Game mode disables a number of cores (the amount depends on the chip; in the 2950X's case, it disables eight of the 16) and tweaks the RAM to the Local memory (aka "NUMA") mode to favor gaming. If you click an affiliate link and buy a product or service, we may be paid a fee by that merchant.In addition to the Threadripper 2950X, Asus X399 Zenith Extreme, and Thermaltake Floe Riing RGB 360, our testbed includes the following components:We then switched over to our venerable iTunes Conversion Test, using version 10.6 of iTunes. The difference here between the 2950X and the Intels is around 20 percent. We're hoping that no one will be doing much conversion action on software this old on a CPU this cutting-edge, but it's an interesting exercise...The absence of adequate liquid cooling solutions is one of the few reasons why you might not have wanted to buy a Threadripper 1950X. But let's dig into why Threadipper remains a whopper of a bargain for extreme power seekers.Last, we fired up the popular 7-Zip file-compression software and ran its built-in compression and decompression benchmark, which is another useful test of a CPU's multi-core abilities. It's far from the only excellent choice in the high-end desktop (HEDT) market these days, though, since the first-gen Threadripper chips can now be had at significant discounts, and Intel will almost certainly release refreshed Core X-Series Core i7 and i9 CPUs in the next few months.
So we then shifted all of our testing to 1080p.PCMag.com is a leading authority on technology, delivering Labs-based, independent reviews of the latest products and services. PCMag Digital GroupInfinity Fabric results an extraordinarily innovative and scalable CPU design, but it also introduces latency as it passes requests back and forth within the chip. Second-generation Threadripper chips have an updated Extended Frequency Range (XFR) tool, dubbed XFR2, that auto-adjusts the speed of every processor core to extend the amount of time the CPU is overclocked before it gets too hot. It seems Blender prefers a balance of cores and raw clock, rather than simply maximum cores and threads, as indicated by the competitive showings of the Ryzen 7 2700X and Core i7-8700K.You can see a reflection of the single-core Cinebench test here in the iTunes benchmark.
That's within a few frames of what we saw in the past with the various Intel Core X solutions.With the Threadripper 1950X, we were able to get the chip stable at 3.9GHz with various tweaks and by bumping up the voltage a fair amount (1.125V to 1.325V). Testing from many outlets indicated that at 1080p, for example, the maximum frame rates in many games showed some suppression versus the same games, settings, and video card in use on recent high-end Intel silicon.Of note, as mentioned earlier, Threadripper has both a Creator mode and a Game mode that you can switch between using the Ryzen Master software. Cinebench shot up to a score of 3,333, an improvement of just shy of 5 percent. Aside from support for basic technologies that every cutting-edge CPU should have, such as USB 3.1 Gen 2 and PCI Express NVMe for lightning-quick storage, the 2950X is capable of handling 64 PCI Express lanes.