New workstation :New Threadripper 3960X or 3970X or Ryzen 3950X

[super gnu]

i am very pleasantly surprised by the massive improvement in vray over the 2990.. makes me hesitate about waiting for the 8ch ones.

for me, i suspect the 48 core might be the sweet spot.. double the memory bandwith than the 32 core, 50% more cores (more bandwith per core) and hopefully more reasonable price/performance and higher clockspeeds than the 64 core.

trouble is, by the time *those* come out, we are already going to have more concrete information about zen3, which is also due out next year and promises even bigger IPC and clockspeed improvements than zen2...

i might just buy some AMD stock.

[psanitra]

super gnu yeah, i wish they released whole lineup same time, would have been easier to make a decision. I guess they just postponed it so they can hold on to the 8core chiplets for as long as possible - to sell it in EPYC market. Selling those in HEDT, less profit

I was also expecting 48core to be sweet spot, but after yesterday i think 32 core is the sweetspot for me. It`s a solid upgrade over my 2990WX. Specially single thread performance was a huge surprise.

48/64 core will bring significantly lower clock speeds , 64 probably as low as 3Ghz per core and boost to 3.4Ghz. That would be my guess, based on the 280W TDP they want to keep. Such a frequencies will be sub-optimal for desktop/single thread, daily work. And from $ per thread efficiency it looks questionable too, they going to ask 4k for it maybe?

They were positive on the future compatibility of TR40/80/W80 platform,so probably next year zen3 will work on current boards, thats good news.

[sirio]

Review are out, performance of 3970X is just nuts

From that benchmark seems that 3970 is almost twice as fast as the 2990(same number of cores), an ~85% jump in IPC seems unrealistic and not in line with every other benchmark(less than 20% on average), experience tells me that when something is too good to be true, it is usually false(or at least represents a very specific scenario). Also core for core Intel had a slight advantage over AMD but looks weird to see the 10980 being significantly faster than the 2990 since is a 18core VS a 32core. I'm not sure what is going on but a common problem with all recent rendering benchmarks is that both CPU and render engines have become extremely fast while scenes remained fairly simple.
The new TR will be great for rendering(not that much though) considering the price, for editing I'm not so sure considering the previous generation performance.

[psanitra]

There are plenty of data around to show how much better TR3 is over 2nd gen, specially over 2990WX, which is a seriosly gimped architecture(specialy on windows),that is choking on complex scenes with limited bandwidth. I`m using it daily over a year, on both Linux and Windows so this is first hand experience.

"looks weird to see the 10980 being significantly faster than the 2990 since is a 18core VS a 32core." - nothing weird here. It`s not only about core count...

If you want to check some non mainstream, non youtubers , but solid reviews check Phoronoix https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...0x-3970x&num=7 , the geometric mean of 111 benchmarks comes to 57% speedup. Sound good enough to me!

[sirio]

Those benchmarks shows exactly what I'm saying, every modern renderer should maximize core usage so results should be mostly consistent across different engine(of course some renderer may be more fine tuned than other so slightly difference should be expected). I mean.. just looking at that results, there are benchmarks where the 10980 is faster than the 3970, other where is faster than the 2990, other where is slower than both, pretty much unconclusive to me
I'm sure that 3970 will be a great choice for render tasks and will be significantly faster than the 2990(and of course Intel offer), but twice as fast in most scene? likely not, I'll believe that when I'll see a complex render made in 1h instead of 2h using bucket sampler.
BTW, I never look at youtube usually look at Phoronix and Servethehome reviews, that being said I take all of that with a large grain of salt since those reviews are made by people with zero knowledge in 3D and benchmarks maybe not representative of real world usage. I always prefer firts hand experience(hopefully unbiased) from people who actually use the hardware in a 3D pipeline, especially if they are doing scenes similar to mine.

