In the world of desktop processors below the server level, nothing out there is quite like AMD's new $1,999 Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, one of three elite chips in the third generation of AMD's mega-CPU line. Featuring 32 cores and 64 threads, this chip is, at the moment, the crème de la crème of the high-end desktop market, and for anyone who relies on programs that require as many cores and as much horsepower as possible, it's the silicon to pine for. Its single-core results are unremarkable, but for its intended use—crushing core-aware tasks—the Threadripper 3970X and its surrounding platform (anchored by the new TRX40 chipset) shatter multicore records. It's a worthy successor to both the Threadripper 2970WX (which we tested) and Threadripper 2990WX (which we didn't), and it brings the heat to Intel's competing silicon, notably the spanking-new Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition. It earns PCMag's Editors' Choice as one of the best CPUs in the high-end-desktop (HEDT) world for content creators, massive multitaskers, and scenarios that require titanic amounts of device bandwidth and memory access.

Same Number of Cylinders, Whole New Engine

Given the developments in the desktop CPU market in 2019, the term "HEDT" may no longer cut it. With the release of the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, AMD seems to be tacking the "highest-end desktop market." Indeed, chips like the $749 AMD Ryzen 9 3950X I recently reviewed, on the nominally mainstream AMD AM4 platform, deliver enough brute-force multicore power to qualify as high-end in almost any scenario. The 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X also matches the core/thread count of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X, the superb task-cruncher from the second gen of Threadripper.

The reason for coining my own term here is it that this chip seems to require some kind of new classification. With its 32 cores and 64 threads, it technically and certainly qualifies as an HEDT chip, but it also exceeds the closest competition by such a wide margin that it feels unfair to both parties to put them in the same category.

Regardless, the base specs of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X don't seem to, at least on the surface, put it too far above AMD's own previous leaders of the HEDT market, given that a 32-core Threadripper 2990WX did debut last year. As mentioned, the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X comes with 32 cores and 64 threads running at a 3.7GHz base clock and a 4.5GHz boost clock. (Contrast that, though with a 3GHz base and a 4.2GHz boost for the 2990WX.) The 3970X features 144MB of L2/L3 cache, and it requires up to 280 watts of power to keep the whole mega-chip running at full tilt.

What happened between then and now? The major upgrades on offer in the third-gen Threadripper series versus last year's line are two-fold: the move from 14nm to 7nm lithography, and the adoption of the "chiplet"-based Zen 2 architecture that originally made its debut in the third-gen line of Ryzen chips. Bound together by AMD's Infinity Fabric (the company's proprietary high-speed component interconnect layer), the chiplet design allows for a lot more power in a much smaller space, and helps to reduce thermal output while keeping the TDP lower.

Another big change is the move from the AMD X399 chipset and the TR4 CPU socket of the first- and second-gen Threadripper chips to a new TRX40 chipset and sTRX4 socket, which allows for four times the amount of bandwidth to travel between the CPU and the chip. The chip package looks the same, and the socket and its elaborate installation mechanism haven't changed, but third-gen Threadrippers won't work in old X399/TR4 boards. (Likewise, first- and second-gen Threadripper chips won't work in the new sTRX4 socket.)

Further differences have to do with changes to the nature and count of PCI Express lanes, and their bandwidth potential. First off, PCI Express 4.0 debuts on the Threadripper platform here, in the same way it did with the X570 chipset with the mainstream Ryzens under the Zen 2 architecture this past summer. Third-generation Threadripper was built to handle up to 72 PCI Express lanes to connect at once, compared to the 64 lanes of the previous Threadripper generation.

