AMD Threadripper Pro Review – Lenovo P620

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Well this is exciting. Inside this fairly unassuming prebuilt workstation is a CPU you can’t buy without the rest of this (for now anyway). This is AMD’s Threadripper PRO, specifically the 3955WX which is the 16 core 32 thread chip using Zen 2 architecture. There’s a lot to cover with this, so lets dive into it!

AMD’s Threadripper PRO lineup currently consists of 4 options, the 12 core 3945WX, this 16 core ‘55’, the 32 core ‘75’ and the 64 core ‘95’. All boast 128 PCIe Gen 4 lanes and 8 channel memory, and up to 2TB of supported memory capacity. That last one is likely going to be the most key for why you’d buy a Pro over the standard Threadripper lineup as it was one of the key complaints especially with the 3990X when it launched last year. I’m sure some folk will enjoy the doubled PCIe Lanes, but for the majority of workstations 64 was already overkill so 128 is. Well. A lot. 

Other than the spec bump, the PRO lineup is also treated to AMD’s PRO Technologies, like their Memory Guard feature that offers full memory encryption in real time, although the PRO chips all offer slightly lower clock speeds than their non-pro counterparts both base and boost. Do bear in mind for these lower end chips there isn’t a direct competitor from a threadripper, as the 3rd gen standard lineup starts at 24 cores, unlike these ones which start at 12. 

Now you might be thinking, why would you get the 12 or 16 core Threadripper Pro when you can buy a normal desktop Ryzen CPU with 12 or 16 cores and much higher clockspeeds and especially if you go 5th gen, much better IPC too? The RAM limitation is definitely the first answer, as the max you can squeeze into a desktop board is 128GB whereas up to 2TB on this bad boy is a major upgrade. Second is the extra PCIe lanes. On the desktop Ryzen chips you’ve got 24 lanes to play with, 4 of which going directly to the top M.2 slot and another 4 to the chipset, whereas with this you have 120 lanes of gen 4 goodness available, plus another 8 to the WRX80 chipset. So for those that just need lots of GPU and ultra-fast storage power available but basically just a CPU to make it work, these lower end chips are great. 

That’s enough theory, lets test this thing! Since this is the 16 core variant, I thought I’d put it up against the last gen Threadripper 16 core, the 2950X, and since I’ve got one in, a Ryzen 5900X to see if a faster 12 core chip can match a T H I C C er 16 core one. Of course since these are ‘PRO’ chips creative and workstation performance is pretty important so lets start with that. 

In Cinebench Single Threaded, both R20 and R23 show the desktop chip ahead by a good margin. That’s to be expected, especially considering the generational difference in architecture, if I was comparing to a 3900X these results would be a lot closer.

What’s interesting though is thanks to the faster single threaded performance, the 12 core 5900X really isn’t far behind the 16 core 3955WX at 12% slower and handily beats the now 2 generation old 2950X. That surprised me, mostly just by how much it beat it by with a whopping 13%!

In Blender both in the BMW scene, and Gooseberry, the results follow the same trend as Cinebench where the 3955WX is the fastest, but not by much at all, followed by the 5900X at 6% slower, then a larger gap to the 2950X at 30% – in gooseberry at least.

In 7ZIP, the 5900X actually comes in last although only by a hair, under 1% faster, then the 3955WX takes the crown with a convincing lead with 20% more performance.

VRay gets back to the same profile we’ve seen in Cinebench and Blender, where the 2950X is at the back of the pack, followed by the 5900X 13% faster, then a smaller 8% lead to the 3955WX.

Premiere pro shows the same trend. The 5900X is 8% faster than the 2950X, and the 3955WX is 4% faster than the 5900X – the margins are slimmer here but for larger projects and higher resolution clips (this is 4K 30) the difference would be much more visible.

Of course, there will be some people who’ll want to game on their machine in their off time, so how does the PRO chip hold up? 

Starting with Cyberpunk 2077, and testing with a 2080ti as the Radeon WX 3200 that came with the machine isn’t exactly up to the task. Unsurprisingly, at 1080p, the 5900X takes a reasonable lead. Neither Threadripper chip is performing badly, but there is a reasonable lead of 10FPS from the Pro to the desktop chip, and 7FPS to the older Threadripper.

In COD Modern Warfare, again at 1080p, all three chips are almost identical in performance with the only noticeable difference being the 1% low numbers which suffer more on the Threadrippers.

Watchdogs Legion also shows all three chips pretty close, with only the old Threadripper dropping more than margin of error performance.

And finally, Fortnite. This is much more expected with the 5900X stretching its legs significantly, almost 30% faster than the 2950X, which has a slight lead over the 3955WX although not by much. 

So, Threadripper Pro. It’s an interesting line of chips that you will soon be able to buy not inside a Lenovo system – March is meant to be when AMD will sell them directly for use on WRX80 boards. The increased RAM limitation and added PCIe Lanes I think will help seriously limit the number of people buying the regular 3rd gen Threadripper chips. The higher core count chips, specifically the 32 and 64 core options, I think are going to be hot sellers for production houses, game developers and content creators and I’ll be very interested to hear final retail pricing on those and how they compare to the non-pro variants. For the time being, you can get a rough idea for the pricing based on what Lenovo is charging. £2770 on top of whatever the 3945X costs for the 32 core, or £6390 more for the 64 core, so the assumption is the 32 core will be around £3000 and the 64 core around £7000, both a hefty premium over the non pro counterparts. For context the 3970X sells for a little under £2000, and the 3990X sells for £3500, so almost double if that pricing stays consistent. 

What about the Lenovo P620? Well despite the old school unpainted interior, everything seems to be thought out well, easy to upgrade everything and reasonable temps without too much noise.