Earlier this year AMD announced the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000 WX series but initially was limited to Lenovo workstations. Earlier this summer it was then announced the Threadripper PRO 5000 WX series would be heading to more system integrators and then the DIY market. Well, finally, these Zen 3 Threadripper chips are heading out to the DYI market and today the review embargo lifts. AMD recently sent over a Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX for my Linux testing at Phoronix and here is my initial review and performance benchmarks for this Zen 3 24-core / 48-thread HEDT chip. Except for the quad-channel Ryzen Threadripper 3000 chips, all of the above AMD and Intel processors support eight channels of DDR4-3200 ECC memory. Threadripper Pro supports a maximum of 2TB of memory in UDIMM, RDIMM, and LRDIMM flavors, while Xeon W-3300 supports up to 4TB. That's not to mention that AMD's core/thread counts weigh in at 64/128 compared to Intel's 38/76. We put both of these chips through a test suite of professional-class applications, like SPECworkstation and SPECviewperf, along with our standard application test suite. And yes, we put the chips through our gaming test suite to see how they fare. For comparison we've included the Threadripper 3990X which was tested on the MSI Creator TRX40 motherboard using the same Team T-ForceDDR4-3600 memory at 3400. Then we have a few desktop CPUs for comparison: a Ryzen 9 5950X tested with dual-rank DDR4-3200 memory, and the Intel Core i9-12900K using DDR5-6400 memory. The graphics card used for all testing is the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. Let's get into the data... Benchmarks

All of the Threadripper Pro 5000 series processors have TDPs of up to 280 watts. They also feature support for 8 memory channels – versus 4 channels on standard Threadrippers -- and have 128 integrated PCIe 4.0 lanes. L3 cache maxes out at 256MB on the top-end 5995WX, but drops down to the 128MB on the 5975WX and the Threadripper Pro 5965WX we’ll be showing you here. Here the 5995WX was 28% faster than the 3990X, which is a significant performance advantage and this translates into serious real-world improvements. We believe the increased memory bandwidth and improved single core performance is largely responsible for the performance gains seen in Adobe Premiere. Z by HP workstations are engineered to bring the power of AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 WX-Series processors to today’s professionals and provide customers with a winning combination of performance and reliability,” Jim Nottingham, senior vice president and division president, Advanced Compute and Solutions, HP Inc. “With this latest generation of Threadripper processors, workstation customers can experience a new era of computing power, fueling creativity and productivity like never before."We had been actively testing for alternatives, the Core i9-12900K was amazing at scrubbing through timelines for general editing, but as soon as we wanted to stabilize more than a dozen clips at once, the system became unusable and would often crash. Meaning we had to stabilize clips in batches, saving after each batch was complete before starting the next batch. It wasted a lot of time and the encoding process was also slower. Supported virtual machine optimization technologies. Some are specific to Intel only, some to AMD. AMD-V The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 Series processors and Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 WX-Series processors offer a wide range of motherboard feature support tailored to meet the distinct needs of enthusiasts and professionals. Chipset The Threadripper 3000 series had no issues with 4K60 footage from the older GH5, but when we upgraded to the GH6 we wanted to start working with 5.7K60, and this proved troublesome. Of course, we could use proxies but they are a pain for editing, taking a lot more time, and overall just a more cumbersome method than we prefer. The 5995WX was on par with the 5950X in Watch Dogs: Legion making it 15% faster than the 3990X, but much slower than the 12900K.

Both AMD and NVIDIA offer compelling graphics options for Threadripper and Threadripper PRO-powered workstations. AMD's work continues, and the company highlighted a 2.3X improvement in the ANSYS mechanical simulation software after code tuning and a 200X improvement in the Autodesk Arnold rendering software. These projects continue with other software providers, which isn't surprising given AMD's continuing market share gains in the workstation market.For all of my initial testing was carried out on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with the Linux 5.19 kernel while keeping the other software components at their defaults. The other systems I re-tested for this review included: In short, the 5995WX is a game changer for our workflow and as such it's difficult to put it into the context of percentage gains, it's not just faster, it's wildly more practical. You could say editing is now more playable, to use a gaming term. This is the most expensive AMD Ryzen CPU you can buy, which as you might suspect is also the fastest and most powerful Ryzen CPU currently in existence. Not even upcoming Zen 4 CPUs will change that, at least not when talking about core-heavy workloads.

Threadripper Pro has 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes (the CPU exposes 120 lanes to the user) compared to Intel's 64 lanes, an advantage because most workstations have plenty of additives, like GPU accelerators, NVMe storage, and high-speed NICs. Another rendering benchmark is V-Ray and here the 5995WX was 15% faster than the 3990X, so not a huge performance gain, but about what we've come to expect for this sort of workload.Rainbow Six Extraction sees similar margins to that of Hitman 3, the 5995WX was 4% slower than the 5950X, but 10% faster than the 3990X. However, removing the power limits allowed the 5995WX to match the 5950X. The last application benchmark is Blender Open Data and we'll also look at power usage in this test soon. Once again when it comes to rendering benchmarks the 5995WX is generally only a little faster than the older 3990X, here we're looking at 7% more performance, so nothing to write home about. System Power Consumption The Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5975WX ended up with 30.5% higher single-core performance than the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3975WX. We had to disregard the multi-core score because it's impossible that both 32-core chips would perform similary, taking into consideration the significant difference in the single-core tests. The Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5975WX run may be bugged. We look forward to putting the Threadripper Pro 5995WX through its paces over the coming months and years, and we hope we can take a look at the 5975WX soon as we feel that model is better suited to our use case. Shopping Shortcuts: