Has anyone tested the 2990WX or 2950X with V-Ray yet?
I saw that too. I’m wondering if this is the same benchmark used on the official VRay Bench site. The 7980XE clocks in at just under 27 seconds on that chart.
Well, you’re looking at the top result which means it was likely overclocked pedal to the metal, very likely with exotic cooling solution and to the point of failing only for the purpose of the benchmark before it shuts down from overheating. You’ll never achieve such score under normal usage. Even the guy that did that benchmark says in his own comments that it was overclocked to the moon (the little comment icons to the right) > 4.8 Ghz, 93°C (dangerously high temps for a CPU!), loud, LM (LM most likely means liquid metal aftermarket thermal paste such as Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut so it was also likely delidded which voids your warranty and can destroy your CPU). The real result of 7980XE (not overclocked, loud and smoldering hot) is 37 seconds, not 27 seconds:
I just got my 2990wx’s today and they are amazing with vray.
I have upgraded 4 “old” 1950x’s with 2990’s
Congrats! Post some Vray benchmark results, will ya! 
I searched on the official results page and there were none done with 2990WX.
Well, that certainly puts a new spin on things I guess I’ve been putting too much trust in the “@ 2.60ghz” on those scores without digging into the user notes. I had been considering a refurb HP with dual E5-2696 v3 but incorrectly assumed it was scoring around the same as the stock 7980XE all this time so decided to wait for The Threadripper 2 instead. I may have missed out on a good deal on those Xeons in the process 
I’m not able to access a desktop for the next few days and it seems that the little “notes” icons on the right of score details don’t work in Safari on iOS. Trying to find a way to read those details to get a better idea of how these CPUs compare without overclocking.
There is only one result for the 2990WX on the V-ray bench site, and it’s 30 seconds.
The median for a 1950X is about 45 seconds (and that’s exactly what mine does it in, incidentally)
So it’s not very impressive considering the 2990 is over 2x the price of the 1950, but it’s only one result. Early days.
That’s certainly a bit strange of a result. In a lot of places I’m seeing 26-22 seconds for 2990WX. Maybe that user with the 30 seconds result didn’t have his PC set up properly or was using the old motherboards. For example, the Threadripper 2990WX requires the new motherboards with beefier power phases like MSI MEG Creation X399 to unfold its full potential since it’s a 32-core 250W CPU and the older motherboards have weaker power phases:
I think 22-30 seconds shoud be correct. Cinebench score is 5000-6000 points depending on the core multiplier. 30-41 was tested by many, and it`s pretty much a choice of how much Watts you want to burn and cool. Der Bauer have good video on youtube and sweet spot for reasonable efficiency seems to be around 3.7-3.8 Ghz per core.
Does anyone have 2990WX CPU and test it on some heavy max scene with vray please? Benchmarks are one thing, but heavy scene with much more RAM to use is another. Please is it ok, is CPU using whole RAM and is there some slowdowns due to four channel memory?
Thank you.
That 30sec result was my first attempt at the benchmark.
I noticed that windows wasn’t letting me use 100% cpu due to a power management setting so I re-flashed the bios and adjusted windows power management and it has been running at 100% since.
Also I am running an older x399 motherboard so potentially that might slows things down slightly.
26-27 secs is what I am getting on the vray benchmark without overclocking. So with some overclocking that should come down. Early days
On scenes with large memory usage the 2990wx takes a little bit longer to get going than the 1950x but once the memory is loaded then it races through.
If anyone has a scene that they want to try on the 2990wx’s PM me and we can sort it out
Do you have any stats on temperatures and Power consumption? I forget the exact number but the TR1 throttled at around 61 degrees, or when consuming more that 178W if I recall correctly.
I just had confirmation that mine is ready to be picked up from the store - I’m debating on whether it’s an upgrade of a new build. Your render times are looking promising. I don’t like the fact that AMD have said that warranty is void if you OC the second gen TR.
AMD Ryzen CPUs use two different metrics to report the temperature so it’s important to specify which metric you are talking about - Tctl or Tdie? The temperature at which 1950X throttles is 95°C Tctl (which is 68°C tDie). To understand the difference between Tctl and Tdie you may want to check this article. I highly recommending reading it but long story short, for Threadripper Tctl temperature is tDie temperature +27°C.
If a monitoring program (like HWMonitor for example) doesn’t say specifically whether the temperature it displays is the Tctl or Tdie temp, then it most likely displays the Tctl temp (for which 1950X throttles at 95°C). Here’s a screenshot of a program that shows the temperature as both Tctl and Tdie (notice the 27°C difference between the two). And here’s example of a program that only says “CPU temperature” without specifying if it’s Tctl or Tdie which typically means that it displays Tctl temperature.