[super gnu]

Im not sure we are looking at the same benchmark page there? To me, that says (as concluded by the review too) that the 3970 rocks. Averaging 57% faster than its predecessor for the same core count. not really inconclusive at all. A few outliers where (probably) either the compiler was extremely intel preferential, or the renderer made heavy use of avx512 which only the intel chip has.

i agree that real-world testing is far preferential to benchmarking, and i certainly wouldnt be buying one without seeing feedback from real-world users. however, given the architecture is a totally known quantity now, due to the previous ryzen 3xxx, the clock speeds are now known, its not exactly a stretch to imagine how good it will be real-world. The only unknown really is memory bandwidth and latency issues, which is what caused all the 2nd gen 32 core problems. Results in all reviews so far seem to suggest that this issue has been put to bed.

vray was always a bit sensitive to NUMA issues, which means the 81% speedup may not be too far from the truth.

[psanitra]

It was avx512 indeed, it`s actually written under the image for that specific benchmark where 10980 was faster...., and that was not a render benchmark

[fraggle]

Those benchmarks shows exactly what I'm saying, every modern renderer should maximize core usage so results should be mostly consistent across different engine(of course some renderer may be more fine tuned than other so slightly difference should be expected). I mean.. just looking at that results, there are benchmarks where the 10980 is faster than the 3970, other where is faster than the 2990, other where is slower than both, pretty much unconclusive to me
I'm sure that 3970 will be a great choice for render tasks and will be significantly faster than the 2990(and of course Intel offer), but twice as fast in most scene? likely not, I'll believe that when I'll see a complex render made in 1h instead of 2h using bucket sampler.
BTW, I never look at youtube usually look at Phoronix and Servethehome reviews, that being said I take all of that with a large grain of salt since those reviews are made by people with zero knowledge in 3D and benchmarks maybe not representative of real world usage. I always prefer firts hand experience(hopefully unbiased) from people who actually use the hardware in a 3D pipeline, especially if they are doing scenes similar to mine.

On top of that, even the official vray benchmark result show the 3970x slower than plenty of intel with half the core and half the clock, witch goes completely against any logic.

[fraggle]

[damnengine]

Even if those scores are correct, those processors are way more costly than the 3970x. I usually check the benchmarks on pugetsystems https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/ar...-3rd-Gen-1621/

[Karol.Osinski]

There are plenty of data around to show how much better TR3 is over 2nd gen, specially over 2990WX, which is a seriosly gimped architecture(specialy on windows),that is choking on complex scenes with limited bandwidth. I`m using it daily over a year, on both Linux and Windows so this is first hand experience.

Hey psanitra
I think I have to agree with bad 2990wx performance on heavy scenes. We got one for our new workstation like 2 weeks ago and while cpy itself is indeed much faster than the previous i9 7900x, it causes some serious stability issues. My collegue's 25gb RAM scene already crashed like 3 times during the render + some random viewport freezes from time to time. I feel like it's pitty that they did not listen when I suggested to wait like 3 months for a new generation 32 core. Can you tell some more about your experience with 2990wx?

[psanitra]

Karol.Osinski - 2990wx stability issue is not a CPU/AMD architecture issue, it`s a build issue - compatibility of Mobo, Ram, cooling efficiency etc. My build is on custom water loop, carefully chosen components and i have no stability issues, even when running OC all the time. Ram choice on this platform is especially picky on 64/128GB kits.

2990WX perfomances,that can be an issue, depends on the load. There are 2 main factors -

1.W10 internal scheduler not handing multi numa cpu properly
2. Crippled memory IO of TR2 architecture, where only 2 of 4 dies are connected directly.

In case of Windows, and light loads, like benchmarks or simple scenes with little mem bandwith usage, 2990wx will behave as expected. With with heavy scenes, with lot of IO, performance can drop significantly to levels of 2950x even. This was(at the release time) and still partially is the issue of Windows. I`m running Linux alongside with W10, and can provide/proof plenty scenes that render slow on windows and will render up to 2x faster in Linux, exactly because of the scheduler issue.

New TR3 generation is new architecture, and all dies/chiplets are connected to IO die in center, so the is no bandwidth issue.

[AC5L4T3R]

I went with the 3960x, the cost of the extra 8 cores doesn't make sense to me, especially when the benchmarks are showing it's not a huge difference between the two. I did consider the 3950x but with quad channel memory (I'm aiming for 128gb for Houdini sims) it was an easier choice.

