AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7970X Review

File Compression and Encoding

LZMA-based file compression benefits from the additional cores on the 7970X, but video encoding hits a wall after 32 cores, relying on IPC and clocks for performance gains beyond that.

The Threadripper 7970X is up to 2x faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X in compression, increasing the lead to over 3x in decompression. Due to the aforementioned lack of scaling beyond 32 cores, it’s pretty similar to the 7980X here.

Encoding x265 video is fairly intensive on modern CPUs, depending on the instructions used. The above test leverages FMA3, AVX, and AVX2 to deliver slightly higher frame rates on the 7970X, and slightly surpassing the 7980X as well.

In Handbrake, using the Matroska HEVC 1080p preset, we see the Threadripper 7970X wrap up the work over 50% faster than the Core i9-14900K and the 7950X and being slightly slower than the 7980X.

SPECworkstation 3.1.0

The SPEC workstation suite is an extensive benchmark suite with CPU, GPU, and storage tests. We filtered out the CPU-intensive loads to draw the following performance charts:

The Threadripper 7970X destroys the mainstream x86 chips in these compute-intensive tests, albeit being almost 50% slower than the 7980X.

Gaming Benchmarks

Not many people associate gaming with Threadrippers, and for good reasons. Most modern titles prefer octa-core CPUs with high clocks and low memory latency. Regardless, the 7970X delivers a respectable gaming performance.

The Threadripper 7970X is roughly as fast as the Ryzen 9 7950X in most gaming workloads, but stays at the bottom of the list, unlike the 7980X which manages to surpass the 7950X in Hitman 3 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. It manages to beat the 7980X in F1 2022 by a very slight margin, otherwise staying at roughly the same or lower frames in most titles.

With ray tracing enabled, the 7970X delivers roughly the same performance as the 7980X, even marginally surpassing it in titles like Hitman 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. It also beats the Ryzen 9 7950X in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Thermals, Power, and Overclocking

At stock, the Ryzen Threadripper 7970X maintained its 350W power limit with an average draw of 349W in Cinebench R24 (multi-core). The fastest core hovered between 4.7 and 4.8 GHz with the thermals holding fast at 91C.

Precision Boost Overdrive isn’t exactly overclocking, but it does relax the thermal and power limits to allow the dynamic boost algorithm to clock higher.

With PBO enabled, the 7970X was up to 1.5% faster in rendering workloads, registering 65K points in the R23 multi-core benchmark. The average power consumption increased to 438W while the core temperatures hovered over 91C. As expected, the fastest cores didn’t see an increase in operational clocks. Instead, they were slightly slower than stock. This is because PBO allows more cores to boost to higher clocks rather than pushing the favored cores to higher limits.

Conclusion

Just like it’s companion 7980X, the Ryzen Threadripper 7970X is a whopper of a chip. It delivers incredible multi-threaded performance, at higher clock speeds than the 7980X albeit with half as many cores, eating content creation workloads for breakfast. Courtesy of firmware optimizations, it also sustains higher core clocks in lightly threaded workloads for superior gaming and media capabilities. Lastly, it maintains a very reasonable power limit of 349W at stock that can be overridden for a mild boost using PBO. However, this is best avoided unless you have a top-end water cooling solution.