AMD’s Zen 4 Threadrippers are making their way to the HEDT and prosumer market. With core counts of up to 64, these chips offer ample compute throughput for any rendering workload. We tested the Ryzen Threadripper 7970X (32 cores) and the Threadripper 7980X (64 cores) and got the following results.
Test Bench
- Motherboard: ASUS PRO WS TRX50 Sage.
- Memory: G.Skill Zeta R5 Neo DDR5 32GB x4 @ 6,400 MT/s.
- Cooler: NZXT Kraken 360.
- Power Supply: Corsair RM1000i.
Content Creation: Rendering and Editing
In heavily threaded workloads like rendering, the Threadrippers rip through the competition. The 64-core Threadripper 7980X differentiates itself in most of the compute-intensive segments, leaving the 7970X with a few wins in Adobe Creation Cloud.
In Cinebench R20, the Ryzen Threadripper 7980X is 47% faster than the Xeon W9-3495X, while the 7970X holds a 27% lead over the 3475X.
Despite featuring fewer cores than their Sapphire Rapids rivals, the Zen 4 Threadrippers maintain their superiority in most content creation workloads.
In some of the PugetBench tests, the Threadripper 7970X jumps past its 64-core sibling, while keeping the Sapphire Rapids Xeon WS at bay. For most folks, the 32-core chip should suffice as a workstation powerhouse.
Compression and Encoding
File compression and decompression tend to benefit from a mix of single-threaded performance and core counts. The following 7-zip benchmark illustrates this. The Ryzen Threadripper 7970X is considerably faster than the Core i9-13900K, but the 7980X performs roughly the same as its 32-core sibling.
The following X265 4K benchmark utilizes the x265 (HEVC) codec using AVX512 and AVX256 as a fallback option. Once again, the Threadripper 7970X comes out on top, followed by the 7980X with a small margin on account of the lower clocks.
Gaming Benchmarks
Workstation processors aren’t usually used for gaming, but now and then, using your compute powerhouse for gaming may be tempting. We tested the Zen 4 Threadrippers across five titles, with and without ray tracing, and got the following numbers.
As expected, the Threadrippers are slower than their consumer cousins but offer stable frame rates with comparable lows in every scenario we tested.
Conclusion: Moar Cores for the HEDT Space
The Threadripper 7000 series features up to 64 cores on the TRX50 platform. Feature-wise, you’re losing out on a few server capabilities, but that doesn’t make it a deal-breaker for most. The Threadripper 7980X and 7970X often beat their Xeon Sapphire Rapids WS counterparts, offering significantly higher performance per dollar than the competition. For most professionals and creators, it doesn’t get better than this.
