AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X 16c 32t Processor Review

Synthetic Benchmarks

3DMark Firestrike

Straight away, the Threadripper is off to a very strong start. The higher clock speeds of the i9 do seem to be giving it a lead, but without a doubt, the 1950X is competitive with Intel’s top dog.

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Overclocked

Overclocking did bring some small boost to the Threadripper, but Intel holds the lead here, again most likely due to their higher clock speeds. Threadripper is seriously hot, and unless we can get a bigger cooler, we can’t clock it higher.

Unigine Superposition 1080p Extreme

No shot at the top spot for the 1950X here, however, the score is competitive, and there’s not much deviation between the top and bottom of the charts here. The 1900X didn’t score that much higher either.

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Overclocked

Overclocking did tighten up the performance nicely, closing the gap between all the CPUs, and even scoring a tiny bit higher than the 1900X. Of course, the scores are so close, you likely wouldn’t notice any difference here, as this is a very GPU bound task. Either way, it shows that PCIe throughput is unhindered.

PCMark 10 Express

Now, this is something I did not expect. Multitasking is amazing on the Threadripper, but the higher clock speeds of the Intel chips is still king here. Of course, the 1950X is no slouch at all, but this is still a very interesting result.

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Overclocked

Overclocking didn’t bring many benefits again, and this tells me one big thing, that PCMark 10 just isn’t using all those cores to their fullest. Close speed on a per core basis rules the roost in this test.

WPrime 32M and 1024M

The 1950X isn’t built as a day-to-day gaming CPU, it just isn’t. However, when it comes to heavy duty workloads such as rendering and calculations, it’s in a league of its own. It decimated the i9’s time of 67.946 by 10 seconds! Run this test on your own system, see how close you can get to that time… simply amazing performance here.

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Overclocked

A reasonable overclock helps a fair bit here too, cutting that time down to a record shattering 48.986 seconds, a time that we don’t think will be beaten in a hurry.

Cinebench R15

Again, heavy duty rendering and computational workloads are what Threadripper is all about. Immediately, we can see it walks all over the i9-7900X’s score. Don’t get me wrong, the i9 is a monster at these tasks too, it’s no slouch. However, cores are king when it comes to rendering and with a score of almost 3000, the 1950X is almost twice as fast as the 1800X!

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Overclocked

That performance is taken to the next level by overclocking too. The i9 didn’t gain much, but the 1950X boosted by over 400 points in this test. If you’re running Blender, Premier, or any rendering application, this CPU is going to be a literally time saver.

Handbrake MP4 to MKV Conversion 4K

Interestingly, the i9-7900X kept the lead here, but the 1950X isn’t exactly lagging behind much. Both CPUs put up a strong fight in this test. Shame we couldn’t keep the 1950X cooler to get those clocks that bit higher, as it may have nipped first place here.

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Overclocked

Overclocking actually saw the 1950X perform worse in this test. I attribute this to overheating half way through the test. Rest assured, we’ll be investing in a big cooler and retesting both the i9 and the TR in the coming weeks to see which one really is the king at rendering.