AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Processor Review

Peter Donnell / 5 years ago

Synthetic Benchmarks

3DMark: 17068
Unigine: 5618 New Record!
PCMark 10 (Express): 4240
WPrime: 4.673/31.876 New Record!
CineBench R15: 164/5076 New Record!
Handbrake: 88 New Record!

The latest CPU from AMD is incredibly powerful, but it’s not completely versatile either. The lower single core performance does mean that when you’re firing all 32 cores, it’s not as swift as I would like for gaming performance. It lags behind in 3DMark quite a lot, although it’s not really a task it was designed for, and the benchmark is simply not using all of the CPU as it should. However, in Unigine, the 2990WX is able to stretch out its legs a little, and it set the highest ever score we’ve had for that test!

The PCMark 10 Express test also went poorly, as that test heavily favours Intel CPUs, as well as more traditional quad-core and higher clock speed CPUs. This is likely also reflective of how the 2990WX would perform in simple desktop applications that aren’t optimised for it. They’ll run ok, but don’t expect any huge boost in performance.

Number Crunching

This CPU is all about crunching the big numbers, and that’s where it shines the most. It set our fastest WPrime 1024M time by a significant margin. 31.976 seconds is amazingly quick, and over 20 seconds faster than the next fastest Intel CPU, the i9-7980XE! It’s also nearly three times as fast as the amazing i9-9900K.

This trend continues in Cinebench, where the score is just on another planet, 5076 points, more than 1500 points ahead of the more expensive i9-7989XE, and almost 2000 points ahead of the 2950X from AMD. This is an exceptional score and one that will no doubt stand as the leader for quite some time now.

It’s also the fastest in Handbrake, scoring 88 FPS; not too shabby for 4K transcoding, which it did at 1.5x realtime!