AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5995WX Box

Product Information

The Hitman 3 results are a bit more typical, where the 5995WX was slightly slower than the 5950X, a mere 3% decline in performance which meant it was still 18% faster than the older 3990X.

The Threadripper Pro debuted in 2020 as a Lenovo exclusive in the company's ThinkStation P620 desktop workstation, which we reviewed at the link. We tested that machine with the 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3955WX. Though it was blisteringly fast for multi-threaded scenarios, we wished that first-generation Threadripper Pro had been based on AMD’s “Zen 3” architecture, which was brand new at the time. Threadripper Pro chips come with the 'WX' suffix to denote they are designed for the workstation market. AMD didn't introduce more cores with the two top-end models, but they're faster due to the step up from the Zen 2 architecture to Zen 3. This is governed largely by the number of memory channels each processor supports, but also by the type of memory.The Intel Core i9-12900K dominates in this title and takes the lead in many of the gaming benchmarks below. Case in point, the flagship 64-core Threadripper Pro 5995WX in the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 workstation we tested absolutely crushed the Cinebench R23 and Blender benchmarks, with scores far superior to anything we’ve seen. If you're wondering why the 'Pro' models cost so much more, it's because they're legitimately more workstation oriented. For example, you get twice as many PCIe lanes from the CPU, 128 versus 64 while the current AM4 desktop parts have 24 in total, 16 for the primary PCIe slot, 4 four the primary M.2 and then 4 connecting the chipset. Cinebench R23 fully leverages the Lenovo’s massive core and thread count, and what a showing it made; the other towers’ scores added together barely touch it. It also absolutely dominated Blender, with the lowest time we’ve ever seen. Computers are my lifelong obsession. I wrote my first laptop review in 2005 for NotebookReview.com, continued with a consistent PC-reviewing gig at Computer Shopper in 2014, and moved to PCMag in 2018. Here, I test and review the latest high-performance laptops and desktops, and sometimes a key core PC component or two. I also review enterprise computing solutions for StorageReview.

Of course, we tested thermal performance before we got benchmarking and everything looked good. After an hour of looping the Cinebench R23 benchmark we hit a peak temperature of 83C, which given the power usage is a good result. That said, it's unlikely to be optimal and if we look closely at the peak core complex die temperatures we see that only two peaked at around 80C, then two more which peaked in the mid to low 70s with what we assume are the four centrally located CCD's peaking at between just 57 and 61C. What We Learned Using the Pro 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 chip giant certainly has its work cut out here. With Threadripper Pro, AMD delivered the holy grail of workstation processors, combining vast numbers of cores (up to 64) with high turbo frequencies and high-memory bandwidth to deliver impressive performance wherever your workflows may take you — single threaded CAD, multi-threaded rendering, or memory intensive simulation, Threadripper Pro can handle pretty much anything you throw at it. 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.

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For code compilation work the 5995WX doesn't appear all that much faster than the 3990X which makes sense as the 5950X was only slightly faster than the 3950X. So for this sort of workload the more expensive Zen 3-based Threadripper processors probably aren't worth the premium. From our tests, however, Sapphire Rapids is not going to be the Threadripper Pro 5000 WX-Series killer we thought it might be, at least in the broader AEC sector. We're only looking at an 8% improvement in the 7-zip file manager decompression test for the 5995WX over the 3990X. But this time removing the power limits resulted in a slightly more impressive 9% performance increase. CAD isn’t a key target workflow for Intel ‘Sapphire Rapids’ or AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro. In fact architects, engineers and designers that only use bread-and-butter design tools like Solidworks, Inventor and Revit, will almost certainly be better served by 12th or 13th Gen Intel Core processors or AMD Ryzen 7000 ( read our comparison article). 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