Reviews AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2970X and 2920X Review

I’m itching to jump on one of these 2920/2950x because its more but see it offering very little for me to upgrade as its not enough of an IPC/clkspeed bump, unless I do it for the sake of it, which I may well do Just doesn’t seem much stronger than first gen offerings, maybe there is a black Friday deal or something I might bite.

I was hoping they would release a 2900x with higher (4.5Ghz+) clocks i could just drop in.

If I was buying a new system now though I couldn’t jump on TR, I’d have to wait and see what the re-freshed X line up from Intel brings, if it has the IPC, the PCIe lanes and a reasonable-ish price that is going to lead to some aggressive price war in HEDT space, might be able to have my cake and eat it with the 9900x/9800x or a cheaper 2950x

Be nice to see what the core clockspeeds are on a per thread basis, a lot of things are using 6-8 threads now, what sort of clock speed do I get at that speed if I don't want to overclock. Thats the biggest problem with my current TR is the drop off after 4 threads, lessened in my case by having the baby chip but basically rarely go beyond 3.9 due to machine load.

 

Intels HEDT platform offers pretty good value compared to its current Desktop line up IMO, looking at the prices of highend boards and chips there which are effectively offering next to no expand-ability. new X chips should drop in at similar price points to existing ones and offer more along with strong CPU core, what is not to like, everyone's definition of reasonable is different, a £600 CPU and £1200 GPU are fine to me, obviously if I can pay less, that is better, but if i am getting what I want from it at those price points, it is fine.

 

Massive props for doing that. It's not often reviewers retest hardware after release, that you managed to find the time to do so and mentioned it was retested is much appreciated.

 

Sorry to be a pain, but any chance you can correct all the instances of 2970X to 2970WX? I keep getting confused over which chip is which without the W.

 

The current 12 and 14 core chips are the only blue cpus that are "magically" unaffected by the current price gouge for Intel chips (of course we all know that is because the 2950x roflstomps all over them), so the HEDT price war is already happening.

 

Part of me would love to build a TR rig and be content that it'll offer enough cores/threads to comfortably last a solid 6-8 years before it even starts to buckle - at which point you could just chuck in a cheap 2990WX (if you can find one). But knowing DDR5 is so close, it doesn't seem worth committing to such a system.

Is Zen 2 slated to be compatible with DDR5? If so, that could mark my re-entry into the hobby, otherwise i'll continue to hold out.

 

Highly unlikely considering AMD is committed to maintaining platform compatibility up to and including 2020 (Zen 3).

 

DDR5 will probably not match DDR4 performance until it has been out in the wild for quite some time, tends to be the case in nearly every launch of NG RAM, so even if it comes on Zen 2, it probably won't be any good until Zen 3 and will likely just match performance at a higher cost because it is new.

 

My guess is we won't see DDR5 until after 2020 and even then it's only really going to pickup where DDR4 left off.

 

I can't recall with DDR2 to DDR3, but DDR3 to DDR4 the maximum-crazy-bonkers-more-money-than-sense overclock for DDR3 (3100MT/s) is still within the JEDEC timing range for DDR4.

 

Time will tell, generally whilst the bandwidth can be more, the timings have been such that there is negligible difference in performance for many applications between gens until things tighten up, DDR5 will give double the bandwidth of DDR4 from higher clocks, this often come initially with timing penalties, in addition, if you use case doesn't need the bandwidth, many on sites like this focuson gaming for example, then what do you get, I can halve my bandwidth from 100Gb/s to 50Gb/s by going from quad to dual channel, the impact on my gaming applications is a single digit percentage delta typically.

 

AIUI DDR5's double-channel layout should result in a 'smoothing out' of access latency (i.e. minimum best-case latencies will remain largely unchanged, 'worst case' peak latencies should drop significantly) as the blocking of one channel per stick still allows the other channel to continue operating normally. Minimum latency is likely to remain mostly static as it has since DDR was introduced.

 

Intel does recover some ground elsewhere though and that would be mobo availability... because on the AMD side it has gone to hell ever since 2nd gen Ripper launched:
https://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer-hardware/motherboards-amd/amd-x399-socket-tr4-atx-motherboards

 

Intel motherboards are a lot cheaper too and not picky on RAM.

 

Stock is a joke on X399 boards right now. But prices? I distinctly remember paying ~£420 for a Rampage V Extreme... most troublesome board I've had since my DFI X48 LT. Current X399 prices aren't too bad, all things considered...

I won't bother with DDR5 for at least a year unless forced to. I jumped on DDR4 fairly early via X99. While it wasn't a regression in performance the way early DDR2 and DDR3 was (probably because X99 was quad-channel?)

I'll admit I really want a second gen Threadripper; but for my use-case, the only one really worth it is the 2990WX. Otherwise it makes more sense to go Intel, simply because the software I mostly use seems to run much better on Intel, even if you compile it and all its dependencies manually and optimise like a lunatic.

 

Makes me wonder if there is a v2 version of motherboards coming out.

though CCLOnline has plenty of stock

 

Possible simply to improve the CPU power delivery circuitry...