Given the price of the new AMD Threadripper Pro, you’d expect the company’s best HEDT processor to crush the competition relentlessly. And it turns out that in most cases this usually happens, except for a few quite important ones, according to the first comprehensive test carried out.
Based in the USA Pugetsystems (opens in new tab)a popular workstation vendor, published a series of in-depth reviews of the Threadripper Pro 5995WX, 10 of them covering various applications, with Intel’s Xeon W-3300 as a training partner.
Even with its 64 cores, the 5995WX couldn’t beat Intel’s Core i9-12900K in Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Lightroom Classic is at Adobe Photoshop while the two came very close in After Effects.
test times
The obvious conclusion is that if you plan on keeping Adobe Creative Cloud, Intel is probably the way to go. The 12900K is not even the fastest Intel HEDT processor at the moment, this title belongs to the 12950HX, released in May 2022.
For the rest of the benchmarks (da Vinci, Cinebench, V-Ray, Blender and Unreal), the top numbers are still important, allowing the 5995WX to top the leaderboard. Another popular benchmark, PassMark, has entries for the 5995WX, where it became the first processor to break the 100,000 barrier, a healthy 15% improvement over the previous champion, the EPYC 7773X.
| AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 SKU | Cores / Threads | Frequency (Reinforcement / Base) | TDP |
|---|---|---|---|
| AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX | 64 / 128 | Up to 4.5/2.7 GHz | 280 W |
| AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5975WX | 32/64 | Up to 4.5/3.6 GHz | 280 W |
| AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5965WX | 24/48 | Up to 4.5/3.8 GHz | 280 W |
Intel’s HEDT renaissance?
Overall, Intel seems to be doing better on lightweight threaded workloads, meaning Intel’s faster consumer CPU will suffice for most creative tasks.
AMD will have certainly noticed how competitive the new Core i9 processors are even compared to AMD’s current high-end consumer processor, the Ryzen 9 5950X.
Realistically, though, we owe an update as the current crop of Ryzen desktop CPUs were released in November 2020, over 18 months ago. Earlier this year, laptop processors based on the Zen3+ architecture gave us a glimpse of just how powerful their desktop (and server) counterparts could be.