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2990WX Vs. i9-7980XE Review - Different KINGS for Different THINGS

2018-08-13
over a year ago AMD introduced their thread Ripper CPU which was 16 cores and 32 threads however this year they've decided to double up and introduce a consumer CPU with 32 cores and 64 threads and that is the 2990 WX and we've got this right here today in the tech yet studio and we're gonna run it through all its paces versus intel's flagship cpu and that is the i9 79-80 XP now I've clocked these both at 4 gigahertz so it's going to be apples to apples in clock speeds and also we're gonna test the out-of-the-box default speeds for those people who don't like delving into overclocks so strap on in get ready and let's see this showdown of these two behemoths in productivity benchmarks welcome back to takia city and first of all we've got 32 cores 64 threads of 12 nanometer plus architecture from AMD the improvements they have made this time around is not just delivering more cause and more threads but also focusing on dropping the latency which is very important for not just end user results but also improving productivity scores not to mention the CPUs in general can overclock higher than the previous generation 1000 series thanks to the 12 nanometer refined process note that AMD is using but another thing to mention with these CPUs these high-end skews that AMD are introducing is that they use the top 5% of dies they actually bend them to be the most efficient in in turn giving you the most power efficiency and the best overclocks for your 32 cores and 64 threads if you wish to purchase it now price-wise we're looking at 799 USD so it is quite an ask and first of all I will say before we get into benchmarks is this is a CPU that's not geared towards gamers if gaming is your number one priority there are much cheaper and much better options and especially for bang for buck but also getting absolute performance for your dollar today's focus is going to be on productivity benchmarks these real high-end desktop CPUs have a specific purpose in my opinion and that is for people who want to reduce their work time and actually make things more efficient in their office environment so with that in mind we'll quickly roll out the meat and potatoes of this review and the first benchmark I'll pull up here is 7-zip if you're into decompressing and compressing this is where the AMD CPU scored a monster victory in terms of its decompressing numbers the compressing numbers did fall a little bit behind so I'm not entirely sure why this is but it's important to note that AMD is still using quad channel memory with the 32 cores that could be a limiting factor in perhaps the compression side of things but in terms of the decompressing side scored a monster victory over Intel here moving over to handbrake and more of a real-world benchmark to change things up when transcoding a 4k video file to 1080p 30fps and what we saw here was the 79 80 X e did score a slight victory both at default and overclocked settings when it came to comparing it to the 32 call option and this of course is just to do with thread utilization which inba this particular benchmark was at about forty to sixty percent for the AMD cpu so it wasn't fully utilizing those calls and threads for transcoding video and the utilization is going to be a big factor in the outcome of today's conclusion so stay tuned and notice that because we're moving on now to v-ray which is a simulator benchmark and here we have a hundred percent utilization and we can see that the 32 core sixty four threaded twenty nine ninety WX scores a victory both on default and even on overclocked settings it goes faster and it just comes out ahead of the 79 80 X e moving over to pov-ray 3.7 this is a benchmark that again scored a victory for the AMD counterpart and it did score quite a sizable victory again with a hundred percent CPU utilization now moving over to another benchmark that I started throw in the mix is the DPC latency benchmark because AMD do make a big note of showing that their latency has improved with the 32 or 64 thread adoption and this is showing with the DPC latency checker maxing out at around 12 56 nanoseconds and a thousand when you overclock it and the Intel side of things did score slightly better so if you're on a music production both these CPUs will do a good job but if you are looking to do a specific program then you may wish to ask the maker of that program which CPU and how many cores and threads is the sweet spot again the utilization thing I'm probably gonna keep reminding you guys throughout this video why it's important because that money out of your wallet is going to be related and correlated to the value for money of the utilization in that benchmark or in that application that you're going to use the majority of the time and now speaking of the majority of the time I personally use Adobe a lot Adobe Premiere Pro and Photoshop and pretty much my go-to applications for getting you guys content and here we have the premier Pro benchmark with its recent updates and optimizations for Intel CPUs showing the 79 80 XE is scoring quite a sizable victory here near some of the victory sizes that we saw when the AMD CPUs at a hundred percent utilization but unfortunately for the 32 core monster it was only getting utilized at around 30 to 50 percent as opposed to the Intel CPU which is going near a hundred percent on this particular benchmark which enabled it to smash through this render and score a big victory here however continuing on with Adobe one benchmark that I saw at the launch event was dimension and this is a new program that I don't have a whole lot of experience with personally though AMD did make a note at the event that their CPUs and threads were getting a hundred percent utilization even on the twenty nine ninety WX doing my own little tests here with the AMD benchmark provided I couldn't initially get it to work properly but I did find one setting at a thousand and twenty four by seven six eight resolution that did give us some numbers and it showed that it was beating the 79 80 XE not by a whole lot but it's still a victory regardless and moving on now to DaVinci Resolve so testing an individual 30-minute render file out it showed that the CPU on the intel side the 79 80 XE did score a victory when we're doing 4k ultra mp4 output so moving on with some more simulated benchmarks here we have Cinebench of course being one of the most popular and poster child's for utilizing cpu cores and threads and the 2990 WS did not disappoint scoring over 6,000 points at 4 gigahertz with the Animax cooler I also tested the Wraiths Ripper cooler both did a fine job of handling the CPU at those said speeds now the default speeds scored just over 5,000 contrast that to the Intel side of things 3900 and round over 3,300 points on default the single threaded scores were still slightly advantageous for the Intel but that was at the same clock speed so the IPC benefit is slightly better on Intel side of things though moving on to power consumption when I tested in I 264 the 18 core of course having a lot less calls and threads did score better and power consumption from the wall both overclocked and on default settings the 32 core 64 