What you're seeing right now is five. Count them. Five instances of Cyberpunk 2077 running on one system.
Not that impressive. But what if I told you that in the background,
we are also running Cinebench and encoding our screen cap using OBS
and running this new fangled Bonsai buddy? Holy shit.
This thing is absolutely incredible. And the craziest part is we're still getting
playable frame rates in all five of our Cyberpunk instances.
This is the power of AMD's Threadripper Pro 9995WX.
It has 96 CPU cores that can run it up to 5.4 gigahertz.
It has 384 megabytes of level three cache.
And with the click of a button, it can boost its default 350 watt power draw
to over 800 watts. That is well beyond the limits
of even this water cooling solution. That's why we brought this freshly repaired water chiller
to explore the limits of the most ridiculous desktop CPU on the planet.
And to see just how far we can push past them. The CPU is at 95 degrees.
And it's pulling at 1,900 watts. This is terrifying.
But first I had to push past this segue to our sponsor.
Let's go.
Before we can break the performance limits of modern computing,
we've got to know exactly where they are. So let's back up to just a few months ago
when we looked at AMD's top of the line, Threadripper non-pro 9980X.
This 64 core monster, it turns out,
was just the appetizer. This one is quite literally like putting one
and a half of these into the same motherboard socket.
Or maybe a slightly different motherboard socket if you want to get the most of it.
More on that later. First, let's take a look at the carrier vessel
that Falcon Northwest sent over for us to check it out in.
This is the Falcon Northwest Talon. And oh, my Tabernacle.
Is it ever gorgeous? They did not have to do it up
in this sick custom UV printed case inspired by our UV reactive LAN collection,
lttstore.com, but the MadLads did it anyway. And that is the least crazy thing about this system.
We're going to talk a lot about the Threadripper Pro 9995WX
and it's ludicrous 96 cores. But first, let's take a moment
to admire the rest of this build. Let's get this side panel. Oh, wow.
I can't find anything solid enough to get it to make a metal sound.
But, oh, wow, that really hurt actually.
That is a thick piece of aluminum. Damn. Wow, that cable management.
This is a 1600 watt power supply. And if you really look in there,
there's lots of cables plugged into it. They just do an incredible job of hiding them away.
And I built a test bench using the same platform. It looked like one of those sentinel things
from the matrix. The other side is no less gorgeous.
128 gigs of DDR5-6400 ECC memory
and has tripled in value since Falkin sent us this system.
And another big difference compared to your system at home is these are running in a quad channel configuration
rather than dual channel, which doubles their bandwidth. And if that sounded crazy, wait till you see us
running the Threadripper Pro in eight channel. Wait, why aren't we doing that now?
It's because while the ASUS ProWS TRX50 Sage Wi-Fi
motherboard in here can work with both Threadripper
and Threadripper Pro, its feature set is more targeting regular Threadripper.
If you want to get the most out of a Threadripper Pro, you need a WRX90 motherboard.
It has the same physical socket, but a different chip set.
More on that later. First, we've got three four terabyte
Kingston Fury Renegade PCIe Gen 5 SSDs in RAID 0.
I don't think Falkin would ever really recommend that. They were just showing off on this system.
And then for our GPU, we've got something that I've actually never seen before.
This is the RTX Pro 6000. Pretty much it's a wolf in business suit clothing.
It's a 5090, but instead of having 32 gigs of VRAM,
it has 96 gigabytes of VRAM.
It also has about 10% more CUDA cores, runs faster,
and all that memory is ECC. Kind of want to do a full review of this thing.
This kind of stuff NVIDIA just does not send out for evaluation because if you need it,
you have a team of people to evaluate hardware for you and you pay for your evals
until you reach an even bigger scale. Finally, for cooling, it uses an AIO liquid cooler
from Silverstone with a 280 millimeter radiator and a custom CPU block that is specifically designed
for thread whipper processors. And at the default power profile,
it does great as we're about to see, but I think we're gonna need more.
Let's fire this thing up. Starting with Blender Monster,
where we got nearly 25% reduction in render times.
I mean, guys, look at this. This is not running on the GPU.
That's insane. 52 and a half seconds. That is over 10 seconds faster
than the top of the line thread whipper for non-pro. Look at this thing rip up threads like a pro.
