Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first made sure all firmware was up to date, then we entered their respective system BIOSes / UEFI and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance" defaults. We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set the memory frequency to the maximum officially supported speed for the given platform (without overclocking). The SSDs were then formatted, and the latest build of Windows 10 Pro x64 was installed.

Threadripper Installed On A Gigabyte X399 Gaming 7 With 32GB G.SKILL RAM

When the Windows installation was complete, we fully updated the OS, and installed all of the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled, and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, and cleared any temp and prefetch data. Finally, we enabled Windows Quiet Hours and let the systems reach an idle state before invoking a test.  Also note, that to ensure AMD's SenseMI technology was performing to its full potential, the Ryzen-powered systems used Windows' High Performance mode or AMD's optimized Ryzen Balanced power profile.

We began our testing with the latest version of SiSoftware's SANDRA 2017, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in sub-system tests that partially comprise the suite with Intel's latest processors (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Cache and Memory, and Memory Bandwidth). All of the scores reported below were taken with the CPUs running at their default settings, with 32GB of DDR4 RAM running in quad-channel mode Gigabyte Aorus X399-Gaming 7 motherboard.

The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and Threadripper 1920X put up some serious numbers in the various SANDRA tests we threw at them. We saw aggregate arithmetic performance of over 377GOPS with the 1950X and 293GOPS with the 1920X. Memory bandwidth broke the 60GB/s barrier, and the multimedia test had the 16-core 1950X breaking the 857MPix/s mark, while the 1920X finished just over 670MPix/s. The cache and memory test also looked strong virtually across the board with this latest version of SANDRA.

PCMark 8 v2 is one of Futuremark’s series of popular PC benchmarking tools. It is designed to test the performance of all types of systems, from tablets to desktops. PCMark 8 offers five separate benchmark tests -- in addition to battery life testing -- to help consumers find devices that offers the perfect combination of efficiency and performance for their particular use case.

This latest version of the suite improves the Home, Creative, and Work benchmarks with new tests using popular open source applications for image processing, video editing, and spreadsheets. A wide variety of workloads have also been added to the Work benchmark to better reflect the way PCs are used in enterprise environments. These tests can be run with or without OpenCL acceleration. We chose to run with OpenCL acceleration enabled to leverage all of the platforms’ available CPU and GPU compute resources…

The Core i9-7900X took top honors here, thanks to its higher clocks and per-core IPC advantage over Threadripper, but all of the high-end systems are tightly grouped. For day-to-day computing or productivity tasks, Threadripper offers way more than enough horsepower to get the job done.