Conclusion

...the 2970WX slots in neatly below the 2990WX and, at £1,200, offers multi-core goodness that is outside the capabilities of the £2,000 Core i9-7980XE.

AMD heralded real progress in the many-core CPU landscape by releasing numerous Ryzen and Ryzen Threadripper CPUs over the course of the last 18 months.

Filling out the 2nd Generation Ryzen Threadripper catalogue today by releasing the 2970WX and 2920X, AMD has strengthened its grip on massive-core CPUs primed for professional rendering and extreme multitasking.

The 2970WX slots in neatly below the 2990WX and, at £1,200, offers multi-core goodness that is outside the capabilities of the £2,000 Core i9-7980XE. Though not as strong in light-load instances and generally slower when gaming at 1080p, it's a fine choice for those that can't stretch to the range-topping processor yet need massive CPU performance.

Decent overclocking potential, for an AMD chip at least, means that it has the ability to tear through heavy-duty applications with ease, though we still reckon it makes sense for most to look further down the stack where performance is more predictable.

A case in point is the 2920X, bringing 2nd Gen Threadripper to a £600 price point, with the ability to scale up to more-core processors through the same TR4 platform used by all of AMD's high-end brigade.

Buying advice is actually more nebulous for this processor because it competes against the very best mainstream chips that are available on cheaper platforms. The recent Core i9-9900K may not be as fast in absolutely CPU-limited scenarios, but it is a better bet for gaming and more general workloads.

Bottom line: the retail arrival of two further Ryzen Threadrippers continues to give Intel serious headaches in the ultra-premium space.

The Good		The Bad
Strong multi-core performance Threadripper has never been cheaper Proven ecosystem		2970WX so-so gaming Limited OC potential for 2920X

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX and 2920X

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It would be really interesting to see how the 2990wx and 2970wx compare to their EPYC counterparts in multi-threaded workloads. EPYC has the advantage of twice the memory channels and all cores having direct local memory access, where Threadripper has the clock speed advantages.

Enough with the TDP derived Bang4Watt scores…they're just so detached from reality as to be worthless. You can see on the Blender system-wide power consumption that there's a 61W (44%) difference between the 8700k and 9900k despite the same 95W TDP. The new Threadrippers with some cores disabled appear to save ~ 5 - 10% in power draw compared to their full-fat counterparts yet have the same official TDP.

If it's not possible to isolate CPU power usage while running a benchmark just use the measured system-wide power consumption. That's what end users will be paying their electricity company for anyway.

Hi, I agree with Lanky123, the Bang4Watt score is useless, as all it takes is to see the actual power consumption and things start to be different. Intel is using legal hole, to show his CPU at 95W, though for most of the time, when taxed, it will go over it a lot.
So for the people who actually care the Bang4Watt, they would likely use the real measurements and not label numbers.

And so-so gaming? These machines most of the time have powerful GPUs and 4K screen attached to them. Gaming is on the par,but they beat Intel in production. So…

Lanky123
Enough with the TDP derived Bang4Watt scores…they're just so detached from reality as to be worthless. You can see on the Blender system-wide power consumption that there's a 61W (44%) difference between the 8700k and 9900k despite the same 95W TDP. The new Threadrippers with some cores disabled appear to save ~ 5 - 10% in power draw compared to their full-fat counterparts yet have the same official TDP.

If it's not possible to isolate CPU power usage while running a benchmark just use the measured system-wide power consumption. That's what end users will be paying their electricity company for anyway.

Actually, I think Anandtech have a better approach looking at the power usage - https://www.anandtech.com/show/13516/the-amd-threadripper-2-cpu-review-pt2-2970wx-2920x/2

When you look at something like the i9 9900k using 168W at full load, when it is meant to be a 95W part, it definitely shows up the difference in how Intel and AMD define the TDP. AMD is closer to reality it seems.

Does not look like my earlier attempt at comment made it.

Be interesting to see results with Processor affinity set to exclude Core Zero as this has seen performance uplifts in some area's per the article issues with core/thread utilisation issues.

Review: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX and 2920X

Conclusion

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