Or does it? Send a bench and actually a lot of our benchmark numbers
look dangerously close to the same results we got
with the 9980X. You know, the $5,000 processor.
The one for non-professionals. Well, as it turns out, that's kind of by design.
See, AMD allows you to put this bad boy
in a peasant consumer TRX 50 motherboard,
but they don't really want you to. This is the ASUS ProWSWRX90E Sage SE.
And it's the big brother to the motherboard that we used in our 9980X review.
This is possibly the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
In fairness to me, it's been almost 10 years since my last child was born. So I can hardly remember how beautiful that was.
The first thing you might notice about this board is that flanking the CPU socket are not four,
but eight memory slots, each running its own channel.
That gives it up to four times the theoretical bandwidth
of a desktop dual channel motherboard. The next thing you might notice
is that it has a grand total of seven PCIe by 16 slots.
But unlike your typical gaming motherboard, where those are gonna be running at often lower speeds
or lower generations of PCIe, every single one of these is gen five
and the full 16 lanes. So you could literally put single slot water blocks
on seven GPUs in here. And I assume you could,
because if you can afford this motherboard, you can afford seven GPUs too.
Lucky you. Oh man. The next thing I was gonna show you guys
was all the M.2 slots, but I just cut my finger open on the IO,
so I guess we'll move over there. Oh, buddy.
One lonely USB two is accompanied by a whopping
six USB 10 gig ports, two USB four 40 gig ports with DisplayPort injection,
dual 10 gig networking ports with a gigabit management port.
And look at that. Convenient little clear CMOS button right on the back.
I'm gonna need that bandaid now. Thank you. Damn it.
And if you thought we were done with crazy IO, check this out.
Every one of these M.2 slots is also at gen five
and because they just had extra lanes and no idea what to do with them,
we've got a couple of slim SAS ports that are also gen four by four each.
Next to the 24 pin motherboard power connector, you will find two additional PCIe eight pin connectors.
Those are to provide extra power in case you actually load this thing up with PCIe cards.
Then at the top, things get even more nuts because there's not one, not two, not three,
but four power plugs for the CPU.
Two normal CPU EPS connectors and the other two PCIe eight pin again.
All for this bad boy. But it's only 350 Watts.
Why could it possibly need all of that? Because once we unlock, it should be a lot more than 350 Watts.
That's why. How much is that worth these days? When I wrote the script, it was 6,000.
When we started shooting, it was 10,000 and now it's $17,000 of RAM.
One terabyte, DDR5, ECC,
5600 mega transfer per second. The crazy part is this isn't even cutting edge speed.
This is like last gen speed. So we're not even quite getting the most out of the CPU,
but when we asked someone to send us over, even a loner of modern RAM to put in it, they laughed.
Yeah. All right, here we go. If I don't do it right, it'll bite me again.
Do you want more goop? Yeah, I'll take a little bit more goop. No keyboard detected.
Now please press F1 to continue. You American megatrends.
Here we go, boys. I like this. If we go into Ryzen Master and we hit apply on the overclock, 350 watts
to 2,000 watt power limit. That would not work with that piddly triple radiator.
We're not even gonna try running it at stock. I mean, we ran it at stock in the other one.
Yeah. But did you guys get numbers for how it runs at stock?
Just having eight channel memory instead of quad channel? Yes, and you'll see massive improvements
in memory bound benchmarks, things like 7-Zip
or even like Y Cruncher if you have to load in a bunch of stuff.
Right. Because you have that nearly double the bandwidth.
Even with the slower higher latency ramen here, there's still a massive increase in throughput
just due to eight channels. But we want more.
2,000 watts, there. Oh my God, that's insane.
And then it flips once it gets past 1,000, it goes, nope.
It just errored out. Also 38.82 seconds.
Did we hit 90 degrees on a water cooler? The water's heating up that fast.
Yeah. The pump speed is the same,
which means that from one run to the next, the load is the same and the pump speed is the same.
So if it's running three, four degrees hotter, that means the water is three, four degrees hotter,
which kind of makes sense because this is not that much water. Okay, how about Cinebench?
We're idling at 40 now. That's how much hotter our water is.
It's gone up like seven degrees since we've been sitting here. We're also idling at 122 watts on this CPU,
which to be clear is the TDP of a 9800X3D.
What score are we trying to beat here? Running stock. Okay.
So that's 7,387 in particular. I feel like we're gonna beat that.
What would our Threadripper non-pro hit?
Threadripper non-pro hits 6,671.
Okay, I can already tell that this is insane.
How fast those boxes are finishing. This is crazy.
This usually takes like maybe 10 minutes on like a consumer CPU to finish this one image.
This is gonna finish in less than a minute. Does AMD ever get tired of winning?
8727, just shy of 9,000 points.
That clears it by a ton. That's almost like a quarter better.
It's more than 20% better over 350 watts. You're paying a lot for the power to do that.
You can afford it. Have we told them how much the CPU costs yet?
13K-ish. Okay, our top one is 94 degrees.
Okay, what frequency root? You've gotta be kidding me. It's running at 4.8 gigahertz across the board.
Oh, Cinebench isn't even that heavy of a load, evidently. Just shy of 800 watts.
Do you think it could do more? Oh, with better cooling.
Yeah, I feel like we've gotta be capped here. Let's do 7-Zip, because that's gonna benefit
from both the increased power to the CPU and the increased RAM.
128 out of 192. Am I reading this right?
11 and a half gigabytes per second.
Yeah, that's the decompression rate. Let's go into 13. It's kind of fluctuating up, so it could be higher.
By the time it finishes the test, it settles in at about 11 and a half each time.
Compare that to the quad channel memory. We're more than double.
More than double. I knew file decompression was memory limited.
But that much? Yeah. Oh my God.
And what about the compression? How are we doing there? 600 megabytes a second?
600? 600, yeah. Compared to the 9980X, almost actually 50% faster.
So we're getting the full benefit of those cores. Like, full benefit.
How did they build this? AMD, TSMC tour.
Maybe talk to your buds, get it arranged. We'd love to do it.
How are we doing this with only 128 threads though?
It's not even using all of the CPU cores. It's just all the extra memory bandwidth, I guess.
The memory bandwidth and the extra clock speeds, I guess. We got room to breathe, assuming we got room to cool.
All right, let's do it. Let's hook up the chiller. Go Bruce, chill us. It's been a while.
It's set to five degrees Celsius, which is probably a little low
if we're trying to avoid condensation. We haven't insulated the board in any way.
So why don't we start around 14? Oh, we already overshot it, brilliant.
Good job, Bruce. Bruce, is that on?
Yeah. Okay, because we're gonna need to start putting some heat into this thing.
You need to calm down. Okay, let's just do Cinebench for now. I don't know if we're gonna get any more speed out of it.
Not without actually changing the CPU multiplier, I don't think.
Yeah. And every single core is pinned at 4.8 gigahertz.
And now that our coolant temperature is under control,
we're peaking at 51 degrees.
Isn't it crazy to imagine that you have 500 amps
and 800 watts going through those tiny little pins on the back of the CPU?
Bring back the blender. Oh, wait, did we get a score? 83.11, not as good.
You know, it was hurting our scores, though, that I forgot, because I had got higher scores without it.
We were OBS, the screen cap was hurting our scores a little bit.
We're using the GPU for the screen we're putting over, right? Yeah.
It does distract your CPU a little bit. 3825.
So we are getting full performance in blender. Yeah. And we peaked at 1130 watts.
Oh, what was our peak temps there? 74 was our hottest.
Let's go for some more clock speed. Let's turn off OBS so we don't have anything running
in the background. To the BIOS copter. Ah, the BIOS.
Tweakers Paradise, they used to call it. They still call it that, apparently.
They do. It's still there. That's great.
Now look, a platform like this is gonna have all kinds of arcane voltages and settings
that you can play around with to get the absolute most out of them.
But today, we're not getting into any of that. So we're gonna be laser focused on just a handful
of settings. Our CPU core ratio, we're gonna set to
almost exactly 50, just a little bit over,
and we are going to disable any VRM throttling
and peak current control. We're gonna give this thing as much current
as it could possibly ask for. Oh, and we're gonna change the thermal limit.
Ah, yes. Usually at 90, we're gonna bump it up to 110.
You hooked up a second power supply. Wait, no.
No, you didn't. This was just in case we wanted to game on it. I don't think the CPU could handle the slight voltage
difference if they were both hooked up to two different power supplies. No, but we could hook the second one up to the GPU.
