we've had high-end desktop or hedt processors for quite a while now you
know those cpus that sit at the very top of the food chain that straddle the line
between home pc and workstation with a high price tag to match
and for a long time Intel dominated that market segment with its extreme edition
and x-series processors but AMD has since fired back in a big way literally
this is the AMD threadripper and i mean look at the size of it it's practically
a coaster you can put your drink on this thing and save your table but other than
leaving your neighbor's desktop with a feeling of inadequacy is it right for
you and what should you know about it let's start out by looking at something
straightforward core count although typical ryzen desktop chips have between
4 and 16 cores threadripper cpus start
at 8 cores and go all the way up to 64
cores meaning that the chips are heavily marketed toward content creators who
need fast rendering times and they all have simultaneous multi-threading so
we're talking 128 threads on just one
socket speaking of sockets it's pretty clear that a chip this chunky won't fit
into your standard am4 motherboard instead threadripper uses the tr4 and
str4 sockets which each have over 4 000
contacts in case you're wondering AMD switched to str4 with the threadripper
3000 series and despite looking the same as the older tr4 this two sockets are
not compatible but aside from having more cores and a bigger footprint what's
going on under the hood that really separates it from a normal ryzen chip
well because threadripper is an enthusiast level lineup it's not just
core count that's important it's also i o Threadripper trips have a lot more
pci express lanes than the ryzen counterparts the first two generations
had a full 60 PCIe 3.0 lanes coming
directly off the chip with 48 linked to the slots on your motherboard enabling
multi-GPU and the other 12 reserved for storage if you're using a 3000 series
threadripper the number of lanes is bumped up to 64. and you get the new pci
express 4.0 revision as well even if you're not into multi-GPU and hey we're
not going to blame you if you're not this can still be useful if you're into
virtualizing you need tons of storage or you're using something like fpga for
crypto mining threadripper also features a larger level three cache than
mainstream ryzen chips to keep all those cores fed and reduce cache misses during
demanding workloads and if you're not sure what a cache miss is you can learn
all about the importance of CPU cache in this video additionally all threadripper
chips support quad channel RAM for performance boost as well as ecc or
error correcting memory which can prevent crashes helpful if you're doing
really critical work on your pc or using it to host a server we'd also be remiss
if we didn't mention the threadripper pro lineup for actual workstations which
uses yet another socket called swrx8 and will give you support for
octa-channel memory but hold on a sec surely chips this large and powerful
have to have some kind of downside right predictably threadripper cpus cost a lot
more money when threadripper debuted back in 2017 the lower cost skew was 549
and the current lineup at the time we shot this video starts at 1
399 for a 24 core model and it goes all the
way up into 4 grand if you want a 64 core model however although this is
obviously a lot of money threadripper has had success beating Intel setups
that cost around five times as much in benchmarks of course high cost isn't the
only thing to look out for threadripper cpus are a little trickier to install on
a motherboard than you might be used to and their higher tdps up to 280 watts
mean you'll need a cooler that's up to task but we wouldn't recommend setting a
glass of ice water on it even if it is the size of a coaster this episode is
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