In contrast, the top competing Intel processors of the moment, in the new 10th Generation "Cascade Lake-X" Core X-Series, can handle only up to 48 direct PCI Express 3.0 lanes for devices (24 lanes for devices shared with all the USB and SATA traffic, totaling 52GBps of bandwidth). Third-generation Threadripper moves that needle to 56 direct PCI Express 4.0 lanes and 16 PCI Express 4.0 lanes for devices paired alongside USB and SATA, opening upward of 133GBps of total bandwidth. If you're running a system with multiple video cards and maxed-out PCI Express storage (some of the new TRX40 motherboards come with expansion cards that carry four M.2 PCI Express SSDs in addition to several on the board), these outer limits may matter. But, mostly, they're just for edge cases and the most extreme PC builds. Indeed, as much as more is better, PCI Express lane counts are outstripping even the most well-heeled pros' abilities to max them out, or at least their wallets' abilities.

The Threadripper 3970X does share a few similarities with previous Threadripper chips like the 2990WX, including its core count (each has 32 cores, with support for up to 64 concurrent processing threads), as well as its support for quad-channel memory. (The boards we have seen provide eight DIMM slots, and support for error-correcting ECC memory also makes a reappearance, on certain TRX40 mainboards.) But outside of that, the Threadripper of today is functionally a leap ahead of the Threadripper of yore, crafting a new HEDT class all its own.

Get Your Wallet Ready, Though

As if the $1,999 price tag for the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X weren't eye-watering enough all on its own, we should talk about a couple more purchases you'll need in concert to get your first third-gen Threadripper system up and running.

The first, and most obvious, is a brand new motherboard. As I mentioned, the first two gens of Threadripper were both based on the same socket: TR4. If you had already purchased a board for the first generation of Threadripper, you had one on hand that would work when the next generation rolled out. (All that was required was a BIOS update.) With the move to the sTRX4 socket and the new TRX40 chipset, though, AMD has pushed motherboard makers to all new board designs with PCI Express 4.0 as part of the paradigm.

And these boards will not be cheap! We've got quotes from all of the big four motherboard makers on the price range you can expect for its TRX40 motherboards at release. Expect to pay $399 for the cheapest model (a Gigabyte model), while the MSI TRX40 Creator we used for our testing will run you $799 out the door. (See our guide to all 12 of the initial TRX40 launch motherboards.)

As you'd expect, AMD also recommends that any third-generation Threadripper installation be cooled with a liquid cooling solution, closed-loop or otherwise, optimally on a radiator 280mm or larger. Expect, then, at least another $100 outlay for a basic all-in-one cooler. The mounting points on the TRX40 boards are the same as they were for earlier Threadripper generations, so it should be possible to reuse an existing cooler if you already have one robust enough from an earlier Threadripper PC build. The few whopping Threadripper air-cooling solutions, though, like the AMD/Cooler Master Wraith Ripper, would seem to be out of the picture.

Finally, there's the RAM. If you plan on doing any kind of serious content creation, you'll need a lot of RAM to handle the load, and although you might be able to get away with 32GB, we recommend kicking that up to at least 64GB in the case of the Threadripper 3970X to give the chip its fullest chance to shine when pressed with the kinds of heavy-duty apps it is designed for. A 64GB quad-channel kit filling four DIMM slots will run you from $300 on up, depending on the supported speeds and the quality of the heatsinks.



All told, you might be looking at anywhere between $800 to $2,000 just in parts alone, before you even factor in the price of the 3970X chip. Be sure to keep all these additional costs in mind before you authorize that Threadripper-size rift in your bank account.

Empty-Handed Intel?

Normally, this would be the section where we'd compare the specs of the AMD Threadripper 3970X to an Intel equivalent. But, here's the problem: There is no proper Intel equivalent.

Here's a look at the relevant HEDT processors in the market space today, broken out by spec. (You can click on it to view it larger.)

In price and core count, the closest competing chip we could find is the Intel Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition, mentioned earlier. It has been released the same day as the third-gen Threadrippers and we have a review of it in parallel. The Core i9-10980XE, though, is in all but cost and boost clock is much the same chip as last year's Core i9-9980XE Extreme Edition.

