AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X Review

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.

File Compression and Encoding

LZMA-based file compression benefits from the additional cores on the 7980X, but video encoding hits a wall after 32 cores, relying on IPC and clocks for performance gains beyond that.

The Threadripper 7980X is up to 2x faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X in compression, increasing the lead to over 3x in decompression.

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 7980X.

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

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 7980X destroys the mainstream x86 chips in these compute-intensive tests, offering 2 to 3x more performance than the Core i9-14900K and the Ryzen 9 7950X.

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 7980X delivers a respectable gaming performance.

The Threadripper 7980X is roughly as fast as the Ryzen 9 7950X in most gaming workloads, even beating Raphael in titles like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Crysis. We see the same trends with ray tracing enabled as we did with rasterization:

Thermals, Power, and Overclocking

At stock, the Ryzen Threadripper 7980X maintained its 350W power limit with an average draw of 349W in Cinebench R24 (multi-core). The fastest core hovered between 4.1 and 4.2 GHz with the thermals holding fast at 86C.

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 7980X was up to 10% faster in rendering workloads, registering 109K points in the R23 multi-core benchmark. The average power consumption increased to 433W while the core temperatures hovered over 90C. 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

The Ryzen Threadripper 7980X is a whopper of a chip. It delivers incredible multi-threaded performance, 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.