 We're going to be talking about AMD's Phenom CPU. Where am I? Why is my shirt black? Hey, hey, hey, whoa! Ah, wait, what? Where am I now? Oh, I got my own media group? Cool, oh, check this out. I ride one of these? Sick. Oh, this must be my office? Oh, look at this thing. Is this a CPU? Wow, look at the size of it. Threadripper 2. Could it be the future? No, no, it's not the future. It's today. It's the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2 2,990WX, and it is right now. And our video about it is brought to you by NCI, I fix it. I fix its new Mahi driver kit includes their one quarter inch aluminum screwdriver handle with a magnetic bit socket, knurled grip, and swivel top with 48 driver bits. Check it out at the link below. So young Linus there came from a world where the Intel Core 2 and AMD Phenom X4 series of quad core processors had the highest core counts among consumer products. But in the 10 years since then, the situation has changed a lot, with AMD launching an industry shaking 16 core Threadripper processor last year, and then following it up today with the debut of the 2,990WX, a 32 core, 64 thread successor. Now they've created a ton of excitement amongst both consumers and professionals, and they have sown a lot of discord with their competition over at Intel, who have reacted to the disruption with their own high-end desktop chips based on the same DNA as their Xeon server lineup, and then this weird like 28 core demo thing that they were doing at Computex this year, and then shortly afterward tried to hide. Anyway, hype train aside though, one thing that we know about Threadripper 2, before we even start testing it, is that this is not a gaming-centric CPU. I mean, even ignoring the $1,300 and $1,800 price tags, when we dig even a little bit further into the specs, we find that the WX series, so these are the two new high-end ones, doesn't turbo up as fast as its ex-brethren, the direct Zen Plus replacements for last year's Threadripper 1. Of course, with that said, we're still gonna run some gaming benchmarks anyway. So normally, we actually breeze by our test benches, but this time there are a couple of important notes. So AMD has created a really solid upgrade path for their X399 customers by allowing existing boards like this Zenith Extreme from ASUS to run the new chips with nothing but a BIOS update. With that said, ASUS did have some concerns about overclocking an up to 250-watt chip on boards that weren't necessarily designed for that, so they equipped us with their ROG Zenith Extreme cooling kit. You shouldn't need this kind of thing for stock operation or if you have excellent airflow over your socket area already, but if you're overclocking, we would strongly recommend it. All right, the first big surprise in our gaming testing was discovering that Threadripper 1 is actually faster in some cases in spite of Threadripper 2's higher clock speeds. Even after multiple runs, these results persisted, which might seem like some kind of a mistake, but as it turns out, the less sophisticated first-generation precision boost, so that's AMD's dynamic clock speed optimization engine, kept the core clocks higher more often with precision boost 2 more aggressively utilizing its intermediate clocks instead of being either full out or clocked down. So we actually ended up losing some raw speed, but what we're getting back in return is more consistency. Another thing that impacted gaming is UMA versus NUMA memory access modes. Now, it's quite a bit more complicated, but in layman's terms, UMA is typically better for multi-threaded workloads thanks to its more consistent memory bandwidth, while NUMA can come out ahead sometimes thanks to a small latency advantage in lighter ones. It should be noted that only the X series allows you to decide which mode you prefer. WX only runs in NUMA mode. This was to retain intergenerational compatibility, and I would say that there are probably some creator by day, gamer by night folks out there who are gonna be pretty pleased with the upgrade path that AMD has provided here. I mean, the 2,990 WX isn't far and away the fastest CPU in every test that we ran. Blender, which leverages Intel's AVX 512 extensions, is a notable exception, and single-threaded tests are obviously not its strong suit, but this, this is one powerful piece of silicon. Even Intel's marginally more expensive 7980 XE is no match when Threadripper 2 WX gets to stretch its legs. Now on the subject of stretching them, let's try some overclocking, shall we? Now, you can still overclock Threadripper 2 manually, but in theory anyway, AMD's precision boost overdrive allows the user to simply set a higher power budget and then watch while precision boost 2 and XFR, so that's extended frequency range 2, do all the heavy lifting. Only some of our workloads actually improved in performance while others straight up regressed. We think this has to do with some kind of weird thermal limit as indicated by the identical 68 degree T die reading at both stock and overclock speeds in spite of our beefy cooler, but that may require further investigation. Let us know if you'd like to see a dedicated Threadripper 2 overclocking video. For now, I'm just gonna grab this, grab this baby. Here's what we can say, 32 cores in a consumer or prosumer or workstation chip, whatever you wanna classify it as, sounds amazing. It is exactly the headline that AMD needs as a company right now to gain valuable, what's called mind share, where normal consumers are more likely to run out and buy normal Ryzen chips because the world record holders and the influential content creators that they admire are using AMD. In the real world though, the potential market for a product like this is pretty limited. Now, the 2,990WX is the high-end workstation king, but you need workloads like heavy virtualization or 3D rendering or gas exploration that take advantage of it. Otherwise, honestly speaking, you'd be better off spending half as much on a 2,950X, the 16 core drop-in replacement for the older 16 core, but now with Zen+, or looking at Intel's lineup if AVX 512 support or single threaded performance are also important to you. But maybe at the end of the day, it doesn't matter who it's for. Maybe this was just about building an amazing piece of technology and then patiently waiting for the use cases to show up because I mean, if there's anything that the history of computing has shown us, it's that if you breed a faster horse, someone somewhere is gonna build a more challenging course. Speaking of building something, Massdrop has gone from just being a place for you to buy stuff to a place for you to buy exclusive, amazing collaborative products. And the Massdrop X Hi-Fi Man HE350 headphones use new dynamic drivers, different from what was used in the HE300, resulting in a more neutral sound signature. They feature a comfortable headband, the Lure ear pads and a detachable cable and they ship within two to three days. Check them out today at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching guys. If this video sucked, it's hard to be an Intel fan boy today, isn't it? So you guys know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also linked down there is our merch storage has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join.