I’ve got my 1950X running perfectly fine without throttling even when it gets to 80-85°C (as measured by HWMonitor).
As for wattage, I don’t think it will throttle when consuming more than 178W like you said. I regularly see 300W-350W power draw (as measured by HWMonitor) when I run my CPU at 3.9Ghz on all 16 cores and it has never throttled.
Hey Alex, what cooling solution are you using for your 1950x? I am using two fans and couldn’t pass 3.8GHz while keeping it under 95C Tctl.
I was reading about NVIDIA’s next GPU’s, which are 24GB GeForce RTX 2080 (or RTX 2080 Ti) that will cost around $1200. With a few of these, I might start using V-Ray RT. For around $5000 I might be able to build a good rig, maybe with the AMD Threadripper 2.
95C Tctl is very high. I wouldn’t run my CPU even close to this. Is it hot in the room where this PC is? I’m using a Noctua NH-U14S air cooler so nothing special like AIOs or custom water cooling. The ambient (room) temperature, PC case design and number of case fans are as important as a good CPU cooler. At 3.9 Ghz (all core OC) and 1.328V CPU core voltage, in long rendering session (40-50 min) CPU temps get indeed a bit toasty - up to 80-82°C but the CPU should handle them fine. The room is kept at a constant temperature of 23°C at all times. My case also has 3 low noise 140mm intake fans in the front to help bring fresh cold air inside the case and a rear fan taking away the warm air as quickly as possible which is controlled by the CPU temp (revs up into high RPMs if the CPU temperature rises and barely spins if the CPU is cold). Not to mention that even exactly the same model CPUs can be different in their capabilities. Some can overclock higher without producing that much heat and some can’t overclock very high without producing lots of heat. This is known as “the silicon lottery”.
I’m waiting to see how these new RTX GPUs perform too but I’m also keeping an eye on the 2990WX. About a year ago we were about to switch to GPU rendering, but after upgrading to 16-core CPUs, which seem to be fast enough for us for now, this idea faded away. And now with this 32-core CPU it makes it even harder to consider moving to pure GPU rendering unless the new RTX GPUs are cheap enough and offer something like at least 2x improvement in speed and RAM capacity over 1080ti. I just can’t be bothered to adhere and work around the limitations of GPU rendering if speed and ease of use don’t compensate for all of this. Not to mention that last time I tried GPU rendering its IPR didn’t produce accurate representation of the lighting (especially for interior spaces where bounced rays are very important), since it didn’t support light cached secondary rays in IPR. At least with CPU rendering I know that every feature is supported and I can fit almost anything into the RAM.
Thank you @Alex_M . My issue might be the room temperature as I am using the exact same air cooler and actually I put two there to do a push-and-pull, but the temperature is still high. My room ambient temp is probably around 28C. What is your motherboard? Do you OC through the BIOS or the utility that comes with AMD?
The motherboard is AsRock X399 Taichi. I overclock through BIOS. Also check if the PC has enough free space around it because if it’s blocked by a desk or a wall the cool air won’t have anywhere to come from and the hot air won’t have anywhere to escape. Also if possible keep the case on the ground since the air there is colder (cold air is denser/heavier and tends to fall to the ground).
Sorry I meant tdie temps. And the safety feature I mentioned due to the wattage arrose from this AMD response - I was asking them why my clock speeds were 3.4GHz whilst using Vray when I’d sometimes see all core running much high clock speeds.
“The throttle temperature is around 85c, however if you are running stock settings then you will most likely be limited more by power draw (wattage) than temperatures. For example, once the power draw exceeeds 180W, the clock will drop to keep things in check.
Your temperatures are good, but using a custom water cooling block will definitely help and will give you a bit more headroom for higher clock speeds at stock settings. That said, if you were to overclock manually using Ryzen Threadripper Mastertool (which we recently updated on our website so a newer version) then the power draw limitation, along with other power saving features like C States etc, are completely disabled. In this scenario, you would only see a clock frequency drop if you saw temperatures in excess of 85c or thereabouts.
I hope that helps.
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I am using AsRock X399 Fatal1ty but it should be fairly similar to the Taichi. I recall I was fiddling with the BIOS settings for a while but fail to make it stably running above 3.8 GHz without Tctl hitting 95C after rendering for like 10 minutes. Now I am running it at 3.75Ghz and still can see it pushing close to 90+C Tctl.
My room temp is probably 5C higher than yours and the space around the PC isn’t super open for air flow. A bit against the wall with some room inbetween.
Did you follow a specific guide for OC? If you have your OC setting documented somewhere, I’d love to follow your settings to give it another go to see if I can push it toward 3.9GHz.