AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5995WX Box

Product Information

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. The new processors are comprised entirely of ‘Golden Cove’ cores — they do not have the hybrid Performance Core (P-Core) / Efficiency Core (E-core) architecture pioneered by 12th Gen and 13th Gen Intel Core processors. Engineering simulation includes Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). FEA can help predict how a product reacts to real-world forces or temperatures. CFD can be used to optimise aerodynamics in cars or predict the impact of wind on buildings. Both types of software are extremely demanding computationally. But there's a problem for enthusiasts — Intel abandoned the consumer-oriented high end desktop (HEDT) market after its crushing defeat three years ago, and now that AMD is the only game in town for HEDT chips, it's also dropping the segment. In short, the 5995WX is a game changer for our workflow and as such it's difficult to put it into the context of percentage gains, it's not just faster, it's wildly more practical. You could say editing is now more playable, to use a gaming term.

Another workflow massively influenced by memory bandwidth is recompiling shaders in Unreal Engine 4.26 which uses all available cores. However, where Threadripper Pro 5995WX loses out in GB/sec it makes up for in cores and all-core frequency, as it still managed to beat the Xeon w9-3495X in our automotive benchmark. We tested all three workstations with a range of real-world applications used in AEC and product development. We also compared performance figures from Intel’s and AMD’s ‘consumer’ processors, including 12th Gen Intel Core (Core i9-12900K), 13th Gen Intel Core (Core i9-13900K), and ‘Zen 4’ AMD Ryzen 7000 Series (AMD Ryzen 7950X), although we did not have a data for all our benchmarks. For our testing we used three select workloads from the SPECworkstation 3.1 benchmark. This includes two CFD benchmarks (Rodinia, which represents compressible flow, and WPCcfd, which models combustion and turbulence) and one FEA benchmark (CalculiX, which models a jet engine turbine’s internal temperature). As most of our benchmarks fit into 32 GB of memory, the fact that we reduced the capacity should have minimal impact on results, although it can’t be ignored altogether. The exception is our Leica Cyclone Register 360 test, which adjusts the number of cores used in relation to system memory. This is why performance drops off massively with 32 GB. 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.

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The biggest potential benefit for ‘Sapphire Rapids’ comes from engineering simulation, specifically CFD. Our tests show that ‘Sapphire Rapids’ can deliver a massive performance boost, largely thanks to its superior memory bandwidth. While solvers and datasets vary, serious users of tools from Ansys, Altair and others should certainly explore what the Xeon W-3400 and 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors can do for them. Extremely complex simulations can take hours, even days to run. Cutting this time in half could deliver monumental benefits to a project. But these days, CAD is often just one of many tools used by architects, engineers and designers, some of which do benefit from having more cores or higher memory bandwidth. So, it’s important to understand how ‘Sapphire Rapids’ performs in CAD.

The Xeon w9-3495X did show a small but significant lead over the Threadripper Pro 5995WX in the rebuild, convert and simulate tests. But the Xeon w9-3495X didn’t have things all its own way, lagging behind in the mass properties and boolean operations tests. 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. The importance to Intel of ‘Sapphire Rapids’ Xeon W-2400 and Xeon W-3400 being a success cannot be overstated. For the last few years AMD has had little in the way of competition in workflows that benefit from many cores or high memory bandwidth. Intel will have certainly felt the impact of Threadripper Pro. To get an idea of pure single threaded performance, albeit through a synthetic rendering test, we also used the Cinebench ST benchmark. Here the Xeon w9-3495X had a clear lead of 22% over the Threadripper Pro 5995WX. Interestingly, despite its significantly lower turbo frequency, the Intel Xeon Platinum 8490H wasn’t that far behind the AMD processor.

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The ThinkStation P620 couldn’t keep pace with the Corsair or Origin in most of these tests, and it’s again a matter of software utilization. As this testing doesn’t employ the Lenovo’s professional hardware as it would be used in the real world, we’ll move on. Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). Point cloud processing software, Leica Cyclone Register 360, assigns threads according to the amount of system memory. On a machine with 64 GB it will run on five threads and on one with 128 GB or more it will run on six.

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.Meanwhile, Xeon W-2400 and Xeon W-3400 supports the latest technologies, including PCIe Gen 5, DDR5 4400/4800 memory (which offers more memory bandwidth than Threadripper Pro’s DDR4 3200) and Intel WiFi 6E. We look forward to putting the Threadripper Pro 5995WX through its paces over the coming months and years, and we hope we can take a look at the 5975WX soon as we feel that model is better suited to our use case. Shopping Shortcuts: