Extreme desktop processors for PC builders and highly demanding workstation users are back—or so AMD says. With the launch of its AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000-series processors, the "consumer class," non-Pro Threadripper chips are a thing again, and the so-called high-end desktop (HEDT) market as it was known in the 2010s has been reborn. And with the top chip in the new Threadripper line, the 7980X, the maximum amount of performance you can draw out of a consumer desktop PC has been not so much raised as it has been multiplied.
So has the cost. Providing, in certain scenarios, two or even three times the performance of the previous fastest desktop processor, the Ryzen Threadripper 7980X is a proper game-changer for those ready to pay up the $4,999 required, as well as foot the cost of the platform: premium motherboard, registered RAM, a robust CPU cooler. If you do work that is tailored to benefit from extreme multi-threaded processor performance, this chip could save you time and be well worth its cost. Make no mistake, though: Mainstream tasks such as gaming or everyday content work are far, far below this chip's station, and it's not designed for (nor a good value for) such pedestrian pursuits.
Threadripper Returns: Power Overwhelming!
AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 7980X is a true behemoth of a processor for the consumer market, and as you’ll see in a moment, the "power overwhelming" StarCraft reference is fitting for the 7980X. For those of you who have never played StarCraft, stop reading and come back after you have, but the Protoss army's Light Archon units in the game that "overwhelm" you with that key phrase are extremely powerful yet costly—just like the 7980X!
The Threadripper 7980X is the top of the new Threadripper 7000 line, loaded with a monstrous 64 CPU cores with simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) technology that enables it to operate up to 128 threads, essentially allowing each CPU core to work on two tasks in unison. This amount of cores and threads dwarfs all other consumer-based competition. For comparison, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, which is the best "ordinary" Ryzen 9 processor at the time of writing, has just 16 CPU cores and 32 threads. The Intel Core i9-14900K appears better on this front, with its 24 CPU cores, but 16 of those cores are Intel's high-efficiency E-cores that don’t support SMT technology, leaving it also with just 32 threads to access.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)This huge core count is backed up by a similarly enormous 256MB pool of L3 cache and 64MB of L2 cache. The power and cooling requirements for this type of hardware is likewise high, with the processor rated for a 350-watt (350W) TDP. AMD was forced to pin the 7980X with lower clock speeds than the Ryzen 9 7950X to keep the TDP from being even higher, and as a result the processor tops out with a boost clock of 5.1GHz. It also has an unusually low base clock of just 3.2GHz.
The PCI Express (PCIe) controller inside of the processor supports 92 PCIe 5.0 lanes, with four of these lanes reserved for communication with the motherboard chipset. The other 88 lanes are fully available for ultra-fast SSDs and workstation graphics cards.
The bulk of these resources are packed inside individual core chiplet dies (CCDs) that contain the CPU cores. Each CCD is created on a 5nm TSMC FinFET process and measures 71mm2. The Ryzen Threadripper 7980X has eight CCDs fully enabled. You'll find a separate die on the chip that contains the PCIe controller and cache that is quite large, at 388mm2—this portion is manufactured on a 6nm TSMC process.
Note that these non-"Pro" chips have been launched alongside a new Pro 7000 line of Threadrippers, too; the main difference with those is support for eight memory channels and up to 144 PCIe lanes. Read more about the Pro-class Threadrippers at this link, and we'll get into some informal test results on the flagship Threadripper Pro, the 96-core 7995WX, later on in this article.
Detailing AMD's New Socket: sTR5
To support the new line of consumer Threadripper processors, AMD created a whole new platform based around a new socket, dubbed sTR5. Just like everything else to do with Threadripper, the socket itself is massive, closer to double the size of a conventional consumer CPU socket like Intel's LGA 1700. It uses a mounting system similar to the one used by AMD on its older sTRX4 socket for third-generation Threadrippers, and TR4 used by the first- and second-generation chips. It employs a pop-up tray that the processor slides into, in order to properly line it up and hold it in position, after which the chip gets bolted down by tightening three torque screws in order.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)Particular care needs to be taken during this process, as it can damage the board and cause technical issues if not followed to the letter. While testing the Threadripper 7980X, I ran into one of these issues when I slightly overtightened one of the screws with the included screwdriver tool. When power was applied to the system, this caused the system to hang in a sort of half-step between on and off. The lights on an attached USB device illuminated, and a notable buzzing was coming from the hardware, and the system could not be powered on.
Loosening the screw fixed the issue, and no lasting damage occurred, but it's worth raising a note of caution here. Having installed lots of processors over the years, I typically am quite careful to not over-tighten or force anything around a CPU socket. I use a fairly lax grip and hold the screwdriver only with my fingertips, going no further than my fingers will turn the screwdriver. It would have been easy to tighten the screw significantly further, and I think I only avoided lasting damage because I didn’t do so. Read the instructions carefully to install the chip and use less force than you think you need.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)The platform also calls for beefy power-regulation hardware. The Asus board AMD sent us to accompany testing uses a new chipset, TRX50. The board has massive heatsinks with fans situated all around the CPU socket. The RAM slots, which typically reside to the right of the CPU socket, were instead pushed above and below the CPU socket to make room for more power and cooling hardware. This likely won’t be a universal board-design choice, but it is the direction that Asus went with on its Pro WS TRX50-Sage Wi-Fi motherboard.
