The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X has been hotly anticipated. AMD’s 3rd generation Ryzen Threadripper family was announced last year in their “Fall 2019 Desktop Update”, but only included two CPUs going up to 32 cores. “Come on”, said the tech community, “we know you can make a 64-core”. Speculation about higher-end SKUs was further fuelled by the 3960X and 3970X model designations leaving a convenient gap for a 3980X and 3990X.
Now, three months later, it’s here. The Ryzen Threadripper 3990X is a 64-core, 128-thread beast. Outwardly similar to the 64-core Epyc server CPUs that showed it to be possible, the 3990X is limited to four DDR4-3200 channels by the consumer platform but comes with a higher 2.9GHz base clock and can boost as high as 4.3GHz when the workload is suitable.
World Records Set
As well as being a perfect workstation CPU for the most heavily threaded workloads, the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X has set the overclocking world alight. Using the extreme cold of liquid nitrogen, overclockers Splave and safedisk set 3 new world records each. Using an ASRock TRX40 Taichi motherboard, Splave took Cinebench R20, Geekbench 3 Multicore and GPUPI for CPU 1B. Meanwhile safedisk took the golds for Cinebench R15, HWBOT x265 1080p and wPrime 1024M with the help of an Asus ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha.
British retailer Overclockers UK have also been in touch to tell us that their very own Arne Saknussemm managed second place in the ranking for Cinebench R20 with Benchmate. Also using an ASRock TRX40 Taichi, Arne managed to push all 64 cores to 4.175GHz with conventional watercooling, while tuning memory to a DDR4-3600 speed with impressive 12-12-12-24 latency timings.
Availability
With a UK price of £3689.99 and a serendipitous US MSRP of $3990, the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X certainly isn’t for everyone. 128 threads is also a comically high amount that very few pieces of software can fully utilise. But for some people it really is worth it, and for others it’s just the ultimate flex.
The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X is available in the UK at overclockers.co.uk, and in the US from amazon.com.