Here is my final config:

PCPartPicker Part List: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/9xqpBZ

CPU: AMD Threadripper 3960X 3.8 GHz 24-Core Processor (£1349.99 @ CCL Computers)
CPU Cooler: Corsair H150i PRO 47.3 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler (£129.97 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: Asus Zenith II Extreme EATX sTRX4 Motherboard (£691.96 @ More Computers)
Memory: G.Skill Trident Z Neo 64 GB (4 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 Memory (£401.05 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive (£89.76 @ CCL Computers)
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive (£154.38 @ Aria PC)
Video Card: MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11 GB VENTUS OC Video Card (£1099.93 @ CCL Computers)
Case: Lian Li PC-O11 Dynamic ATX Full Tower Case (£115.00 @ Currys PC World)
Power Supply: Corsair 1000 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply (£209.99 @ Corsair UK)
Total: £4242.03
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-12-03 08:29 GMT+0000

[suurland]

I went with the 3960x, the cost of the extra 8 cores doesn't make sense to me, especially when the benchmarks are showing it's not a huge difference between the two. I did consider the 3950x but with quad channel memory (I'm aiming for 128gb for Houdini sims) it was an easier choice.

Here is my final config:

PCPartPicker Part List: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/9xqpBZ

CPU: AMD Threadripper 3960X 3.8 GHz 24-Core Processor (£1349.99 @ CCL Computers)
CPU Cooler: Corsair H150i PRO 47.3 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler (£129.97 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: Asus Zenith II Extreme EATX sTRX4 Motherboard (£691.96 @ More Computers)
Memory: G.Skill Trident Z Neo 64 GB (4 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 Memory (£401.05 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive (£89.76 @ CCL Computers)
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive (£154.38 @ Aria PC)
Video Card: MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11 GB VENTUS OC Video Card (£1099.93 @ CCL Computers)
Case: Lian Li PC-O11 Dynamic ATX Full Tower Case (£115.00 @ Currys PC World)
Power Supply: Corsair 1000 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply (£209.99 @ Corsair UK)
Total: £4242.03
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-12-03 08:29 GMT+0000

Looks very close to what I'm looking into.

I'm not sure about what ram to get though, you picked F4-3600C16Q-64GTZNC with timmings 16-19-19-39 and not the more expensive F4-3600C16Q-64GTZNC with 16-16-16-36, I know very little about ram so if anyone have any insight.

Also what fans will you be getting? the case you picked is not the air version so how do you plan to mount the fans as you can't get air in from the front?

/Thomas

[Alex_M]

I went with the 3960x, the cost of the extra 8 cores doesn't make sense to me, especially when the benchmarks are showing it's not a huge difference between the two. I did consider the 3950x but with quad channel memory (I'm aiming for 128gb for Houdini sims) it was an easier choice.

Here is my final config:

PCPartPicker Part List: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/9xqpBZ

CPU: AMD Threadripper 3960X 3.8 GHz 24-Core Processor (£1349.99 @ CCL Computers)
CPU Cooler: Corsair H150i PRO 47.3 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler (£129.97 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: Asus Zenith II Extreme EATX sTRX4 Motherboard (£691.96 @ More Computers)
Memory: G.Skill Trident Z Neo 64 GB (4 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 Memory (£401.05 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive (£89.76 @ CCL Computers)
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive (£154.38 @ Aria PC)
Video Card: MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11 GB VENTUS OC Video Card (£1099.93 @ CCL Computers)
Case: Lian Li PC-O11 Dynamic ATX Full Tower Case (£115.00 @ Currys PC World)
Power Supply: Corsair 1000 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply (£209.99 @ Corsair UK)
Total: £4242.03
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-12-03 08:29 GMT+0000

That's a very nice system, congrats! Can you share what is your CPU temperature (Tdie) after 10-15 minutes of rendering a heavy scene with the Bucket sampler? Can you also do some tests comparing the CPU and GPU rendering speed in interior and exterior scenes at same Noise Threshold levels? With the GPU rendering in RTX mode instead of CUDA, of course.