One universal thing is that the sTR5 platform supports a quad-channel memory interface. This means that the platform can have as much as a 256-bit interface between the RAM and the CPU. You’ll need to have a stick of RAM occupying a slot in each memory channel to leverage this, but as long as you have at least four sticks of RAM properly installed, you should benefit from this design choice. You will need to use registered DDR5 RAM, however, as standard DDR5 is not listed as supported. Registered DDR5 has the benefit of on-the-fly error correction, but it's also more expensive than regular memory.
Testing the Ryzen Threadripper 7980X: Our Test Configuration
No existing platform we have suffices to test the 7980x. AMD sent us some of the hardware we needed for testing the new Threadripper. This includes the aforementioned Asus Pro WS TRX50-Sage Wi-Fi motherboard, four 32GB sticks of registered DDR5 RAM, and an NZXT Kraken 360 360mm water cooler. To this we added a SilverStone DA850 850W power supply, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card (all Threadripper CPUs lack on-chip graphics), and a Lexar NM790 4TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, on which I installed Windows 11 Pro. All of the parts were installed into an open Praxis Wetbench case.
In terms of competition, the Ryzen Threadripper 7980X doesn’t have much, at least not on the consumer side of things. I predominantly review consumer processors, and with the last generation of "consumer" Threadripper and Intel's Core X-Series Extreme Edition processors almost exactly four years old at this point, nothing much that's close to current on market is left to challenge the Threadripper 7980X on its specific turf. AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X and Intel’s Core i9-14900K do attempt to put up a decent fight, and plenty of arguments exist for buying either of those processors over the 7980X under many circumstances, but they simply don’t produce the raw horsepower of the 7980X.
Before I get into the benchmarks, a few last notes: First, we typically test processors using AIDA64 and Adobe Premiere Pro, but we weren’t able to test the Threadripper 7980X with either. This is likely due to software issues rather than roadblocks with the Threadripper 7980X, however. The problems related to Adobe were unquestionably caused by an issue with the PugetBench test plug-in software we use (no ding on either AMD's chip or the PugetBench utility, mind you), and it seems likely that AIDA64 simply didn’t have support worked in yet for the 7980X when we went to test it in the run-up to its release.
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X: CPU Tests
Kicking things off with Cinebench, we immediately saw the Threadripper 7980X claim its spot at the top of our charts. With nearly three times the performance of the Ryzen 9 7950X or the Core i9-14900K, we have no question who won here. The single-threaded performance was lackluster, but in fairness, you don’t buy a processor with 64 cores to run single-threaded applications faster.
The POV-Ray multi-threaded test results showed similar dominance with the 7980X between 43% and 57% faster than the Core i9-14900K and Ryzen 9 7950X respectively, with even greater performance gains against most other processors we tested. In the single-threaded POV-Ray test, however, the 7980X was the slowest CPU in the bunch.
In the remaining tests, we saw more lackluster results from the 7980X, which was likely due to some mixture of the Threadripper 7980X’s lower clock speeds and the state of program optimization for this many cores and threads. Not many programs are optimized for running on this big smorgasbord of cores, and that certainly would explain the ho-hum results the 7980X turned in with Adobe Photoshop and HandBrake.
In Handbrake, the oddly long result was nonetheless repeatable. It could have something to do with the older version of Handbrake used for testing, which we could not immediately change for standardization purposes. This version of the software simply may not be able to take advantage of as many cores and threads as the Threadripper makes available. I suspect part of the issue also lies with the 7980X's low base clock, as the other 7000-series Ryzen Threadripper I tested (the 7970X, review forthcoming), did considerably better and also has a significantly better base clock.
The performance in Blender was excellent, though. It all comes down to whether your software can let Threadripper stretch its 64 legs to the fullest.
An Aside: The 96-Core Threadripper Pro 7995WX
A side note: We also informally tested Threadripper 7980X's professional top-end counterpart, the even more core-rich Threadripper Pro 7995WX, in the run-up to this launch. Dell gave us remote access to a Precision workstation running this flagship 96-core/192-thread Threadripper Pro 7995WX for some limited benchmark testing. While we didn't add this chip to our formal benchmark numbers, as we weren't able to get truly hands-on with it and run all our standard tests, citing a few comparative test numbers is worthwhile.
