The Threadripper Pro 5995WX is an impressive processor and although for the majority of our testing it wasn't a great deal faster than the 3990X, it can be around 30% faster depending on the workload. However even that percentage gain can be fairly meaningless in a workstation setting, so here's what happened in ours... Intel differentiates its Xeon W-2400 and Xeon W-3400 processor families in two main ways: by number of cores and by memory channels. CAD isn’t a key target workflow for Intel ‘Sapphire Rapids’ or AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro. In fact architects, engineers and designers that only use bread-and-butter design tools like Solidworks, Inventor and Revit, will almost certainly be better served by 12th or 13th Gen Intel Core processors or AMD Ryzen 7000 ( read our comparison article). We put both of these chips through a test suite of professional-class applications, like SPECworkstation and SPECviewperf, along with our standard application test suite. And yes, we put the chips through our gaming test suite to see how they fare.

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. For comparison we've included the Threadripper 3990X which was tested on the MSI Creator TRX40 motherboard using the same Team T-ForceDDR4-3600 memory at 3400. Then we have a few desktop CPUs for comparison: a Ryzen 9 5950X tested with dual-rank DDR4-3200 memory, and the Intel Core i9-12900K using DDR5-6400 memory. The graphics card used for all testing is the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. Let's get into the data... Benchmarks If your product develops a fault outside of the manufacturer warranty or PB Tech warranty period, we offer a full repair service and are an authorised repair agent for leading brands such as Samsung, HP, Toshiba, Lenovo and more. In many ways, AMD ended up cannibalizing its own HEDT products by blurring the lines between HEDT and the mainstream with 16-core Ryzen chips on mainstream motherboards, leaving little reason for most to spend more for extra cores on HEDT.AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO Processors Support for 128 PCIe® 4.0 lanes, which delivers twice the I/O performance over PCIe 3.0. On that note, it's difficult to give something like the 5995WX a value rating, if it can do for you what it can do for us then it's invaluable and will pay for itself. It's a workstation product, designed for professionals and with no retail competition for Intel, it's your best option. We're happy AMD is giving customers the chance to build their own workstation PCs and not forcing them to buy mediocre OEM systems, so that in itself is a win. 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. 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. Now, on to testing the ThinkStation P620. As for competing machines, let’s just say that most of our comparisons will be very large apples to very small mandarin oranges—nay, tangerines. We test our fair share of fast machines, but nothing we’ve reviewed comes remotely close to the sheer power inside this beast.

Our initial testing shows the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 series has massive potential. More accurately, it has all the potential that the software you’re using gives it. 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.The 5995WX was on par with the 5950X in Watch Dogs: Legion making it 15% faster than the 3990X, but much slower than the 12900K. In ray trace rendering, the 64-core Threadripper Pro 5995X still has a considerable lead over the 56-core Xeon w9-3495X. And while Intel may possibly win out at certain price points, simply because it has so many different models across its Xeon W-2400 and W-3400 families, we certainly don’t expect viz specialists to move to ‘Sapphire Rapids’ en masse. Plus, as you move down the range, it will face more competition from 13th Gen Intel Core. Beyond the cores, there are some other significant differences between the two processor families. Compared to the Intel Xeon W-2400, the Intel Xeon W-3400 has more memory capacity (4 TB vs 2 TB), more PCIe lanes (112 vs 64) (so it can support more add-in GPUs), more Intel Smart Cache (L3), and a higher max base power (350W vs 225W). As you can see, this test doesn’t leverage much of the Lenovo’s hardware, either. The Core i9 chips outpace the top-end Threadripper Pro here. In fact, its scores are lower than what we saw in our first tests of Intel’s laptop flagship Core i9-12900HX, a 16-core mobile chip that isn’t far off the desktop Core i9-12900K’s performance. But these tests aren’t ones for which you’d invest in a 64-core CPU.

To see how memory bandwidth impacts performance in different workflows, we tested the Xeon w9-3495X with a variety of different memory configurations, from 1-channel with a single 32 GB DIMM, all the way up to 8-channels with 8 x 32 GB DIMMs. Interestingly, even with 6-channels, the Xeon w9-3495X edged out the Threadripper Pro 5995WX in memory bandwidth, delivering 141.21 GB/sec in SiSoft Sandra. There are many different types of ‘solvers’ used in FEA and CFD and each behaves differently, as do different datasets.Ray trace rendering is highly scalable. Roughly speaking, double the number of CPU cores to half the render time (if frequencies are maintained). Finally, it’s important to note that all our tests were done with the ‘ultimate performance’ Windows power plan and power draw may be different with future BIOS updates. I should note we also use Geekbench 5.4 Pro to gauge CPU performance, but the ThinkStation refused to run that for reasons I couldn’t determine. It also didn’t complete our Adobe Premiere Pro test, likely a conflict with the automation utility we use. It’s not unusual to run into hiccups when testing exotic, seldom-seen hardware like this. A Different Set of Comparisons The Hitman 3 results are a bit more typical, where the 5995WX was slightly slower than the 5950X, a mere 3% decline in performance which meant it was still 18% faster than the older 3990X. As we mentioned before, Steve and Tim's video editing workstations are currently using the Threadripper 3970X and 3990X and while both have been game changing, allowing us to stabilize dozens upon dozens of b-roll clips at once while also providing impressive encoding performance, the recent upgrade to a Panasonic GH6 mirrorless camera has caused a few editing related headaches.

Of course, we tested thermal performance before we got benchmarking and everything looked good. After an hour of looping the Cinebench R23 benchmark we hit a peak temperature of 83C, which given the power usage is a good result. That said, it's unlikely to be optimal and if we look closely at the peak core complex die temperatures we see that only two peaked at around 80C, then two more which peaked in the mid to low 70s with what we assume are the four centrally located CCD's peaking at between just 57 and 61C. What We Learned Using the Pro Though expansion is excellent in this tower, it’s not quite on par with that of larger, dual-CPU workstation towers. The ThinkStation P720 (17.6 by 6.9 by 19.1 inches) outdoes the ThinkStation P620 with 12 DIMM slots and six 3.5-inch or 10 2.5-inch drives. That said, with up to 64 cores, the ThinkStation P620 usually outpaces dual-CPU towers in processing power. The P720, for instance, tops out at 40 cores via two 20-core Intel Xeon chips.Except for the quad-channel Ryzen Threadripper 3000 chips, all of the above AMD and Intel processors support eight channels of DDR4-3200 ECC memory. Threadripper Pro supports a maximum of 2TB of memory in UDIMM, RDIMM, and LRDIMM flavors, while Xeon W-3300 supports up to 4TB. That's not to mention that AMD's core/thread counts weigh in at 64/128 compared to Intel's 38/76. The Intel Core i9-12900K dominates in this title and takes the lead in many of the gaming benchmarks below. 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.