AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X & 1950X Review

[SKYMTL]

Overclocking… or Burning Down the House

Overclocking… or Burning Down the House

Let me start this off by saying that overclocking Threadripper needs to be approached like holding a loaded gun. You have to prepare, check that all the safeties are in place, pull the trigger and brace for the recoil. It isn’t for the faint of heart, nor should you overlook any part of the process. Buy the best cooler you can afford, always log temperatures since they can run away into red-alert meltdown mode in a heartbeat and make sure your power supply is up to the job.

My story of overclocking these processors is one of both caution and success. I wasn’t expecting much, but the 1950X and 1920X actually delivered some respectable results and I’m sure things could have gone further had I switched out my cooler earlier. In a few words, without increasing fan speeds to max, the Corsair Hydro H90 simply wasn’t up to the job of keeping either CPU cool enough for stability over 3.9GHz on all cores. Going above 3.9GHz required more voltage which in turn simply overwhelmed Corsair’s otherwise excellent cooler. I swear that I smelled plastic melting somewhere as the 1950X hit 91°C within 10 minutes, threw up its arms and started throttling. The little brother 1920X didn’t behave any better as it took about 15 minutes to reach the critical temperatures and also start throttling. By that point, the heat coming off of the H90 could have warmed an entire Siberian village in the dead of winter.

Luckily, AMD had sent a triple-bay 360mm Thermaltake liquid cooler (now I know why…). Installing that unit greatly improved temperatures for both processors, with the 1950X finally leveling off at 4GHz while the mighty 1920X kept going all the way to 4.14GHz. The problem with both ended up being the not insignificant amount of voltage needed to reach those frequencies. Supposedly there’s a new BIOS revision in the pipeline that will lower voltage thresholds for overclocking and I’m already anxious to try that.

Another thing you will need to watch out for is power consumption. Due to the aforementioned voltage increases, the 1950X ended up sucking down 348W for the whole system, compared to the stock 260W. The same could be said of the 1920X which went from 242W to 333W. Like I said: be prepared with both cooling and power.

 

[SKYMTL]

Conclusion; AMD's Mission Complete

Conclusion; AMD's Mission Complete

Looking back at how things played out over the course of this review, I have no doubt it will be one of the most hotly debated articles that I’ve written in the last few months, maybe even the last year. There’s no denying that the Zen architecture has proven to be Intel’s match, and the resulting Ryzen processors have become perfect ambassadors for AMD as a whole. There are an infinite number of successes to be discussed, yet with this launch the lion’s share of debate will likely surround exactly who will benefit most - if at all - from what Threadripper brings to the table.

It is extremely hard not to become an overnight fanboy when retroactively looking through the vast majority of results in this review. The Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X throw out numbers that are nothing short of fabulous, to the point where we have to wonder how Intel will respond. With Ryzen 7, 5, 3 and now Threadripper, the dog piling has continued unabated. But like any seasoned fighter, Intel does seem to be weathering the storm quite well as they progress with a staccato launch schedule of their own with the upcoming high core count Skylake-X and Coffee Lake lineups.

Despite the presence of some extremely high-end Intel processors in our charts, both the 1950X and 1920X are in the league of their own, particularly in multi-threaded environments. They are tailor-made for prosumer workloads like rendering, high-level video conversion and encryption / decryption or basically anywhere Threadripper’s significant core / thread advantage can be brought to bear. Throw some low-level core affinity modifications into that equation and there’s more than enough processing power to eat through multiple workloads in parallel without the architecture even breaking a sweat.

Unfortunately for Intel, their competing HEDT lineup is far from fleshed out at this point and the only real competition for Threadripper is the $1000 Core i9-7900X. That processor actually holds its own quite well particularly in real-world benchmarks, but that doesn’t make it a standout winner by any stretch of the imagination. For professionals at least, the 1950X’s additional processing threads will make AMD’s equally expensive CPU a better value. Just be aware that Threadripper does tend to struggle in lightly-threaded applications, so if you are a photo editor or someone who utilizes programs that tend to benefit from high per-core throughput, Intel’s stable of parts may be preferable to the 1950X.

While its big brother may struggle a bit due to an Intel-matching price point, the 1920X feels like the real winner here. It literally offers 90% of the 1950X’s performance - sometimes even beating its sibling in frequency-focused benchmarks - for $200 less and it also falls into a perfect gap between Intel’s i9-7900X and i9-7820X. In that position it can offer 7900X-matching scores and the money saved can be funneled into some other worthwhile system upgrades. To be honest with you, it makes every one of the Core i9 processors feel heavily overpriced, particularly when you take into account the pathetic number of PCI-E lanes on the i9-78xx series chips.

Speaking of PCI-E lanes, I have to give some serious kudos to AMD for realizing enthusiasts have had enough of Intel forcing segmentation by artificially limiting the PCIe allocation of non-flagship CPUs. It is plainly insulting to see a $600 processor like the i9-7820X unable to run two graphics cards at full x16 speeds. Threadripper’s fully accessible 60 CPU-bound lanes will be a breath of fresh air for power users, both on the professional and gaming side of the equation.

As you may have already guessed, these massive thread-happy processors represent a poor value for any gaming-focused system. I’ve said this once and I will say it again: this isn’t an AMD-exclusive issue but rather one that’s endemic of every capable yet low-clocked 8+ core processors. When compared against the likes of Ryzen 5 / 7 or Intel’s i7 series, the i9 and Threadripper CPUs suffer from a serious case of framerate envy due to their very nature. Games love low latency and high frequencies and neither HEDT lineup really offers that combination.

Where the other shoe drops for Threadripper is that its framerates suffer more than Ryzen 7 did, to the point where we see simple Ryzen 5 processors matching or surpassing AMD’s $1000 wunderkind in several games. We’ll be testing some theories about this shortfall in the coming weeks, but it seems like AMD’s dual die design just doesn’t benefit the serial nature of many game engines.

There are some ways to mitigate - but not eliminate - these issues through the clever Memory Modes toggle, but it isn’t a miracle worker that can cure all ills. On one hand it is certainly nice to have a way to optimize a system to your needs, be it gaming or professional tasks. However, the entire process of entering the BIOS (or the Ryzen Master Utility), flipping a switch and then rebooting feels a bit like an inelegant kludge rather than a finely honed process worthy of a platform that’s launching in 2017. It makes rapidly switching between applications with different system loading profiles all but impossible. Luckily, even in the default Distributed Mode, performance is obviously still very respectable.

Actually taking the plunge into the Ryzen Threadripper platform isn’t for the faint of heart since you’ll need a beastly cooling system and power supply to keep these things within their operational specs. Much like the Intel i9-7900X, the Threadripper 1950X and 1920X run hot and consume gobs of power. Threadripper does indeed have some overclocking headroom, but try overclocking and things rapidly escalate to thermonuclear levels where even our triple-fan AIO had some trouble keeping up and power consumption increased by nearly 100W. Granted, some of this additional output is due to the fact that the CPUs needed a significant bump in voltages to reach stability, but there’s now a BIOS which is supposed to somewhat lower that threshold.

So there you have it. Like I said at the beginning of this conclusion, the way you view Threadripper will be largely dependent on what you do with your system. Professionals, prosumers or even gamers who need their system to crunch through other tasks while they frag away will certainly benefit from what’s being offered here, especially with the 1920X. On the other hand, I can’t imagine ever recommending Threadripper for someone who wants to assemble a pure gaming setup. People running a single high-end graphics card will be infinitely better served by Ryzen 7 or even the extremely versatile Ryzen 5 processors.

And yet Threadripper isn't just about price, performance and processing performance per watt. It also happens to be about the fulfillment of hopes and expectations of countless enthusiasts. Enthusiasts who, regardless of their preference for the blue or green sides, were hoping that in some way AMD would break the cycle of the planned obsolescence, high pricing structures and egregious feature cutting in the high-end desktop market. That’s exactly what happened and the end result is nothing short of spectacular.