AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 7000 CPUs offer up to 96 and 64 cores in the PRO and HEDT variants, respectively. We’ll review the latter, first the TR 7980X and the 7970X a few days later. The Threadripper 7980X features 64 Zen 4 cores with a peak single-core boost clock of 5.1GHz. They are paired with a massive 256MB 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 7980X consistently delivers top-of-the-line performance, beating its Xeon W9 rivals and the preceding Threadripper PRO 5995WX. The deltas are particularly massive in Da Vinci Resolve, where all 64 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 7980X.
The TR 7980X is an absolute beast in these compute-oriented workloads, beating its predecessor (also 64 core) by up to 28%.
In Blender, the 7980X is nearly 3x faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X, indicating healthy scaling from the dual-CCD to the 12-CCD design.
We see similar gains in Corona 10 and V-Ray as the Threadripper 7980X leads the Core i9s and the Ryzen 9 by 2.5 to 3x.
Continued on the next page…