Dell's Precision 7875, equipped with Threadripper Pro 7995WX (Credit: Dell)The Dell machine was a Precision 7875 tower, with a motherboard built on the WRX90 chipset that's specific to the Threadripper Pro. The 96-core 7995WX scored a trivially higher 100,291 on Cinebench R23's Multi-Core setting (versus the 7980X's result of 98,300), 1,133 on Adobe Photoshop using PugetBench (versus 1,031), 22 seconds on our Blender 2.93 trial (versus the 7980X's 31 seconds), and 3 minutes and 3 seconds (3:03) on HandBrake 1.4 (not strictly comparable; we ran a different version of HandBrake on the two systems).
The supporting hardware, GPU (the Precision used two RTX 6000 Ada series cards), and the memory amounts (512GB of ECC RAM in the Precision!) between the two test systems were not at all comparable, so take these numbers with a boulder of salt. (The Precision tower was also not liquid-cooled with a 360mm cooler.) But the 7980X comported itself very well versus its Pro counterpart.
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X: Gaming Tests
HEDT processors like the Ryzen Threadripper 7980X aren’t designed for gaming, and buying one mainly for that purpose is folly. Of course, you can do some gaming on the side with these chips, if you're so inclined. So we ran our typical game tests using the RTX 3080 for some comparison numbers. The lower clock speed of the Threadripper 7980X reared its head, with the chip being decisively beat by the best consumer Core and Ryzen chips in 3DMark tests, and either on par with or a bit below par on actual game tests at lower resolutions; at higher resolutions our tests were mostly GPU bound.
Sure, you could play games with the Threadripper 7980X, but realistically that shouldn’t be anything of a primary or secondary aim. From a financial, performance, and power-consumption standpoint, you simply have better options.
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X: Power and Thermals
Using a Kill-A-Watt wall meter to gauge the power draw of the test system as a whole gives us a rough idea of how much power each processor consumes. Though the graphics card, motherboard, and RAM all play into this, as well, the bulk of the power draw in a test like Cinebench will be down to the CPU, as it’s under heavy load.
Sure enough, the Threadripper 7980X consumes a great deal of power, but it was not as far ahead of the competition in this regard as we would have expected. The Intel Core i9-14900K wasn't far behind, and that’s really saying something, since that processor was so much slower than the Threadripper 7980X in Cinebench. The Ryzen 9 7950X did much better in this regard, but it still didn't drive the same amount of performance per watt as the Threadripper 7980X.
Keeping the Threadripper 7980X adequately cooled is a considerable challenge, but it’s a challenge for most of the other processors in this list, too. The two Core i5 processors shown in the list are the only ones that didn’t hit their thermal limits while testing. Now, it certainly is a bigger issue for the 7980X, as it exceeded its thermal limit of 95 degrees C by one degree, and that’s even with the provided 360mm water cooler installed. Everything else in the list was cooled by a 240mm water cooler and may have done somewhat better if they had been tested with this more robust cooler, too.
Either way, plan to buy the best cooler you possibly can if you are buying a Threadripper 7980X. This is where the monster liquid coolers come into their own.
Verdict: Multi-Threading the Needle
AMD’s announcement of the return of HEDT processors with the new Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series was exciting on a number of levels. Processors marketed in the HEDT segment have always blurred the line between workstation and consumer products, and typically delivered excellent performance for work tasks but without some of the drawbacks that come from buying true workstation-grade hardware. With HEDT, prices were typically a bit lower; the hardware was in more consumer-friendly form factors; and many other consumer components (such as memory and coolers) were available to make the building process easier.
Some of that still holds true for the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X, but AMD overshot the position of even deep-pocketed consumers with this chip. Instead, the 7980X feels far more like a workstation part. The $4,999 asking price for the chip alone is well within range of what true workstation processors sell for, and the need to use more expensive components such as registered memory exacerbates this issue. More-demanding cooling requirements also don't help, as the 360mm water cooler AMD supplied to us worked right up to the edge of keeping the processor from overheating, further limiting the aftermarket parts that can be used with the platform.
Asus, for its part with its Pro WS TRX50-Sage Wi-Fi motherboard, didn’t make any bones about who this platform is for. It views this CPU platform as workstation fodder, as the “WS” in the board name stands for workstation, and “Workstation” is printed all over the motherboard box. Its board even supports the use of two power supplies, and we’ve seen other sTR5 motherboards that also share this design. Again, this is something we only ever see on workstation parts.
None of this is to overshadow the fact that the Ryzen Threadripper 7980X is an exceptional processor if used for the right purposes. It needs to be used with software that supports a sky-high thread count. But as long as you do, it performs exceptionally well, and it’s relatively power-efficient for its level of performance. Just know: It’s not as much of a "consumer" product in quite the same way that earlier Ryzen Threadrippers straddled that line, and it should be weighed against workstation solutions more than consumer ones.
Consumer chips like the Ryzen 9 7950X and Core i9-14900K are strong alternatives for less demanding content creators who want to avoid the Threadripper 7980X’s steep chip, memory, and board price tags and who don’t mind waiting a bit longer for work to process. But, if you need a roaring multi-threaded engine that can tear through optimized work as fast as possible—as time is money, after all—the Ryzen Threadripper 7980X is well worth considering.
