WEBVTT

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we're going to be talking about AMD's phenom CPU

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where am i my why is my shirt black

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like hey hey whoa oh wait oh what where

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am i now oh i got my own media group

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cool oh check this out i ride one of these

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sick

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oh this must be my my office

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oh look at this thing is this this a CPU

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wow look at the size of it

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ripper too could the is it could it be

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the future

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no no it's not the future it's today it's the AMD ryzen

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threadripper ii 2990wx and it is right now and our video about

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it is brought to you by nci

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i fix it ifixit's new mahi driver kit

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includes their one quarter inch aluminum screwdriver handle with a magnetic bit

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socket knurled grip and swivel top with 48 driver bits check it out at the link

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below

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so young lioness there came from a world where the Intel core 2 and AMD phenomx 4

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series of quad-core processors had the

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highest core counts among consumer products but in the 10 years since then

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the situation has changed a lot with AMD

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launching an industry shaking 16 core

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Threadripper processor last year and then following it up today with the

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debut of the 2990 wx a 32 core

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64 thread successor now they've created a ton of excitement

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amongst both consumers and professionals

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and they have sown a lot of discord with

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their competition over at Intel who have reacted to the disruption with their own

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high-end desktop chips based on the same dna as their xeon server lineup and then

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this weird like 28 core demo thing that

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they were doing at computex this year and then shortly afterward tried to hide

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anyway hype train aside though one thing that

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we know about threadripper 2 before we

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even start testing it is that this

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is not a gaming centric CPU i mean even

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ignoring the 1300 and eighteen hundred

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dollar price tags when we dig even a little bit further

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into the specs we find that the wx series so these are the two new high-end

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ones doesn't turbo up as fast as its ex

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brethren the direct zen plus replacements for last year's thread

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ripper one of course with that said we're still going to run

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some gaming benchmarks anyway so normally we actually breeze by our test

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benches but this time there are a couple of important notes so AMD has created a

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really solid upgrade path for their x 399 customers by allowing existing

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boards like this zenith extreme from ASUS to run the new chips with nothing

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but a BIOS update with that said ASUS

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did have some concerns about overclocking and up to 200 250 watt chip

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on boards that weren't necessarily designed for that so they equipped us

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with their rog zenith extreme cooling kit you shouldn't need this kind of

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thing for stock operation or if you have excellent air flow over your socket area

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already but if you're overclocking we would

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strongly recommend it all right the first big surprise in our

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gaming testing was discovering that threadripper 1

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is actually faster in some cases in

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spite of threadripper 2's higher clock speeds

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even after multiple runs these results persisted which might seem like some

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kind of a mistake but as it turns out the less sophisticated first generation

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precision boost so that's AMD's dynamic clock speed optimization engine kept the

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core clocks higher more often with precision boost 2 more aggressively

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utilizing its intermediate clocks instead of being either full out or

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clocked down so we actually ended up losing some raw speed but what we're

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getting back in return is more consistency

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another thing that impacted gaming is uma versus numa memory access modes

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now it's quite a bit more complicated but in layman's terms uma is typically

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better for multi-threaded workloads thanks to its more consistent memory

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bandwidth while pneuma can come out ahead sometimes thanks to a small

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latency advantage in lighter ones it

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should be noted that only the x series allows you to decide which mode you

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prefer wx only runs in numa mode this

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was to retain intergenerational compatibility and i would say that there

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are probably some creator by day gamer by night folks out there who are going

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to be pretty pleased with the upgrade path that AMD has provided here i mean

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the 2990 wx isn't

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far and away the fastest CPU in every

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test that we ran blender which leverages Intel's avx 512

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extensions is a notable exception and single threaded tests are obviously not

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its strong suit but this this is one

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powerful piece of silicon even Intel's marginally more expensive 7980xe

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is no match when threadripper2wx

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gets to stretch its legs now on the subject of stretching them

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let's uh try some overclocking shall we

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now you can still overclock threadripper

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2 manually but in theory anyway AMD's

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precision boost overdrive allows the user to simply

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set a higher power budget and then watch while precision boost 2 and xfr so

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that's extended frequency range too do all the heavy lifting only some of our

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workloads actually improved in performance while others straight up

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regressed we think this has to do with some kind of weird thermal limit as

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indicated by the identical 68 degree t-die reading at both stock and

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overclock speeds in spite of our beefy cooler but that may require further

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investigation let us know if you'd like to see a dedicated threadripper 2

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overclocking video for now i'm just going to grab this grab this baby

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here's what we can say 32 cores in a consumer or prosumer or

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workstation chip whatever you want to classify it as

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sounds amazing it is exactly the

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headline that AMD needs as a company right now to gain valuable what's called

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mind share where normal consumers are more likely to run out and buy normal

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ryzen chips because the world record holders and the influential content

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creators that they admire are using AMD

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in the real world though the potential market for a product like this

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is pretty limited now the 2990 wx

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is the high-end workstation king

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but you need workloads like heavy virtualization or 3d rendering or gas

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exploration that take advantage of it otherwise honestly speaking you'd be

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better off spending half as much on a

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2950x the 16 core drop in replacement

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for the older 16 core but now with zen plus or looking at Intel's lineup if avx

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512 support or single threaded performance are also important to you

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but maybe at the end of the day it doesn't matter who it's for

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maybe this was just about building an amazing piece of technology and then

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patiently waiting for the use cases to show up because

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i mean if there's anything that the history of computing has shown us it's

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that if you breed a faster horse someone somewhere is going to build a

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more challenging course

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speaking of building something massdrop has gone from just being a place for you

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to buy stuff to a place where you buy exclusive amazing collaborative products

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and the massdrop x hifiman he 350

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two to three days check them out today at the link in the video description

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so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked

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it's hard to be an Intel fanboy today isn't it

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so you guys know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like

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button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also link down there is

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where merch george has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which

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you should totally join