AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X & 7970X Review: Revived HEDT Brings More Cores of Zen 4

Threadripper 7000 vs. Threadripper 3000: Generational Improvements

Looking at how the latest AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series processors compare against the previous Threadripper 3000 series, we are essentially testing apples against apples (or older apples). Both sets of Threadripper CPUs share the same core/thread counts, including the 7980X and 3990X, which both have 64C/128T, albeit being Zen 4 vs Zen 2, given AMD didn't launch non-Pro SKUs for the 5000 series. The same can be said with the 7970X and 3970X, which are both 32C/64T chips.

All four of the AMD Ryzen Threadrippers hit a max power in line with their rated TDPs, including 280 W for the 3000 series and 350 W for the 7000 series.

In 3DPM V2.1, it's worth highlighting that AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 3000 series doesn't support AVX 512/AV2 workloads. Given that AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series does, it means that performance in comparison is much higher as expected in this benchmark.

In Dwarf Fortress, the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series CPUs (7980X and 7970X) run much faster in this benchmark than the 3000 series. In the larger of the three tests, the 7980X is around 39% faster than the 3990X, showing that Zen 4 versus Zen 2 is very beneficial.

In Factorio, both the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series chips perform similarly here, although are around 30% faster than the 3000 series.

Looking at CineBench R23 single-threaded performance, there are substantial gains going from Zen 2 to Zen 4, as expected. In the CineBench R23 multi-threaded benchmark, we can see that even the Threadripper 7970 (32C/64T) is 10% faster than the 3990X, which is a 64C/128T part. The Ryzen Threadripper 7980X decimates the other three chips with a gain of 71% over the previous generation chip with the same core/thread count.

While our WinRAR 5.90 benchmark is quite sensitive to memory performance, the Threadripper 7970X beats the 7980X, while both are marginally ahead of the Threadripper 3000 series chips.

Overall, as we can see regarding rendering and simulation performance, the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 chips are both vastly superior to the 3000 series chips. It does have to be said that Threadripper 7000 is two generations of cores ahead of the 3000 series (Zen 4 vs Zen 2), as AMD didn't launch non-Pro 5000 series SKUs. Users looking to update from the Threadripper 3000 series platform for HEDT will certainly see benefits across the board opting to elect for Ryzen Threadripper 7000.