Sunday, July 30th 2017
AMD Ryzen Threadripper Breaks 5.2 GHz + X399 Boards on Display!
AMD did not just announce retail availability on Ryzen Threadripper today, they also had some on-site and arranged for a fun LN2 overclocking event as part of Capsaicin SIGGRAPH 2017. As always, such events are to give day one estimates on the maximum performance potential of the silicon which in turn guides end users and board partners alike on the worst case scenarios as far as power draw and cooling requirements go.
Monstru from Lab501 was kind enough to share a couple of pictures of the actual event with us while AMD followed up with a Cinebench R15 screenshot as seen below. All 16 cores of the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X were overclocked to 5.2 GHz with a x52 multiplier on a standard 100 MHz bus speed. Core VID from CPU-Z is not trustworthy at these temperatures, so presumably it was more in the range of 1.6 V than 1.16 V. They did have DDR4 RAM in quad channel but at the JEDEC base of 2133 MHz to get as high a CPU frequency without the IMC being a factor. The Cinebench R15 score of 4122 cb is very impressive, given the previous high score for a 16-core CPU was 2867 cb, and it took a 28 core CPU to beat this score before. Sure, the days of high core count overclockable CPUs is only coming now but it goes to show where we were before AMD and Intel both decided to go big this generation.
After the break we have some photographs of X399 motherboards from various manufacturers, so be sure to take a look.
AMD had also invited their board partners to showcase some of their motherboards for this platform, and we saw AsRock present two motherboards- the Taichi and the Fatal1ty Professional Gaming. AsRock has in the recent years made the Taichi and Fatal1ty Pro Gaming two sides of the same coin, if you will, and we expect both to share a lot here too. They generally have well designed boards, and if the heatpipes on the VRM heatsinks are any indication the story is the same here.
MSI and Gigabyte were on board as well with a Gaming PRO CARBON AC and AUROS Gaming 7 respectively. These are on the higher end of their motherboard ladder each, so it is good to see board partners come out with feature-rich boards right off the bat.
Rounding off the showcase was ASUS with two boards as well. They presented the PRIME X399-A which should be a more budget friendly option compared to what will be their flagship for this generation- the Zenith Extreme. Of note is the fact that both have a heatpipe from the VRM heatsink to the I/O heatsink, so thermals were definitely a consideration in the design of these boards.
All six boards on display were ATX or E-ATX in form factor, and hopefully we will see some mATX motherboards sooner than later for those who need a workhorse on the go.
Monstru from Lab501 was kind enough to share a couple of pictures of the actual event with us while AMD followed up with a Cinebench R15 screenshot as seen below. All 16 cores of the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X were overclocked to 5.2 GHz with a x52 multiplier on a standard 100 MHz bus speed. Core VID from CPU-Z is not trustworthy at these temperatures, so presumably it was more in the range of 1.6 V than 1.16 V. They did have DDR4 RAM in quad channel but at the JEDEC base of 2133 MHz to get as high a CPU frequency without the IMC being a factor. The Cinebench R15 score of 4122 cb is very impressive, given the previous high score for a 16-core CPU was 2867 cb, and it took a 28 core CPU to beat this score before. Sure, the days of high core count overclockable CPUs is only coming now but it goes to show where we were before AMD and Intel both decided to go big this generation.
All six boards on display were ATX or E-ATX in form factor, and hopefully we will see some mATX motherboards sooner than later for those who need a workhorse on the go.
28 Comments on AMD Ryzen Threadripper Breaks 5.2 GHz + X399 Boards on Display!
The problem with the kill-switch is that you can no longer benefit from Core Performance Boost features. Specifically, having a higher core frequency in single thread. In OC mode you can only sync all core ratios, meaning that you are limited by the maximum stable overclock using all cores. Practically, it's possible that your single threaded performance is lower in OC mode because your all-core max stable frequency is lower than the XFR single threaded max frequency. The only way to not have this issue is by using reference clock and using CPU ratios lower than .
On Threadripper this will be even more pronounced since we now have 16 cores. It will be interesting to see the performance and power consumption results comparing overclocking via manual OC mode and using reference clock.