AMD 3rd Generation Ryzen Threadripper TR 3960X Review

Conclusion

If ever a review pretty much wrote itself, this is up there with the very easiest. There is nothing we can say that hasn’t already been made spectacularly obvious by the results in the graphs, the technical specifications, the raw horsepower that puts Top Fuel dragsters to shame.

Before we get to what you all already know, let’s do a little housekeeping. We weren’t sent a Ryzen 3950X, which is why it doesn’t appear in our graphs. It’s significantly more affordable than the TR 3960X, and should be better suited to those of you who do light creating tasks rather than require absolute power. Similarly when we were testing the Threadripper 3960X we hadn’t yet received a copy of the Ryzen Master software which is why we haven’t included it in either our test package or our discussions regarding the 3960X. Unfortunately the downside to both Intel and AMD deciding to launch products on the same day with both motherboards and processors needing testing and writing we only have a finite number of hours in a day, so with the software arriving too late to be included it’ll have to sit by the wayside. We will go back and look at it another time, when we’ve more of that precious resource.

As for the Threadripper 3960X itself, it’s everything in reality that it looked like it would be on paper. The 2nd Generation of Threadrippers was an excellent refinement of the earliest models, and the 3rd Generation brings all the refinements to the party that we’ve seen from the 3rd Generation of Ryzen CPUs. Thermals are better, power draw has been reduced, overclocking has been improved. With 24 cores and 48 threads it is unquestionably not a processor that will be for everyone. Unless you do huge amounts of those tasks that need an Enterprise based system – photo editing, video rendering, 3D modelling – then much of the time the processor will be twiddling its thumbs and your bank balance will be thinking about all the other things you could have purchased with the money saved by getting a 3900X and X570 setup. But, and it’s a ‘world pie eating champion’ sized but, if you do rely upon getting your workflow completed in the fastest time possible then there is almost nothing that will get close to the performance you can obtain from this mighty TR 3960X processor.

The AMD Threadripper 3960X is a processor for the enthusiasts. It’s ludicrously powerful, and with a hefty price tag to match. The single threaded performance has all the boost benefits we’ve seen from the latest Agesa updates, and in multithreaded benchmarks there is clearly no replacement from having 48 threads happily crunching numbers. It’s easy to overclock too, and requires a lot less fettling than the first generation Threadripper CPUs to keep running at peak performance in a variety of tasks. Even without the Ryzen Master software we didn’t see significant drops in gaming or basic desktop tasks that we saw from the initial TR 1950X. It’s more user-friendly, and with greatly reduced power draw. If you are willing to put the time in to extract the most from every core in per-core overclocking.

If you’ve got the funds, the hardware and the requirements to utilise the AMD Threadripper 3960X to its fullest you will come away from the experience with your jaw welded to the floor. It’s insanely fast, crushing all before it like a sledgehammer. We can only begin to imagine how the TR 3970X performs if the 24 core version is this good.

  

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