The big leap for Intel this year is that while the Core i9-9980XE originally debuted at the same price that the 3970X retails for today (around $2,000), this year, the company is slashing prices by half, sending the 18-core/36-thread Core i9-10980XE into the realm of "relative affordability" at a $979 MSRP. (Also, a minor leap: With a compatible new X299 motherboard, the 10th Generation Core X-Series chips now support an additional four PCI Express lanes.)

With the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X costing more than twice that much, Intel's current top-end HEDT chip can compete easily on price, but not on core counts or overall performance. The closest available equivalent in the third-generation Threadripper lineup is the Ryzen Threadripper 3960X (you can read our full review of that chip here), which retails for $1,399 and only has 24 cores/48 threads, while the $749 Ryzen 9 3950X actually beats the Core i9-10980XE in most benchmarks despite costing $230 less. (The Core X-Series, though, carries some advantages over Ryzen 9 based on its surrounding platform.)

Ultimately, this is all an issue of lithography. Comparing an ultramodern chip manufactured by AMD on its spanking-new 7nm process to what essentially amounts to a third revision of the same chip on 14nm from Intel, it is a bit of an unfair fight. Until Intel moves the majority of its fabrication lines to 7nm, AMD's chips will be able to fit more transistors in a smaller space, with all of the benefits that brings.

So, just how far ahead of the curve is the third-gen Threadripper? Let's get into our testing...

CPU Performance Testing

For my test setup, I installed the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X into a MSI TRX40 Creator motherboard, and populated four of the DIMM slots with 64GB of Corsair Dominator DDR4-3600 memory, and added in an Nvidia GeForce GTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition card to handle video output during the CPU tests. (Like all earlier Threadrippers and most Ryzen CPUs, these new Zen 2-based Ryzens do not have on-chip graphics, so a video card is necessary.) For all tests, we ran the memory at its maximum 3,600MHz speed, using the Creator motherboard's top supported XMP profile.

For the Windows 10 boot drive, I relied on a 1TB Corsair MP600 PCI Express NVMe M.2 SSD. Keep in mind, like many of AMD's enthusiast-centric processors, the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X does not include a stock CPU cooler in the box, so you'll need to have one on hand or buy one. We used the same triple-fan Thermaltake Floe Riing RB 360 liquid cooler we used for our first- and second-gen Threadripper tests.

We test CPUs using a variety of synthetic benchmarks that offer proprietary scores, as well as real-world tests using consumer apps like Apple's iTunes and 3D games like Far Cry 5. Let's dig in.

Cinebench R15

One of the most widely recognized predictors of a CPU's multithreaded performance is the Cinebench R15 benchmark, which offers a good overview of performance on many different types of demanding apps. It's a CPU-centric test that gauges both the single-core performance and the multicore performance of a processor. The resulting scores are proprietary numbers that represent the CPU's capabilities while rendering a complex 3D image.

Remember what I was saying earlier about the Threadripper 3970X being in a category all its own? Well, this is what I meant. Not only is there no chip on Intel's side to compare to (outside, perhaps, the Xeon workstation/server world), there's no chip that posts these kinds of results and still lives in the realm of consumer-facing CPUs...period.

If you're a content creator who uses Cinema 4D or programs like it to handle much of your visual effects rendering tasks, nowhere is the value of the Threadripper 3970X more apparent over the competition (what little there is) than in tests like these. Time, as they say, is money, and when your processor moves faster, so do you.

iTunes 10.6

For a real-world look at single-core performance, we use an ancient Windows version of Apple's iTunes to encode a series of music tracks. Because the program is so aged, it doesn't make use of most of the available processing threads; this is a trait of the occasional legacy software that many of us need to rely on from time to time in special circumstances.

Now, for all the brawn and brute force that the Threadripper 3970X can exert in multicore tests like Cinebench R15, single-core tests remain a hurdle. Adding more cores to a package does mean that something has to give, and the clocks on a single core can take a hit. The Threadripper 3970X shares the same struggles as the rest of the company's newest chips do, and will almost always lose single-core tests (like this one) to vastly cheaper chips like the Intel Core i9-9900K. Of course, using a chip like the 3970X mainly for single-core tasks is like buying a Porsche 911 to pull hay bales.

