Power Consumption, Overclocking, and Pricing

The power consumption of the new Threadripper parts is nearly identical to their 32 and 16 core siblings.

In general, the performance increases afforded by the Threadripper 2970WX in heavily threaded applications compared to the i9-7980XE will also come with a 25% increase in power consumption.

However, this gap shrinks to around 5% when comparing the Threadripper 2920X to the Core i9-7900X.

Overclocking

While we only had time to put the 2970WX through its paces, we were able to hit 4.1GHz on all cores at a voltage of 1.4V. This overclock placed our Cinebench score at just under 5000, for a 14% increase in performance.

At 4.1GHz, the 2970WX drew a total of 605W total system power, a massive 260 W increase over stock.

Pricing and Availability

The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2920X and 2970WX processors are set to become available today for a price of $649 and $1299 respectively. 

Compared to Intel's aging Core-X lineup, the second generation Threadripper lineup is a fresh breath of air. While Intel has announced updated SKUs before the end of the year, it remains to be seen if the clock speed increases will substantially change the performance landscape

At $649, the Threadripper 2920X becomes a compelling AMD alternative to Intel's new 8-core Core i9-9900K. While the MSRPs are about $150 apart, given the general unavailability of the i9-9900K and current price hikes, consumers looking for a good balance between single-threaded performance, multi-threaded capability, and more importantly price, would do well to consider the Threadripper 2920X.

While the X399 platform will still be slightly more expensive than a high-end Z370 or Z390 motherboard, the additional capabilities afforded by Threadripper in the form of 64 PCI-Express lanes will be convincing for some enthusiasts. 

Additionally, I would expect the TR4 socket to be unchanged for at least a couple more generations, making the Threadripper 2920X a great entry into the Threadripper ecosystem.

Similarly, the Threadripper 2970WX provides a lot of value compared to Intel's Core-X lineup. For $700 less, users can get an addition entire mainstream level CPU's worth of cores compared to the i9-7980XE. While the same performance tradeoffs we observed with our initial 2990WX review still apply in single-threaded workloads, the improvements to NVIDIA drivers as well as AMD's Dynamic Local mode seem to help this a bit.

In fact, because of the massive price difference, I would recommend the 2970WX over the 2990WX to anyone who has been on the fence about the 32-core option. Unless your machine is solely dedicated to rendering, the additional 8-cores will not give a substantial performance advantage, especially considering the $500 price difference.

For providing an impressive amount of value at it's $649 price tag, the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2920X is awarded the PC Perspective Editor's Choice award. For enthusiasts looking to step up their core count, but don't necessarily have a need for 16 core, the 2920X is a great entry to the Threadripper platform.

Bringing the cost of very high core count processors down to a more attainable level, the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX wins a PC Perspective Gold Award. While some applications still won't be able to take advantage of the high core count, AMD is offering 24 CPU cores for less $700 than Intel's 18-core count option.

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