That's the plan. Oh, yeah. I'm ready.
I already jumped over to 20 degrees. Oh, God. 300, 1,000.
We're still at 1,100 watts. I thought we were gonna get more power.
Yeah, well, Cinebench isn't really that hard to run, apparently.
82, 42.
But that's not as fast as the other one we did. If you want something that's gonna hit it way harder
and might show a better improvement, we could probably see that in Blender because that was the other one
that benefited the most from PBO. We're only gonna get a benefit here
on loads that can't take advantage of a few cores boosting up even higher.
Exactly. So the way we've tuned it now is really only useful
for multi-threaded workloads, which I mean, I thought Cinebench was one,
but I guess you just don't have enough threads for me, Cinebench. Okay, let's see how Blender does.
Our time to be for Blender is 39. All right, are you ready?
Yeah. The CPU is at 95 degrees.
And it's pulling at 1,900 watts. This is terrifying.
Did you say we were in a 1,600 watt power supply? Yeah.
I mean, we're well beyond the measurable range for CPU package power. That just doesn't work.
So the only prescribed limit right now in the BIOS is 2,000 watts.
35.88. 10% would be about four seconds.
That's about a 10% improvement. If we pull up something more aggressive,
like Prime95 though, we will find that we're thermally constrained.
Will we? Yes. Or maybe even power constrained. Will we?
Ah, there it goes. Yeah, yeah, just fully rebooted.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, that makes sense. I'm amazed that at no point did our power supply trip.
And our breaker for that matter. If we're gonna wanna run a game,
it might be in our best interest to use a second power supply for that guy. Okay, cool.
Brilliant. So we could fire up Cyberpunk, but I think the game everyone wants to know about
is City Skylines 2. Can the threadripper 99.95 WX
finally tame this hot pile of city?
500 watts in City Skylines 2?
How does this 95 degrees Celsius? We're using 3% of our memory.
But somehow 26% of our CPU.
And it's still chugging. This isn't even that big of a city.
Have they still not fixed this thing? No, this game, it's just impossible to run
because it's so broken at a core level. Like me, that it'll just never really work properly.
Like this is not even high graphic settings. We're running a 1080p.
This is the most powerful computer. It just doesn't matter when the game is the bottleneck.
Cyberpunk, theoretically, right? If you're not familiar with this card,
it's possible that NVIDIA's professional drivers, they just ain't that good at gaming.
So, let's see. Ooh, that ray traced lighting though, boys.
That looks great. That does look great.
90 FPS. Oh god!
Officer, officer, he jumped right in front of my car.
You're the police, you don't have to worry. That was not my fault. It's 100% legal.
Just run him over to make sure he can't testify against you.
In conclusion, this thing is a next level beast. So powerful that we struggled to find benchmarks
that could even use all of its cores while still being relatable to consumers in any way.
But spending more on our computer doesn't necessarily make for a smoother experience.
We had issues with motherboards, with the RAM controller, with PBO performance optimization.
See, the core problem here is that both HDDT or high-end desktop and workstation
are relatively small niches of hardcore compute folks.
Folks who are gonna be expected to go and chase support from the system integrator or the VAR
who provided their equipment. So yeah, it's a bummer that enthusiasts
can't buy these Threadripper Pro chips from official sources.
But even if they could, it'd be hard to recommend them to anyone
who isn't making copious amounts of money with their PC.
So it's time for the uncomfortable conversation
if you missed it earlier. This chip goes for somewhere around $12,000.
If you can find a source for it, which AMD will not give you officially.
You add a terabyte of RAM for another 10 grand.
Plus, I mean, who knows what's going on with that? And I don't know, a couple of pro NVIDIA GPUs
for 10 Gs plus a pop. And all of a sudden, a WRX automobile
starts to look more practical than a WRX computer.
But for the folks who need this kind of performance,
like you're a university or an engineering lab and you need to run simulations,
sure, you could book access to the supercomputer or you could have 25 meetings
to get a server in the university rack or you could just have one meeting,
get this thick boy in your lab and let her rip.
Now it's time for a thick segue to our sponsor.
If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the time we looked at the slightly more attainable Threadripper Non-Pro 9980X.
Totally got 64 cores though, so I don't even know if it'll excite you.