30 PCWorld MARCH 2020NEWS THREADRIPPER 3990X REVIEW ROUNDUP
envelope since the introduction of its first-gen
Ryzen architecture. AMD’s efforts that [sic] last
few years have re-shaped the enthusiast
computing landscape and injected some real
excitement. If AMD continues on this
trajectory with Zen 3 and beyond, we can’t
wait to see what the company has in store for
us all next year.”PUGET SYSTEMS ON
THREADRIPPER 3990X
FOR PREMIERE
It wasn’t just YouTubers and hardware sites
who got first dibs on Threadripper 3990X. PC
workstation maker Puget Systems put the new
chip through its Adobe Premiere CC
benchmark (go.pcworld.com/psys) and
answers the singular question of “Is the AMD
Threadripper 3990X good for Premiere Pro?”
The answer isn’t likely to shock anyone: No.
“While there may be some niche uses for
the AMD Threadripper 3990X 64 Core within
the greater video editing industry, the 3990X
is underwhelming for Premiere Pro. It is
certainly no slouch, but only performs roughly
on par with the Threadripper 3960X 24 Core
for both live playback and exporting,” Puget’s
Matt Bach writes.TWEAKTOWN SAYS YOU’LL
WANT A BIG PSU FOR
THREADRIPPER 3990X
Many reviewers looked at power
consumption of the new chip, but StevenBassiri of TweakTown.com (go.pcworld.com/
twkt) might have had the most fun, noting:
“The Ryzen Threadripper 3990X eats up
power, but not nearly as much as we
expected, at least at stock. We saw total
system power go to around 370W, with the
CPU pulling about 300W. We noticed that
AMD achieved this by greatly reducing the
core voltage, so we were pulling a bit over
300A at less than 1v. HOWEVER, look below
to see what happens when we enable PBOC;
hint, the system power went over 1000W.”
Bassiri said he believes Threadripper
3990X itself was likely consuming about
800 watts.
Yup. Throw in a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and
custom liquid cooling, and the days of a
1,500-watt PSU just might be back.Tweaktown said the Threadripper 3990X
consumes up to 800 watts and more by flipping
on PBOC and XMP profiles.