The AMD Threadripper 9980X is a high-end 64-core CPU delivering significant performance gains in multi-threaded professional workloads like simulations and financial modeling, but it offers limited benefits and inconsistent results in gaming and lightly threaded applications. Priced at $5,000 and requiring robust cooling, it is best suited for users who can fully utilize its massive core count and extensive PCIe lanes, while gamers and general users should consider more affordable desktop CPUs.
The AMD Threadripper 9980X is a high-end 64-core, 128-thread CPU priced at $5,000, targeting professionals in production, research, medical modeling, and financial simulations rather than gamers. The review emphasizes that while gaming performance is tested to ensure functionality, it is not the CPU’s focus, and cheaper desktop CPUs outperform Threadripper in gaming tasks. The 9980X offers generational performance improvements ranging mostly between 2% and 18%, with some specialized workloads like convolution filters seeing up to 58% gains due to architectural enhancements in Zen 5, particularly in AVX instruction handling.
Production benchmarks show that the 9980X excels in multi-threaded, compute-heavy tasks such as options pricing, molecular simulations, and CFD analysis, often outperforming previous generation Threadripper CPUs by significant margins. However, some workloads like compression or Adobe Photoshop see minimal or even negative scaling due to the CPU’s high core count and lower per-core frequency compared to desktop alternatives. The review highlights that the 9980X is best suited for users who can leverage its massive core count for parallel workloads or those requiring extensive PCIe lanes for multiple accelerators.
Gaming performance on the 9980X is passable but inconsistent, with higher frame time variance and lower average frame rates compared to more gaming-optimized CPUs. The CPU’s high core count and lower boost clocks lead to scheduling inefficiencies and diminished gaming performance, making it a poor choice for pure gaming systems. Nevertheless, the CPU can handle games without major issues, but users focused on gaming should look to more affordable and better-performing desktop CPUs.
Thermally, the 9980X runs cooler than its 32-core counterparts due to its power being spread across a larger silicon area, and it maintains stable frequencies around 3.9 GHz under all-core loads with occasional spikes up to 4.2 GHz. Power consumption is high, around 371 watts measured at the EPS 12V cables, requiring robust cooling solutions like a 360mm liquid cooler. Single-threaded boost clocks have slightly improved over the previous generation, reaching up to 5.4 GHz in light workloads.
In conclusion, the AMD Threadripper 9980X is a niche, high-cost CPU designed for specialized professional workloads that benefit from extreme multi-threading and large cache sizes. It delivers solid generational improvements in production tasks but offers limited value for gaming or lightly threaded applications. Buyers should carefully assess their workload needs, as sometimes a 32-core Threadripper or a high-end desktop CPU may offer better performance per dollar. The review also introduced new benchmarking tests inspired by this CPU, which will be incorporated into future CPU reviews to provide a broader perspective on performance across applications.