POV-Ray 3.7

The POV-Ray benchmark is a synthetic, highly threaded, and CPU-intensive rendering test that offers a second opinion on the Cinebench results. It offers a good balance of results that can show both the single and multicore capabilities of a processor in the same benchmark.

For any losses the Threadripper 3970X suffered in the single-core iTunes test, it bounced right back to its commanding lead in the multicore POV-Ray benchmark. Here, the Threadripper 3970X set a record for a CPU in this space, a commanding first-place finish.

Handbrake 0.9.9 & Blender

Handbrake and Blender are two benchmarks that test how well a processor will handle raw-muscle content-creation tasks, such as 3D rendering or 4K/HD video conversion.

As an all-cores rendering task, the Handbrake results are, yet again, no surprise. As a 32-core monster, the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X ran laps around the rest, completing its task in less than half the time of the Intel Core i9-9900K, and just nearly half of how long it took its predecessor, the Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX.

The Blender results weren't as flat-out dominant, but because the results do skew toward being so similar across a wide variety of chips (our test file doesn't take all that long to execute), taking even a second off the record here is a big achievement (which, perhaps unsurprisingly at this point, both the Threadripper 3970X and 3960X manage to do).

7-Zip

Here on the 7-Zip compression/decompression benchmark, we saw some eye-popping results.

The Threadripper 3970X scored nearly three times as fast in file compression versus the Core i9-9980XE Extreme Edition, and even faster than that when compared to the new Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition. Now, sure, the Core i9-10980XE is half the price of the 3970X, but the relative numbers paint the picture that the advent of 7nm lithography and chiplet-based architectures have drafted.

The one caveat to these impressive results is the RAM differential. We ran the same 7-Zip test after pulling 32GB of the available 64GB of RAM, and saw a drop of roughly 22 percent in performance. Not a one-to-one 50 percent drop, but still something to consider if you're debating on how much RAM to install in your 3970X system.

Cinebench R20

Finally, there's Cinebench R20. R20 is reportedly eight times as demanding as Cinebench R15, and it does a better job of representing how a chip will hold up to more modern workflows that incorporate newer rendering techniques used in today's 3D modeling shops.

Taken in a vacuum, the 3970X's results look clearly dominant, but the important distinction to make here is that at least on a power-to-price comparison, this is one time where the Threadripper 3970X lines up almost perfectly with the Intel Core i9-10980XE. The 3970X performs just over twice as fast as the i9-10980XE, while being just barely more than twice as expensive.

Overclocking: Low Ceiling on This Sample

Feeling lucky, overclocking your new $1,999 CPU? Using the internal overclocking tools available on the MSI TRX40 Creator motherboard, I initiated a series of stepped overclocks of the 3970X that performed differently depending on the use case.

For starters, let's establish the parameters of my overclock. At max, I attempted to get all 32 cores up to 4.8GHz (starting from a base clock of 3.7GHz and boost clock of 4.5GHz). But this proved to be too unstable to be reliable. While it was consistent in gaming and tests like 7-Zip, as soon as I started running a longer core-crusher trial like Handbrake or the all-cores test in POV-Ray, all the cores kicked in and it was a matter of seconds before the system crashed to blue screen.

So, for maximum stability, I overclocked the CCDs independently of one another. (A CCD is a sort of per-chiplet "grouping" of eight cores and their caches that AMD incorporated into the new Threadripper architecture.) I settled, ultimately, on clocking the first CCD to 4.8GHz, the following one to 4.7GHz, the next to 4.6GHz, and the last to just above the stock speed of 4.55GHz, at a voltage of 1.525V.

Once the stable overclock was in place, I ran it through a few benchmarks. The percentage gains weren't nearly as impressive as the clock uptick itself (a 7 percent boost at peak), with 7-Zip returning results that were only about 2 percent better (really, within the margin of error at stock). Gaming performance in CS:GO ticked up just 4 percent. Finally, Handbrake shaved off a mere few seconds, with our trial run going from 2:43 down to 2:36.