threaded monster did start to use up a lot more power as you go past 3.4 gig oh it's going over to 4 gigahertz didn't see near an extra what's being juice from the wall so your mileage may vary with overclocks but I think around 4 gigahertz is a nice sweet spot for this CPU especially on 32 cores though another thing we can see from those Cinebench scores is that the out-of-the-box turbo speeds what I'm noticing is we're getting anywhere from three point two to three point four gigahertz on all cores on the AMD side of things the precision overdrive didn't really change this with the Cinebench score still core scoring five thousand points as opposed to default speeds I think the motherboard manufacturers are probably already pre overclocking the CPU just a little bit on the intel side of things you're getting around 3.4 gigahertz on all cores out of the box and a turbo up to 4.2 you got so when manually setting both these CPUs to 4 gigahertz the single core performance actually does slightly better on default settings because those single turbo boosts on both AMD which goes from around four point zero five to four point one five gigahertz and on Intel site which goes to four point two gigahertz is higher than that four gigahertz though the next thing that we're pulling up now is w prime where I'm pretty sure the W stands for what mate and we've got here the thread Ripper CPU of four gigahertz getting twenty eight seconds and 33 seconds on the larger test but on the smaller test it's actually falling behind by just a slight ever-so amount so it was interesting to see Intel pull ahead on the smaller test but then winning for the AMD on the bigger test I guess it just takes time to ramp up all those calls and threads and when it does that's when thread rip off takes advantage and takes the victory and now with winding out the benchmarks we'll do some quick gaming benchmarks for you guys 3d mark 5 strike really showed that the 32 cores is not your best option for gaming we saw some weird results here where essentially with the for dianne abled on the AMD side of things we were getting really low scores on both the GPU and the CPU side of things a 79 80 XE did score a big victory here but there is an option in the rise and master software which you can use for overclocking that allows you to turn it into game mode which essentially just enables one die and then you'll get much better results and of course this will translate into better results for gaming but when we look at gaming benchmarks like csgo leaving it in creative mode and especially for streaming we consider the 79 80 XE still does pull ahead on both default and overclocked settings and then go into streaming it doesn't really drop it all on the aim DS side of things because it does have a lot of headroom for the intel is still beating it out so winding down the gaming benchmarks and one interesting thing to note is that Windows is currently recognizing this CPU as essentially four died and that's different to the 79 80 XE which is recognized as a single CPU in Windows so AMD do tell me that they are working with Microsoft to patch the scheduler and help fix things down hopefully this will translate into better 3dmark firestrike scores in creative mode as well but as it stands you've got quad channel memory and 32 cores but if you are into gaming and streaming then I will be taking a look at the 29 50 X which comes in practically half the price of the 2990 WX and you still got quad channel memory and a lot of headroom in terms of cores and threads so stay tuned for that but what we've got here is a CPU that's geared towards productivity if the application can utilize 32 cores and 64 threads that's where you're gonna see a massive benefit with the thread Ripper 2990 WX now of course the amount of applications that can utilize this many threads in this many cores properly is still yet to be seen I'm just using some benchmarks here and of course I'm using some of the programs that I use in my workflow and it still isn't showing a hundred percent utilization for the 2990 WX that's up to software developers to catch up if they want to fully utilize the potential of this CPU here and I think in ways it's sort of geared up towards the future the CPU and in some cases if you're looking at Maya Arnel Brenda which unfortunately I couldn't get it to work on my computer at least the test bench and I did try a couple of different motherboards because I have three different motherboards here try different coolers and updating biases in different memory and I still couldn't get this benchmark to work it must have just been some settings that went wrong but anyway Meier aside this CPU especially with some of those Mark's like v-ray Cinebench 7-zip showed the potential of the 32 core 64 threads and at 1,800 us this thing is an absolute monster not only in its total performance but also its performance per dollar I'm really impressed what AMD are bringing to the table especially in 2018 they're really forcing Intel to step up their game as well as bringing their own game to the market and they're gaining a lot of market share so it's really good times in the cpu market in 2018 and if you ask me a couple of years ago if we're gonna see 32 cores 64 threads for 1,800 US dollars in 2018 I would have said no way that's not possible but AMD is doing that and of course how relevant this CPU is for you as a user all depends on your workflow and the applications that you're going to use if you can utilize this CPU 100 percent or even near that then you're gonna get really good value for money and you're gonna be saving a lot of time as well however you can't use that then you can look at some of the other options available and of course save some money but in terms of which should you buy the 79 80 X II or the 32 core 2990 WX again that remains up to you what is your main priority are you using just Adobe or are you using a lot of other applications that can utilize all those cores and threads and even though Doby does utilize all the cores and threads for Intel hopefully Adobe can span that optimization to AMD pretty soon and then would be seeing some different results as we saw here today in this review anyway guys I hope you enjoyed this one if you did then be sure to hit that like button if you have any questions or comments about the 2990 WX then be sure to hit me up in the comment section below and also stay tuned on the channel I'll have some more content coming in relation to the 2950 X and also some coolers on x3 nine-nine and if you want to get that content as soon as it comes out then be sure to hit the sub button and that bail notification and turn notifications on because apparently YouTube's telling me that if you guys want the videos and you don't want to miss them then just saying sub nowadays isn't enough who knows maybe the guys that you tube and Google could use some thread Ripper 2990 wxc be using their service that way their service wouldn't glitch as much anyway I'll catch you guys in another tech video very soon peace out for now bye okay so today we've got 32 cores 64 threads on the line alright so here it is ladies that'll start off a good video hey here it is ladies and gentlemen a twenty nine nine
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