AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 7000 CPUs offer up to 96 and 64 cores in the PRO and HEDT variants, respectively. We’ll be covering the latter (HEDT) here. The TR 7980X was reviewed a few days ago, and here we’ll be checking the 7970X out. The Ryzen Threadripper 7970X features 32 Zen 4 cores with a peak single-core boost clock of 5.3GHz, higher than the 5.1GHz in the 7980X. They are paired with a massive 128MB L3 cache pool, divided into smaller chunks of 32MB each. It offers 48 PCIe Gen 5, 32 PCIe Gen 4, and 8 PCIe Gen 3 lanes, down from 128 Gen 5 lanes on the PRO platform.
The Ryzen Threadripper 7000 chips leverage the sTR5 socket with quad-channel DDR5 RDIMM 5200 support and a TDP of 350W. Up to twelve 5nm CCDs are paired with a 6nm I/O die using the Infinity Fabric interconnect.
Test Bench
- Motherboard: ASUS PRO WS TRX50 Sage.
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 FE.
- Memory: G.Skill Zeta R5 Neo DDR5 32GB x4 @ 6,400 MT/s.
- Cooler: NZXT Kraken 360.
- Power Supply: Corsair RM1000i.
Image Processing and Video Editing
Adobe Creative Cloud is the most popular video/photo editing suite, now available as a subscription. We used the PugetBench suite to evaluate the performance of Photoshop, Lightroom Classic, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Da Vinci Resolve.
The Threadripper 7970X consistently delivers top-of-the-line performance, beating its Xeon W9 rivals and the preceding Threadripper PRO 5995WX and even the 7980X. The deltas are particularly massive in Da Vinci Resolve, where all 32 cores spring into action, ripping the competition to pieces.
Rendering Performance
Rendering tests are crucial components of any content creation test suite, the most notable among them being Cinebench and Blender. These workloads love the extra cores the Threadrippers offer, scaling extremely well on the 7970X.
The TR 7970X is an absolute beast in these compute-oriented workloads, just like the TR 7980X. It beats the 64 core TR 7980X in single-threaded workloads but gets crushed by it in the multi-threaded workloads, understandably due to the lower core count in the 32 core TR 7970X.
In Blender, the 7970X is nearly 1.5x faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X, indicating healthy scaling from the dual-CCD to the 12-CCD design. The companion 7980X meanwhile is nearly 2X faster than the 7970X.
We see similar gains in V-Ray as the Threadripper 7970X leads the Core i9s and the Ryzen 9 by 93% and 75% respectively, coming short of the 7980X by almost 40%.
Continued on the next page…