I was a little surprised to see so little headroom available out of the Threadripper 3970X, but given the sheer number of cores at work, it's understandable if the whole chip is balanced too carefully to reward overclockers with much love when we start juicing it. (It's also very understandable if you don't care and don't want to risk frying a $1,999 CPU.)

How Does the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X Game?

Like everything else, the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X takes gaming and its gaming results to the max, beating out just about every other processor we could pit it against in combat. Here's a detailed summary of how our recent HEDT processors played out when paired with a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti...

As much credit as we'd like to give the designers of the 3970X for dominating both content creation and gaming, a few of these results might be skewed a bit by RAM. In the tests for the other processors here besides the 3970X and 3960X, our testbeds were equipped with "only" 16GB or 32GB of RAM, versus the Threadripper 3 testbed at 64GB. That said, most games can't even take advantage of RAM above 16GB. But that might explain the jumps in frame rate at 4K resolution for CS:GO, as well as the superfast results in ultra-optimized titles like Bioshock: Infinite.

Regardless of the results, though, as a gaming processor alone the Threadripper 3970X is extremely overkill, about as overkill as it gets. You'd be almost as well off buying a Ryzen 5 3600X and using the leftover $1,700 or so to get a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti card and the best-looking PC case you can find.

We just present the results here for content-creation users who are also gamers on the side. Even though a few makers (notably Asus) are marketing gamer-focused TRX40 motherboards, no one should buy a Threadripper CPU just for gaming alone; Intel's and AMD's mainstream CPUs do an excellent job of maximizing frame rates. All you need to know is that you're leaving nothing on the table if you go with a Threadripper as a dual work/play PC solution.

Overkill for Most, But Unmatched for All

On the surface, nothing revolutionary seems to be happening with the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X. It's simply an upgrade from last year's 2990WX, retaining the same number of cores and threads.

However, it's everything surrounding the cores that makes this 2019 iteration of Threadripper so special. The jump to the Zen 2 7nm chiplet-based architecture has yielded huge improvements for this generation of Threadrippers, so much so that they almost need a whole new category to define them on their own. You won't find a faster consumer-accessible processor in the world right now for $1,999, and if you're a pro content creator who relies on fast render times to do your job more effectively, this processor should pay for itself (including the equally hefty upfront cost of entry).

This is to say nothing of what's waiting just around the corner: the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X AMD teased during its briefings on the third-gen Threadripper, with its staggering 64 cores, 128 threads, and 288MB of total cache. That upcoming chip, about which details beyond the core count are scarce, could tilt this equation even further, though it will be quite pricey.

Even without the 3990X, though, at this point, AMD is running raw-performance victory laps, closing out a stellar year with the heaviest hitters it has ever fielded. It's an unfamiliar scenario: The onus is now on Intel, both in production capability and in seizing mindshare, to make up some major ground lost to its perennial-underdog rival. If the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X is any indication of the lead AMD can maintain going forward, Intel may be spending some time in the desert before it can regain the power position it's enjoyed for the past decade or so.

Artboard Created with Sketch. AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X 4.0 Editors' Choice See It $2,099.99 at Newegg MSRP $1,999.00 Pros Unmatched performance in multithread-aware tests, with 32 cores and 64 addressable threads.

Top-notch gaming results.

Support for ECC memory with certain mainboards.

Up to 256GB of memory, in quad channel, supported on TRX40 mainboards. View More Cons New TRX40 motherboard platform means high cost of entry.

Low overclock ceiling.

Single-core results are middling. The Bottom Line AMD's 32-core Ryzen Threadripper 3970X performs so far ahead of the curve that it practically creates a new class of consumer-accessible CPU. If you're a pro content creator with the ready cash, look no further: This is the V16 engine that makes your heart rate rev up.

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