Review Threadripper 3rd Gen Review and Availability Thread

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Hitman928

Diamond Member
Apr 15, 2012
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Since the other thread got merged and I am not the OP as well as the announcement thread being so long, I figured it would be better to have a separate review and availability thread.

Once reviews are posted I will update this post. If you see a review you would like added to this post, please PM me.

Video reviews
Hardware Unboxed
Gamers Nexus
Linus Tech Tips

Print reviews
Phoronix
PCWorld
PCMag
Guru3d
Tweaktown
Anandtech
Computerbase (translated)
Servethehome
Phoronix (3990x)
For sale
3960x, 3970x, and 3990x listed for sale on Newegg.
 
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beginner99

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Jun 2, 2009
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Dumb question, is it a legal minefield or do some companies allow experienced employees to build or configure workstations themselves?

As jpiniero said, you don't want to be responsible for supporting it especially not within a big company. Just having to RMA broken parts makes me shudder if you have to go through SAP or the likes. Simply a road you don't want to take if you mind your own sanity.
 
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Atari2600

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Nov 22, 2016
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Dumb question, is it a legal minefield or do some companies allow experienced employees to build or configure workstations themselves?

I've configured several for a company I'd be subcontracting to - had to get a couple of different suppliers added to their "list" too.

Thankfully they were willing to listen and it worked out pretty well.


Any program or project has a budget. You make the case that buying X instead of Y will allow you to do the job quicker saving Z and they'll be all over it. Even more so if you make the argument for selling the capability to more clients*.

*who are struggling precisely because they are big, stupid and have exclusive arrangements with HP/Dell/etc
 
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Hitman928

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Just got an email that the 3970x is on sale at newegg with a promo code for $150 off. In reality it's $50 off as Newegg increased the list price $100 over MSRP. Both the 3970x and 3960x are currently in stock and the 3960x is $10 lower than MSRP.
 
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Topweasel

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Oct 19, 2000
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As jpiniero said, you don't want to be responsible for supporting it especially not within a big company. Just having to RMA broken parts makes me shudder if you have to go through SAP or the likes. Simply a road you don't want to take if you mind your own sanity.
It depends on technician bandwidth. For example I work for 3000+ employee company but am only responsible for my ~100 employee satellite. I am the only real technician at this location responsible for purchasing, supporting, and repairing any of our employee computers. I'd love to tell our engineers to get threadripper or push for 4800h workstation laptops (well I would be less likely on that) and building stuff is my favorite part of my personal computing hobby. But I can not and will not ever suggest that they let me build systems for them. But I could see the main branch doing it for their employees. An example, every laptop I purchase I purchase with a 5 year warranty, why, mostly because if it goes down I need the manufacturer in next day to resolve the issue for as long as we might need them. I can't be out of commission for a whole day trouble shooting an issue with a single system. My parent company on the other hand by laptops in such bulk that they don't purchase extended warranties on them, to them if lets say 5 systems act up in a month, loading a different system and trashing any system not fixed by a reload is cheaper than purchasing the warranty on the 50-100 systems they might purchase a month or quarter. They have 50-60 techs, each tend to have different specific jobs (to much job siloing going on) but could probably get away with having a tech just working on TR systems and between engineer workflow improvements and the labor for some pretty low level tech would make it worth it.

But that probably even then is a mid level business aspect. They could do it because the amount of services in general requires a decent amount of trained IT guys in specialized tools and large enough to need a decent helpdesk. But you get to much larger and the IT size does another shrink as the rest of the business grows much faster then IT. So you get to a point that between the stretched thin, the amount of workstations you would need, and so on, it becomes too cumbersome again.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
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WTF is it with folks making youtube videos these days?!?!

Writing an article is a far better means of quickly and concisely delivering information.

It's harder to monetize a written article. That being said, I don't think you can monetize anything under 10 minutes on YouTube.
 
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jpiniero

Lifer
Oct 1, 2010
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Reading AT's review of the 3990X, it's basically a waste on Windows since MS is MS. Reckon if you had the workloads to use it, you'd be running Linux anyway.
 

Hitman928

Diamond Member
Apr 15, 2012
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Adding new Phoronix review of the 3990x to the OP. Basically, as pretty much expected, it dominates in Linux.

embed.php


What surprised me though is that even in a deep learning benchmark using Intel's DNN library which is optimized for AVX512 support, it takes 2x Xeon Platinum 8280s (which support AVX512vnni for deep learning acceleration) to beat a 3990x by 16% in one test. However, the 3990x is still faster in the other test by 40%.

embed.php

embed.php


System76 also put together a workstation line that includes the new 3990x.

 

moinmoin

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Jun 1, 2017
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Reading AT's review of the 3990X, it's basically a waste on Windows since MS is MS. Reckon if you had the workloads to use it, you'd be running Linux anyway.
Reading it now, oh god is it hilarious. It's like Microsoft planned the Windows scheduler to handle a 6 bit amount of threads at most, and added support for more by forcible splitting any further threads in some artificial additional NUMA. And it's forced due to Windows Home/Pro/Enterprise version segmentation, going higher makes the scheduler less worse(!) and improves performance, but never without caveats! Turning SMT off sometimes gets benchmark results beating even the "best" Enterprise scheduler with SMT on. OMG is this a ridiculous mess...
 

BigDaveX

Senior member
Jun 12, 2014
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Reading it now, oh god is it hilarious. It's like Microsoft planned the Windows scheduler to handle a 6 bit amount of threads at most, and added support for more by forcible splitting any further threads in some artificial additional NUMA. And it's forced due to Windows Home/Pro/Enterprise version segmentation, going higher makes the scheduler less worse(!) and improves performance, but never without caveats! Turning SMT off sometimes gets benchmark results beating even the "best" Enterprise scheduler with SMT on. OMG is this a ridiculous mess...
The Windows 10 scheduler is probably fundamentally the same (with a few tweaks to allow for things like SMT and Bulldozer modules) as the one introduced in Windows Vista, back when we were only a couple of years into the multi-core revolution and a quad-core chip was considered massively overkill. Wouldn't surprise me if all the way back in 2006, some underpaid programmer in the bowels of the Redmond campus thought "Eh, 64 threads ought to be enough for anybody".
 
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Markfw

Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
May 16, 2002
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I would get one, if I had not already spent my near term budget on 5 EPYC chips, the latest of which is 64 cores ! the other 4 are 32 thread. Thats 192 cores or 384 threads just for those.

The 3990x will be in my custom watercooled box at some point. a 360 (fat) and 420 mm rad, both just for the CPU ? Yea, I think I can cool it.
 

amrnuke

Golden Member
Apr 24, 2019
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This thread is about TR availability. Are they marking those up? Nope.
Your other posts in this thread are talking about motherboards and Intel chips, apologies for not reading your mind that you had narrowed your context.

In any case, yes the TR3s are available, surprisingly my local MC has 10+ 3990X in stock, 10+ 3970X. The only newly released chip they don't have in good stock is the 3960X (not available at all).
 

KentState

Diamond Member
Oct 19, 2001
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Your other posts in this thread are talking about motherboards and Intel chips, apologies for not reading your mind that you had narrowed your context.

Now you are being blatantly dishonest to save face. The focus has been on TR parts and the only mention of Intel was a direct reply to another poster. You just picked out a comment and wanted to put something down for some odd reason.
 

Zstream

Diamond Member
Oct 24, 2005
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I was ready to pull the trigger on the 3960... went to checkout and it was gone. Is the strx motherboard good for 4th/5th gen as well?