The Ryzen "ThreadRipper"... 16 cores of awesome

[Shivansps]

1080p performance even if gaming is important to users of these systems means absolutely nothing.

When you move past mainstream anything could happen, 2-3 way Crossfire/SLI, 1080P@144hz, 2K@144hz... anything, dismissing the issue does not work.


Speaking of SLI/Crossfire, any tests with TR? That whould be interesting to see as PCI-E lanes are tied up to diferent dies.

 

[USER8000]

Why? i certanly expected worse overall, but there are a few awfull cases like Total War, and that one got a Ryzen patch.



Thats an excuse, if you move away from 1080p you are sending the bottleneck to the gpu, next-gen GPUs may change that again. I can fully respect gaming as a secondary option, but not the 1080P thing.

Having actually worked in places and know people who work in places which have large numbers of HEDT workstations deployed none of these systems will be overclocked or be used for gaming - that is where most of these are sold,and its even funnier when you are silent about the Core i7 7700K/7740K which ended up beating most of the more expensive Intel CPUs in gaming.

Intel cares so little for gaming performance on their high core count X299 CPUs,they changed the cache organisation,and spent more effort on improving non-gaming performance and introduced a line of rebadged consumer chips for gamers.

All enthusiasts do is moan on forums about CPUs meant for work not running some game "well" and even "well" is them being in a bubble when almost all gamers are still using 60HZ monitors.

If people are paying a £1000 CPU to run a lightly threaded game at a million FPS,I am honestly going to question their sanity,when a Core i3 7350K can be had for £100 and probably will run them as well.

I will also question their sanity when Coffee Lake is only mere months away.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Impressive and I'd love to bite, but gaming is a big component of my main system so I think I'm going to wait for: 1) Coffee Lake and 2) x299 wave 2 boards before I make a final decision (plus the case I want won't be released until October or November). An Intel price cut could make this very interesting.

 

[USER8000]

Impressive and I'd love to bite, but gaming is a big component of my main system so I think I'm going to wait for: 1) Coffee Lake and 2) x299 wave 2 boards before I make a final decision (plus the case I want won't be released until October or November). An Intel price cut could make this very interesting.

You wouldn't buy such a huge core count for gaming - you can see the Ryzen 5 is more or less similar performance to a Ryzen 7. In the end ignore X299 and Threadripper if you are a gamer. Coffee Lake Core i7s will be where it is at if you want to go OTT on the CPU for gaming,and Ryzen 5 6C/12T and Core i5 6C/6T if you want a solid chip to last a few years,but don't want to spend too much money.

 

[Topweasel]

Why? i certanly expected worse overall, but there are a few awfull cases like Total War, and that one got a Ryzen patch.



Thats an excuse, if you move away from 1080p you are sending the bottleneck to the gpu, next-gen GPUs may change that again. I can fully respect gaming as a secondary option, but not the 1080P thing.

No one plays with a CPU bottleneck in games especially not in the HEDT market. That's why I disregard purposeful 1080 gaming. You get a setup that runs a game you are playing at what you want it to. It will always be at least that good. You get a new game later, it's more intensive of a game on the GPU. You can find settings that are acceptable and continue to play it, or you buy a new video card that does as well as the old one did in the games you are now playing. Multi GPU setups are the same. If a CPU struggles to keep up with 144 gaming with one video card on a CPU bottlenecked system adding a second isn't going to fix that. So again knowing that upper end frame rate is almost always going to be a clock speed driven quest that is unaffected by the amount of GPU's you don't buy a 10-18 core CPU that can't clock as high.

CPU bound gaming isn't a legitimate use case in most situations and doesn't exist on HEDT.

 

[Anubis]

Not to mention for those of us for whom gaming is at best a secondary consideration, we're not gaming at 1080p high settings...

considering the last steam survey had something like 70% running 1080p or lower resolution i would say that yes people are running 1080p at high settings

 

[LTC8K6]

Having actually worked in places and know people who work in places which have large numbers of HEDT workstations deployed none of these systems will be overclocked or be used for gaming - that is where most of these are sold,and its even funnier when you are silent about the Core i7 7700K/7740K which ended up beating most of the more expensive Intel CPUs in gaming.

Intel cares so little for gaming performance on their high core count X399 CPUs,they changed the cache organisation,and spent more effort on improving non-gaming performance and introduced a line of rebadged consumer chips for gamers.

All enthusiasts do is moan on forums about CPUs meant for work not running some game "well" and even "well" is them being in a bubble when almost all gamers are still using 60HZ monitors.

If people are paying a £1000 CPU to run a lightly threaded game at a million FPS,I am honestly going to question their sanity,when a Core i3 7350K can be had for £100 and probably will run them as well.

