AMD Ryzen 2nd Generation Threadripper 2920X and 2970WX Review

Test Setup

Something that apparently bears repeating judging upon our recent correspondence is that when we’re testing at stock, we literally mean that. We open the package. Build a system. Touch nothing. Install OS. Run the benchmarks. Apparently the words stock don’t mean the same thing to everyone, so for clarities sake we’re reminding you. Any tweaking of power limits or adjustments to boosts in certain scenarios would count as not stock. If we’re going to tweak anything we’re going to tweak it all, and that’s what our overclocked results are for.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2920X
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX
ASUS ROG Zenith X399 Extreme
Corsair LPX 2666MHz
Corsair LPX 3200MHz
Corsair MP500 M.2
nVidia GTX 980
Corsair HX1000i
Corsair ML Fans
Coolermaster ML360 RGB TR4 AIO Cooler

Overclocking

The important thing to remember whenever we’re overclocking these high core count CPUs is that we’re not looking to make a single core run as quickly as possible, but instead we’re trying to get the boost clock speed to happen across every core. Sure we could say ‘hey we got the CPU to 4.5 GHz’ or whatever, but when that’s only on one core rather than all 12/24 then the benefits wont appear in our graphs when testing the types of applications owners of these chips will use – video encoding and 3D rendering. Thus whilst the absolute clock speed might not make your jaw drop, you have to keep in mind that every single core is running at this speed, which is a serious test of the silicon.

Ryzen Threadripper 2920X

  

Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX