Final Thoughts
How Much Does it Cost?
The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX 32-Core 64-Thread processor is still priced around £1599.99, or about £50 per core if you want to work it out that way. However, the Threadripper 2920X is priced at just £599 on Amazon and some retailers like Scan have it lower than that at just £583.49. This is without a doubt a bit of a bargain for the level of performance on offer. It’s about £90 more than the i9-9900K, but if you’re not gaming, and you’re simply rendering, and doing content creation, the 2920X had the i9 beaten in all the right places.
Overview
AMD has been building up its war chest with exceptional pace these last few years. Their range of Ryzen CPUs reinvigorated the affordable and mid-range PC market. Even the enthusiasts (myself included) jumped on their Ryzen 7 series for gaming. Now they’re chipping away at Intel, with extremely competitive performance, huge core counts, and a price per core ratio that giving consumers some impressive choices for their money. Intel still holds the crown for some things, such as gaming, and their extreme CPUs are faster in many areas. However, Intel’s CPUs are often much more expensive.
Gaming
Threadripper isn’t a gaming CPU by nature, but the 12-core model is the one that comes closest. Its gaming performance was much better than previous TR4 CPUs. Of course, the fewer cores on offer means that each core can have a higher clock speed due to the lower overall TDP. This means the 2920X is closer to the Ryzen 7 configurations than it is the 2990WX. That’s a good thing though because it means we saw higher frame rates in all our games.
Should I Buy One?
It seems 12 cores is a really nice sweet spot for Threadripper. The budget TR4 this may be, but it’s got plenty of get-up-and-go for the money. It smashed out a new record of 92 FPS in Handbrake while transcoding 4K video and it still scored amazingly in CineBench and WPrime. Furthermore, it gave us good gaming performance, it overclocked nicely, it doesn’t run too hot. It’s got a lot going for it. If you’re looking to build a competent workstation for game development, video editing, game streaming and more, you could do a lot worse, and at this price, what’s not to love?