I will also question their sanity when Coffee Lake is only mere months away.

Intel is certainly pushing the new Core-X chips as gaming chips. That seems odd if they didn't care.

 

[IEC]

When you move past mainstream anything could happen, 2-3 way Crossfire/SLI, 1080P@144hz, 2K@144hz... anything, dismissing the issue does not work.

No one is buying these HEDT systems primarily for gaming usage. If your primary usage is gaming an i7-7700K or maybe Coffee Lake i7s will be the best performance. Best performance/$ for gaming probably still goes to R5 1600/X.

considering the last steam survey had something like 70% running 1080p or lower resolution i would say that yes people are running 1080p at high settings

See my response to Shivan above. Same thing, if you are building a 1080p gaming rig, this is most assuredly not the CPU for you.

---

As far as HEDT workstations in the workplace goes, Threadripper will sell well in that market because of three simple letters: ECC

The "competition" in that space is 3x as expensive for the performance Threadripper offers.

 

[french toast]

Threadripper certainly lives up to its name

 

[tamz_msc]

considering the last steam survey had something like 70% running 1080p or lower resolution i would say that yes people are running 1080p at high settings

And of those 70% less than 5% are using 6600K/7600K and 6700K/7700K or above. If Steam install-base is the Atlantic then "Gaming" CPUs would be the Great Lakes.

 

[scannall]

considering the last steam survey had something like 70% running 1080p or lower resolution i would say that yes people are running 1080p at high settings

And that survey is useless in regards to $1000 CPU's. Anyone who buys these large core count CPU's for 1080 gaming first should be mocked and belittled. And using these high end parts (Either X299 or X399) for productivity on a 1080 monitor? Ain't gonna happen, except with the most clueless amoungst us.

 

[ddogg]

It amazes how people still bring up TR as a primary 1080p gaming rig. You must be braindead to spend this kind of money if that was your primary use case. This is targeted towards people who can use application that consumes lot of cores AND game at the same time. 16c will allow me to run multiple VMS (each one allocated 4 cores) on my box and play at the same time. Can you do that with a 7700k? I know my 6700k can't. I also game at 1440p ultrawide so thosr 1080p slides are completely irrelevant to me

 

[Atari2600]

What is more interesting to me is the platform longevity.

Chances are it'll be 2020 before AMD change sockets (DDR5). I've also read they expect a couple of CPU revisions on this socket.

Personally, I'm not convinced X370 will cut it as a prosumer platform a few years down the line, but X399 will. My usage scenarios have changed drastically in the past few months, I no longer need the heavy lifting I had envisaged - but I'm still likely to get the 1900X in a few months along with the best mobo (review dependent) and get onto the platform. Then, if, in a year or two I do need to run large simulations, update the CPU to Zen2 or Zen3, if I need the NVMe or PCIe drives, get them too then, RAID0 and go for it.

 

[HurleyBird]

The SMT/NUMA switch is a bit of a non-starter for me. Too much micro-management. And if I don't do the micro-management, then I'd be cognisant of leaving performance on the table which would be somewhat maddening.

Is there a way to set up per-application profiles in advance? From AT's review, it didn't sound like you could (although I did skim some parts). I guess the problem is what happens if you run two application at the same time which prefer different profiles. I suppose each application could be given a priority though...

In any case, I really wish there was a way to make this all transparent to the user. Without that, a Threadripper system sounds like a bit of a personal hell to a guy like me.

 

[USER8000]

Intel is certainly pushing the new Core-X chips as gaming chips. That seems odd if they didn't care.

Well they obviously don't care otherwise they would not have changed the cache organisation and spent all that effort on improving AVX performance - maybe you are getting confused between marketing and the actual engineering side,when their own rebadged Core i7 7700K,destroys the Core i7 7900K and almost any other CPU in gaming. Even the Broadwell E CPUs are faster in games.

Look at the Hardware.fr review:

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/967-18/indices-performance.html

They use games which have been tough on AMD in the past,and look at where Skylake-X is located relative to the other Intel CPUs.

Every change with Skylake X is to improve non-gaming performance.

 

[tamz_msc]

The SMT/NUMA switch is a bit of a non-starter for me. Too much micro-management. And if I didn't do the micro-management, I would be always cognisant that I'm leaving performance on the table.

Is there a way to set up per-application profiles in advance? From AT's review, it didn't sound like you could (although I did skim some parts). I guess the problem is what happens if you run two application at the same time which prefer different profiles.

In any case, I really wish there was a way to make this all transparent to the user.

Ever used a 2P server? It's just NUMA on/off toggle.

