28 PCWorld MARCH 2020NEWS THREADRIPPER 3990X REVIEW ROUNDUP
Most reviewers are saying: “It depends.”
Here are the highlights from major sites and
some other interesting places that tested it.ANANDTECH SAYS
THREADRIPPER 3990X IS A
“NO BRAINER” (BUT...)
Kicking off the review roundup are
Anandtech.com’s Dr. Ian Cutress and Gavin
Bonshor, whose views don’t fit into sound
bites (go.pcworld.com/nrev).
Cutress and Bonshor say the consumer/
prosumer chip is stunningly fast in some
workloads, but many times it has issues
outrunning the 32-core Threadripper 3970Xat half its price:
“For the first stage, the consumer/
prosumer level, our conclusion is that the
usefulness of the 3990X is limited. Aside from
a few select instances (as mentioned, Corona,
Blender, NAMD) the 32-core Threadripper for
half the price performed on par or with
margin. For this market, saving that $2,000
between the 64-core and the 32-core can
easily net another RTX 2080 Ti for GPU
acceleration, and this would probably be the
preferred option. Unless you run those
specific tests (or ones like it), then go for the
32 core and spend the money elsewhere.
Aside from the core count there is little to
differentiate the two parts.”
As anticipated, Anandtech’s
review shows the single-chip
Threadripper 3990X outpacing
$20,000 dual-socket Xeon chips,
which makes it an easy win.
“The second stage, the
enterprise level, it becomes a no
brainer to consolidate a dual socket
system into a single AMD CPU—the
initial outlay cost is substantially
lower, and the long term power
costs also come into play. This is
what the enterprise likes to combine
into ‘Total Cost of Ownership’, or
TCO. The TCO and performance
advantage of AMD here is plain to
see in the benchmarks and the
pricing.”Anandtech.com showed one of the challenges for
Threadripper is out of its control: Which version of Windows
you use matters.