AMD YD299XAZAFWOF Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Processor

Currently, this CPU is hands down objectively the best at 3D rendering in a single socket (by the metric of time taken to render 3D scenes).In blender cycles, I've had this CPU outpace my dual 1080ti at rendering, 950 vs 693 seconds in a scene I've been using to benchmark.I also do a lot of data processing.Encoding (ffmpeg): depending on the codec used, it can be pretty good, or pretty meh, in the worst cases getting slightly outpaced by the 18 core i9 7980XE in h265. h264 I found was not quite as favorable for the intel cpus though, but something to note is that neither of those codecs actually fully loaded the cpu, 2 of the dies were typically idle, thus the cpu was being treated like a 16-core, and one of the dies was barely loaded, resulting in severe under utilization for the AMD cpu that pushed its boost clocks down, while the intel cpu was able to make use of much higher boosts, since at least the number of threads was much closer to its actual core count. Parallel encoding however swings things back in the favor of the 2990WX though, where it can now fully utilize all the cores. Occasionally some under utilization would happen due to memory bandwidth constraints in some portions of my reference task.NLP Text Preprocessing (Proprietary w/ Python, Numpy): This particular bit of code is unfortunately a custom piece written for my job, so not necessarily directly translatable to what other people may be doing, but running 64 instances of the program in parallel didnt scale how I expected... because my nvme drives couldn't keep up with the IO demands, resulting in CPU under utilization, so not the CPU's fault. I'll need to set up a larger scratch disk array to properly test this.AVX2 deep learning: ok, the 1080tis win out for this workload, but against other cpus the 2990WX can still hold its own... until you bring in the question of AVX512, which is an interesting topic. Sure, AVX512 might be a bit easier to code for than CUDA... in theory, since its still all on the CPU. However AVX512 is not at all easy to code for, or even getting the stuff to compile right. Its also less mature and less supported than CUDA, making.. coding for CUDA arguably actually easier overall. For all the hammering away at some of the problems I was facing, I could only get around half the benchmarks to run on AVX512 intel cpus without crashing. Some of them still produced unexpected outputs. Anyways, verdict is that, while GPUs and dedicated hardware still easily outpace CPUs here, the 2990WX isnt half bad at it either if you cant otherwise use GPUs.Games: it manages a solid 60fps at 4k using dual 1080tis. Cant ask for much more than that. I'm an artist and programmer who games on the side, I like high resolutions, and I dont really play anything that greatly benefits from high fps - it just makes it nicer to watch but provides no tangible benefits for what I play.If you have workloads that benefit from this CPU, you or at least your business probably makes enough money to get this CPU, and in the arena that this CPU fights in, where its battling parts that range from $500 to $10000, its one of the best values there is for workloads its best at.If you also want to game on it, well, its perfectly fine if you just want 60hz or even 90hz (vr), with dynamic local mode bringing it closer to where the 2950X and 2700X sit. Its never going to be a top tier champ of the high refresh rate gaming arena, but thats not what its value proposition is for anyways, theres cpus better at that for much cheaper (2700X, 8700K, and just forget the 9900K even exists since the 8700K is just a few percent slower while not running into the same power/thermal issues as the 9900K - which by the way, actually can use more power (I've seen people reporting up to 265W on the package) than even the 2990WX (peak power draw I've observed is 248W) does at stock settings on a good board under all-core loads, since MCE is a stock setting enabled by default on a lot of those boards that can actually supply it enough power without the VRMs throttling or overheating).

Generally speaking this baby packs 32 cores and 64 threads and it's awesome for video production, rendering, and compile farms. Or as a beefy server. It's not designed for severe overclocking... its not really a consumer CPU and should be thought of more as a workhorse. In that situation you generally want power efficiency, and the 2990WX delivers efficiency in spades if you run the memory <= 2666 and limit the cpu to 250W or so using XFR2 + PPT to set a socket limit (check power consumption at the wall and dial-in what you want). It works great with a large air-cooler in this configuration, which is what I need.This is not really a 'server' CPU. It's designed to accomodate a beefy air cooler, not run in a 2U case (even with forced air). So don't expect to do that.In terms of memory, I've had no trouble running ECC with this baby though it should be noted that you might not be able to push 3000Mhz with all eight slots populated. Not that you would want to anyway, with 32 cores a high memory fabric frequency takes a lot of power budget away from the CPU cores. I don't recommend going above 2666. Yes, 3000+ will perform better, as will OC'ing the thing to the heavens... but you wind up burning 400W or more to get perhaps a 15% improvement over 250W and it isn't worth doing if the intention is to use the system as a workhorse.Gamers who really want a ton of cores would be better served with the 2950X and not the 2990WX. The memory configuration in the 2950X is more symmetrical and has a UMA (uniform memory access) mode. The 2990WX is NUMA-only due to the assymetric nature of the memory connections to the CPU dies.Basically, UMA modes in large CPUs like this one, or in e.g. dual-socket Xeon systems, exchange a low and high address bit, switching memory banks typically every 256 bytes of addressable memory, in order to spread the memory load evenly between banks. NUMA mode keeps the banks separate but the OS must understand this to produce an efficient use of memory in terms of allocating memory for CPU cores. The 2990WX does NOT have a UMA mode. The 2950X does.-Matt

I expected an AMD processor, but unfortunately a kid's paint arrived after waiting several weeks. The 2000$ worthy product has suddenly become a kid's paint tool costing several dollars.When it arrived, I was so disappointed with this product, because I had waited for the CPU to assemble a complete PC in the end.

First off, this CPU is flat out awesome for what it's bringing to the table; 64x 3.0ghz = 192ghz of CPU potential at just the base clock. That's insane!But, I discovered a couple items:A) CPU max temp before it starts throttling is 68C. It has a max temp of 95, but it's set to start pulling back just below 68C. Given I built this system (temp) on a traditional HSF, that means I get only a bit of time before I hit that. Water option inbound, just wanted to sort how how/where I was going to place it.B) Even though the systemboard supports it, I found out that the CPU does not - due to the infinity fabric, RAM clock speeds are limited. My board can support up to 3600. Setting it that way is a no-post situation and bios resets itself. I've managed to get it running at 2933, which based on what I've read seems to align with the limitations of the infinity fabric. RAM being swapped for certified compatible. I did see in the HCL for it, that 3000 is supported, and, I've ran it that way and seem to have no issues with the RAM I initially purchased since it goes to 3466, but I'm running it at 2933 until the new RAM comes in since this will get RA'd.All said, everything I can throw at it, it just laughs and asks 'what else ya got?'.