 

[HurleyBird]

I don't want to think about having to toggle it on or off every time I change an application. I don't want to settle for potentially much lower performance by just "setting it and leaving it." I want to have the best gaming and mt performance that the chip is capable of in an automatic, transparent way. I don't want to feel compelled to fiddle with toggles to get the most out of my system.

 

[formulav8]

i certanly expected worse overall, but there are a few awfull cases

Most likely those buying TR, gaming is of secondary or tertiary importance.

 

[tamz_msc]

I don't want to think about having to toggle it on or off every time I change an application. I don't want to settle for potentially much lower performance by just "setting it and leaving it." I want to have the best gaming and mt performance that the chip is capable of in an automatic, transparent way. I don't want to feel compelled to fiddle with toggles to get the most out of my system.

It is what it is, there is no other way to make what is essentially a 2P system work without having the applications aware of the topology. If you're not willing to put up with NUMA and its associated quirks, then frankly these CPUs aren't the best choice for you.

 

[Topweasel]

Intel is certainly pushing the new Core-X chips as gaming chips. That seems odd if they didn't care.

It's like saying because it's says it has a gaming mode that the Vega FE is therefore targeted at gaming and sucks as a gaming card because it comes in third.

There are parts of these systems that are good at gaming and for the most part including with the clock speeds the 1950x, these perform well in games. Just because they aren't the fastest doesn't meant they can't be used for gaming.

We aren't Ricky Bobby. Not being first doesn't mean they are last.

 

[rvborgh]

Something is wrong with the Cinebench 11.5 results on AT's review.

Ryzen ThreadRipper on Cinebench R15 comes in right around where my overclocked (to 3.2 GHz) 48 core quad socket Opteron 61xx comes in... (mine 3229cb, TR at 3006).

However, on CB 11.5 i am seeing 39.04 points, whereas TR is only seeing 20.52 points.

Something is definitely wrong there as there should be virtually a linear curve fit (and the overall results should be higher). On my system i've graphed the results out... and with a small margin simply multiplying CB 11.5 results by 82.6 gives me the CB R15 results and vice versa.

i did run into the same issues with NUMA vs non NUMA... Cinebench loves non NUMA (node interleaving ON)... the interesting thing about that review is that it reminds me that i need to see whether some of my games see a dramatic gain with the system set to NUMA mode and pinning things to the cores on on socket. Its easy just to set the BIOS and forget it.

Did AT do its gaming benchmarks with 3200 memory? I cannot believe that gamers that buy TR are not going to crank the memory speeds up knowing what we know about how Ryzen responds to the increased fabric speed.

 

[HurleyBird]

It is what it is, there is no other way to make what is essentially a 2P system work without having the applications aware of the topology. If you're not willing to put up with NUMA and its associated quirks, then frankly these CPUs aren't the best choice for you.

Obviously the NUMA quirks are unavoidable, but it seems like those quirks can be better managed. If I can change the SMT and NUMA modes in the supplied software, presumably without the need for a system restart although I can't see if this is explicitly mentioned anywhere, then surely that same software can support application profiles, and AMD can add some defaults to it.

 

[tamz_msc]

Obviously the NUMA quirks are unavoidable, but it seems like those quirks can be better managed. If I can change the SMT and NUMA modes in the supplied software, presumably without the need for a system restart although I can't see if this is explicitly mentioned anywhere, then surely that same software can support application profiles, and AMD can add some defaults to it.

Those toggles are basically using bcdedit, so you'll obviously have to restart each time you make any changes.

 

[EXCellR8]

Most likely those buying TR, gaming is of secondary or tertiary importance.

+1

If I had my dream job of modeling and rendering environments for Half Life 3 (which dev rights were bought from Valve for the sum of 50 USD) I would totally build with TR. But since my main computer is primarily for gaming/web/email/photoshop the compute power is wasted on me. I could certainly use it, but not too often.

I remember mapping on Source with my Athlon XP, compiling maps and lighting, omg that poor little CPU I'm so sorry...

 

[IndyColtsFan]

You wouldn't buy such a huge core count for gaming - you can see the Ryzen 5 is more or less similar performance to a Ryzen 7. In the end ignore X299 and Threadripper if you are a gamer. Coffee Lake Core i7s will be where it is at if you want to go OTT on the CPU for gaming,and Ryzen 5 6C/12T and Core i5 6C/6T if you want a solid chip to last a few years,but don't want to spend too much money.

I said it was a large component, not the only one. The difference between a 7900 and 7700 at the same clock is what, 5-7% max in gaming? I already have a Ryzen 5 and a Ryzen 7 box and now it is time for my big upgrade.