The monster has been unleashed and will rip through multitasking or heavily multithreaded programs with the greatest of ease! I've mostly used this CPU for automating routines that would otherwise take much longer on other CPUs with fewer cores. With all 64 hardware threads in use, I'm seeing 3.8 GHz clock speeds though that increases to 4.2 GHz with one thread in use based on default settings. (I know I could push that a little more if I wanted.) Threads past 32 seem to be 1/4 as fast so using all 64 threads versus 32 yields a 25% net speed increase. Still, with all 64 threads in use, what would normally take an hour on a typical quad-core CPU will be done in about 8-9 minutes on this beast!
The stability has been solid. I've never experienced any slow down issues, crashes, blue screens, or anything. I haven't gotten into overclocking much, but I've been using Ryzen Master to monitor temps and clock speeds and have considered overclocking for some tasks.
If you're into gaming, this isn't quite the best CPU to get, unless you're wanting to stream your game play as well where the extra cores will allow for faster, higher quality encoding without affecting the game's frame rate.
Installing the CPU was rather interesting. It comes with a piece attached on the sides that sticks out meant for holding it so that you don't touch the CPU itself at all. You basically just align it with the CPU slide-in opening on the motherboard and gently slide it down then secure it with the included specialty torque screwdriver that will let you know when you get to 13.5 in-lbs of torque as it will click.
Do note that this CPU does not come with a cooler. For as much power as it draws and as much cooling as it'll need, I strongly recommend a liquid cooling setup. An applicable heat sink fan setup is just going to be much too bulky and cause problems with future upgrades.
The 3970X requires a lot of power. With my system idling, I see that my UPS is reporting about 160-180 watts of power usage (30W from display excluded). With this CPU under full load doing just number crunching with all 64 threads in use, I see it jump to about 400-430W. If you get a single high end video card to go with it, that'll increase still more. You'll definitely want at least a 750W PSU at bare minimum, preferably 850W to 1000W.
The main weak point, of course, is the price. However, for what this CPU can do and how much processing power it has, it's well worth the cost if you're the type that does heavy multitasking or use heavily multithreaded programs a lot.
| Processor | 4.5 GHz ryzen_threadripper_2990wx |
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