 Ghz 7950x which costs ~$500. So you pay 10x money for just the 2x increase in performance. What is 2x increase in performance ? NOTHING! When you compare computers, remember, you compare not a salary, game fps or your weight loss :) stop thinking this way, in computers, and specifically in supercomputers it is 3-10x when things are really different. Typically if usual PC is really not enough for you then the next step you need is 10x or 100x more, or even 1000x. So these hell expensive toys have no economic sense for almost everyone. Just get supercomputer time if you need more than your PC gives you and stop wasting your money. By the way these processors made off $10 chiplets cost probably $100 to manufactureThunder 57 - Wednesday, November 22, 2023 - link
You're all over the place. First of all a 7950X has 16 cores. Even if tweo of those could match a 64 core TR (it won't), you'd need all of the other parts associated with a second computer. You are also forgetting about PCIe and memory bandwidth.Then you say maybe $100 to manufacture. You know how much it costs to develop these chips? AN insane amount of money. You make it sound like AMD is selling a $100 widget for $5000 because they can. People will buy these for $1000's. If they didn't sell, AMD would have to lower prices. The market will determine what is "fair".