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AMD Threadripper 9000 is taking a victory lap to drive home its dominance over Intel and to prove the HEDT market belongs entirely to AMD. You might look at a range of Threadripper prices that start around £1,350 and then head up to £2,250 and arrive at £4,500 and say to yourself, ‘woot, that's too strong for my blood' and AMD would reply, ‘no problem, Ryzen 9 can be bought for less than £400'.
On the other hand, if you decide you need the biggest and the best (and can live with a CPU power draw of 350W) you need to select your CPU carefully. Clearly these Threadrippers make little sense for gamers but they also bring marginal benefit if you are working with Adobe Premiere or Handbrake. Our advice is to carefully consider the software you use and to ponder the trade-off between core count and clock speed. We can see the use case for the 32-core 9970X but struggle to see who might benefit from the 64-core 9980X.
You can buy Threadripper 9980X for £4,480 inc VAT, while Threadripper 9970X will cost £2,240 inc VAT.
AMD Threadripper 9980X
Pros
- Excellent performance and a useful improvement over Zen 4 7980X.
- Easy to cool at 80 degrees C despite 350W power draw.
- Good motherboard and driver support.
Cons:
- High system cost.
- Check your software will benefit from anything like 64 cores.
- Clock speed is held back by the massive core count.
AMD Threadripper 9970X
Pros:
- Impressive performance and useful levels of boost in short workloads.
- Faster memory delivers a small benefit when the clocks speeds are high.
- The huge CPU is easy to cool despite the high power draw.
Cons:
- The 9970X is significantly cheaper than 9980X but you still need a high end motherboard, memory and GPU.
- High power draw makes air con a necessity.
KitGuru says: Zen 5 Threadripper 9000 has landed and it delivers a useful increase in IPC and memory speed.
