AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX Box

Product Information

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. The 5995WX was on par with the 5950X in Watch Dogs: Legion making it 15% faster than the 3990X, but much slower than the 12900K. Introduces new Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 WX-Series processors, the ultimate workstation platform from OEMs including Dell Technologies, HP, and Lenovo – AMD's work continues, and the company highlighted a 2.3X improvement in the ANSYS mechanical simulation software after code tuning and a 200X improvement in the Autodesk Arnold rendering software. These projects continue with other software providers, which isn't surprising given AMD's continuing market share gains in the workstation market. And all of this isn't to mention the sheer computational heft afforded by beefy core counts and generous slabs of L3 cache. With access to plenty of memory and storage throughput, we expect that AMD will carve out substantial wins in many categories, especially relative to Intel's Xeon W series that already struggles against the previous-gen Threadripper lineup.

The Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX provided by AMD for review features 24 cores / 48 threads with up to a 4.5GHz boost frequency and a 3.8GHz base frequency. All of the Ryzen Threadripper PRO SKUs are rated for a 280 Watt TDP. According to Geekbench 5, the average single-and multi-core scores for the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X are 1,285 points and 22,366 points, respectively. We saw a similar single-core margin as with the Pro variant. In this case, however, the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5975WX delivered up to 23.4% higher multi-core performance. The last application benchmark is Blender Open Data and we'll also look at power usage in this test soon. Once again when it comes to rendering benchmarks the 5995WX is generally only a little faster than the older 3990X, here we're looking at 7% more performance, so nothing to write home about. System Power Consumption 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. Rainbow Six Extraction sees similar margins to that of Hitman 3, the 5995WX was 4% slower than the 5950X, but 10% faster than the 3990X. However, removing the power limits allowed the 5995WX to match the 5950X.Both AMD and NVIDIA offer compelling graphics options for Threadripper and Threadripper PRO-powered workstations. 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. Except for the quad-channel Ryzen Threadripper 3000 chips, all of the above AMD and Intel processors support eight channels of DDR4-3200 ECC memory. Threadripper Pro supports a maximum of 2TB of memory in UDIMM, RDIMM, and LRDIMM flavors, while Xeon W-3300 supports up to 4TB. That's not to mention that AMD's core/thread counts weigh in at 64/128 compared to Intel's 38/76. This same theory also applies to storage; given Threadripper's support for 128 lanes of PCIe 4.0, speedy performance with NVMe SSDs is essential. AMD claims the Threadripper 5000 WX-series also offers superior performance in storage-bound workloads, thus maximizing the investment in costly storage arrays. If you're familiar with the Threadripper 3000 processors, then this new 5000 series won't offer any surprises, it's basically the same deal. The layout is much the same and the power consumption is much the same, therefore the cooling requirements are about equal.

We won't go through the above album of benchmarks in detail, they speak for themselves, but there are more important broader considerations at play. For multithreaded workloads, Threadripper PRO processors offer up to 96 cores and 192 threads, the most cores of any workstation processor for complex simulation, generative design, rendering, and software compilation tasks, where users can see up to two times faster performance in tools like Chaos V-Ray. 3 Additionally, Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 WX-Series processors offer up to 384MB of L3 cache along with eight channels for DDR5 memory for applications which require high memory capacity and bandwidth. The Threadripper 7000 Series is built to enable powerful I/O for desktop users, with up to 48 PCIe Gen 5.0 lanes for graphics, storage, and more. Capable of twice the memory bandwidth of typical dual-channel desktop systems, the quad-channel DDR5 memory controller on Ryzen Threadripper 7000 Series processors can support even the most intensive workflows. Processor The Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5975WX ended up with 30.5% higher single-core performance than the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3975WX. We had to disregard the multi-core score because it's impossible that both 32-core chips would perform similary, taking into consideration the significant difference in the single-core tests. The Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5975WX run may be bugged.The single core gains are more impressive, here the 5995WX was 14% faster than the 3990X, but also 9% slower than the 5950X and almost 30% slower than the 12900K. We had been actively testing for alternatives, the Core i9-12900K was amazing at scrubbing through timelines for general editing, but as soon as we wanted to stabilize more than a dozen clips at once, the system became unusable and would often crash. Meaning we had to stabilize clips in batches, saving after each batch was complete before starting the next batch. It wasted a lot of time and the encoding process was also slower. Another big difference is memory support. Whereas AM4 processors support dual-channel memory, HEDT chips like the 3970X and 3990X utilize quad-channel memory. However, the Threadripper Pro series goes a step further by supporting octa-channel memory. That's eight DDR4 memory channels just like it's offered on Epyc server processors. We're also looking at comparable performance between the 5995WX and 5950X in Horizon Zero Dawn, meaning the new 64-core processor is 17% faster than its predecessor. Cooling As we mentioned before, Steve and Tim's video editing workstations are currently using the Threadripper 3970X and 3990X and while both have been game changing, allowing us to stabilize dozens upon dozens of b-roll clips at once while also providing impressive encoding performance, the recent upgrade to a Panasonic GH6 mirrorless camera has caused a few editing related headaches.