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Review: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X

by Tarinder Sandhu on 7 February 2020, 14:01

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD)

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CPU II - Corona, KeyShot, V-Ray, POV-Ray

Corona Renderer is a modern high-performance (un)biased photorealistic renderer, available for Autodesk 3ds Max, MAXON Cinema 4D, and as a standalone application.

It loves cores and threads. The actual render time of 17.92s would put it on the first page (out of over 1,000 pages) for all CPU results, including many, many server boxes housing multiple CPUs. It's quicker than dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 chips that cost ten grand a pop.

The initial results look impressive, right? The problem is that, even at 961fps, the workload is not taxing enough to load the CPU more than 83 percent. The lead over 3970X is 33 per cent.

After speaking with AMD, increasing the Camera Benchmark file resolution to 2,560x1,600 enables all 128 threads to sing at 3.08GHz. The 3990X averages 125.1fps at this setting, compared to 78.2fps for the 3970X. A Core i9-9900KS, which is a pretty darn good consumer CPU, scores 24.8fps, putting performance into some kind of understandable context.

Here's a benchmark that doesn't care about the cores and threads at its disposal - it eats them all up, leading to numbers that are 2.7x higher than the best HEDT chip, Core i9-10980XE, from the competition. Vroom.

POV-Ray, as noted no the system setup page, needs an additional executable file in order to leverage 128 threads. Running the same test as all the other chips, performance is in its own league, as one would rightfully expect.

It is over 3x faster than the aforementioned Intel Core i9, and over twice as speedy as the Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX from last year.