Load Temperatures
With a massive 280W TDP, temperatures at full load reach a crazy high of 94 degrees Celsius, which I think is absolutely nuts. But having said that, the our Noctua NH U12S TR4 CPU cooler did an adequate job of cooling the processor.
Verdict and Conclusion
As you can see from the benchmark scores in our previous page, the Ryzen Threadripper 3960X is a real beast. It outperforms everything we’ve got in our labs, and it’s definitely the fastest processor we’ve tested to date … that’s unless someone gives me the next model up – the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X (32 cores/64 threads) 😛
We got an impressive score of 5668 for Cinebench R15, and it zipped through Blender Splash2 in 8 mins : 15.25 secs. In PCMark 10, it produced a high score of 7055. For Port Royal, we managed to get score of 6,633 with a DLSS score of 44.65. And for Timespy and Firestrike, we got excellent scores of 5,506 and 23,985 respectively.
The support quad-channel memory really helped here. Using 4 sticks of Thermaltake Toughram RGB DDR4-3200, we got an eye-boggling score of 83,421 Mb/sec read, and 84,379 Mb/sec write!
Although we only used a PCIE Gen3x4 M.2 SSD for our tests, I would love see the how the whole system will perform with a PCIE Gen4x4 M.2 SSD. Having said that, I’m still getting great read/write speeds with my Viper VPN100 512GB PCIE M.2 SSD.
There is one thing I have to say … Please note that AMD’s 3rd Generation Threadripper 3000-series uses the new TRX40 platform (socket sTRX4) is not compatible with the previous generation of Threadripper CPUs or any of the AM4 processors such as the Ryzen 7, Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 3.
This means, you’ll have to invest in a new motherboard and a new cooling solution, and with the CPU’s massive 280W TDP … you might need to check, to make sure your power supply can handle it.
So what about gaming? Well, the truth is … the Ryzen Threadripper 3960X may not benefit hardcore gamers, since most games will not use the extra cores, and besides it’s not really aimed at the gaming market anyway.
However, if you’re a real power user who needs an affordable, fast and powerful multi-core processor for content creation, 4K/8K video editing, raw photo editing or 3D rendering … then you only have one choice.
All said and done, the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X is a really fast and capable processor. With this many cores, you won’t find an Intel equivalent for this price, which is currently retails around USD $1,399-1,499.
Final Words
AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 3000-series is in direct competition against Intel’s Core-X (HEDT) processors, and it’s a real challenge for Intel. They’re falling behind these past few years, and some analysts have predicted it might take up to 2 years for Intel to catch up! Anyway, the battle for the coveted crown for the best desktop processors continues … and this time, AMD seems to be the winner for now.
You can buy the following items from Amazon US. You can also visit our Amazon stores in UK, Germany, Australia, Canada.
| Motherboard | $599 | |
| CPU | AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X Processor  (24/48)Base 3.8GHz – Boost 4.5GHz |
$1,399-1,499 |
| Cooling | Noctua NH U12S TR4 Cooler | $69 |
| Ram | Thermaltake Toughram RGB 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4-3200 ram | $226 |
| HDD | Viper VPN100 512GB PCIE M.2 SSD | $75 |
| PSU | Thermaltake ToughPower iRGB 850W – 80Plus Gold | $168 |
| VGA card | Zotac GeForce RTX 2080 AMP | $715-750 |
Total Cost (excluding case) |
~ $3,250+ |
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