Threadripper 5965WX or Ryzen 7950X?

[sschoellhammer]

Hello there,

I was planning on building a threadripper machine but with the new Ryzen 7's I'm again undecided..
I was under the impression that threadripper is far superior in terms of multithreading performance but looking at this chart here for example, the difference is rather marginal and considering the huge price (and power draw) difference I'm wondering if this still makes sense for me.
The Ryzen only supports 128 GB of ram and another advantage of TR seems to be far more options for storage (if I understand the meaning of pci lanes correctly...) That aside I'm not sure what I'm getting..

Whats your take?

Thanks!!

 

[Alex Glawion]

It'll really depend on the workloads you're looking to run. If you don't need the extra PCIe Lanes for multiple GPUs or multiple high-speed storage (e.g. nvme m.2 drives), the Ryzen 7950X will be the better choice for almost anything. It has MUCH higher single core performance, meaning faster active work, and is about on par in multi-core performance.

What are your workloads?

 

[sschoellhammer]

I would have liked to be able to extend the system with GPUs as I need them ( think a one man shop renderfarm) but this flexibility is for me only worthwhile to certain price pain point .
I also do a lot of houdini/sim work so I do care about multicore performance quiet a bit.
Sadly TR seems to be only beating the Ryzen on the very high end of its range - at about 5 times the price - so I don't think it would make sense for me... or anyone? . (If there are no other differences in performance these benchmarks don't cover. )

 

[Alex Glawion]

Yeah the higher RAM cap, more pcie lanes for 3+ gpus at x16 pcie lanes, and more storage support really is what makes a TR shine. A Ryzen is much better for active work, though, and you can even get 2 - 3 GPUs working on it at reduced pcie lanes, but since most gpus don't saturate the bandwidth anyway, there's no performance decrease.

 

[sschoellhammer]

Thanks a lot for the input About the GPU's, looking at the existing mainboards I see it pretty hard to actually install more than 3 big cards on there..
I think for my next project Ryzen it is. Do you have go to main board that you'd recommend for 2 GPUs?

 

[Alex Glawion]

For TR or Ryzen? You'll need to go with dual-slot blower style gpus. Then find a Motherboard that allows for 3x x8 or more pcie lanes. There are quite a few for TR.

For Ryzen, pcie5 was rushed, and things aren't that easy. Right now it seems like you can do 2 GPUs at reasonable pcie 4 bandwidths at most on X670E.

ASUS ProArt X670E-Creator WIFI comes to mind.

 

[sschoellhammer]

<<For Ryzen, pcie5 was rushed>> Would you say it'd be a good idea to wait? I'm in no immediate pressure.

 

[Alex Glawion]

Sure, there might be the possibility of supermicro entering the motherboard game for that generation, which would get us some great boards for multi-gpu.

 

[sschoellhammer]

oh my, now you got me interested. haha

 

[Alex Glawion]

Hehe oh for sure! If you want to go server/rack, there are some more possibilities, especially for crazy multi-gpu rigs. Of course, they are expensive, loud, hot, and not that great for actively working on, but as a rendernode, entirely viable!

 

[Filser]

Hello Guys,

I am 3D Archviz Artis and I am thinking of buying a new pc but I am not sure which settings are best for Corona Render/3DMax.
My need is essential single core power (for 3D modeling, texturing, lightning ), and fast when launching the Corona Interactive Render.
At my current job i work with a AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX 32-core 3.0GHz c/ Turbo 4.2GHz 64MB SktTR4. The thing is that I have some performance problems with it, and I can only take advantage of its power when I'm doing the final render. This processor takes a long time to launch the interactive render and when I have complex geometries or a high number of mesh (trees, grass, plants) the view port visualization is very slow and I have difficulties to move inside the scene. The same scene is much more fluid and fast launching the interactive render in i9 or even on 5 years old i7 processor with a low base core frequency and core count.

I also need a CPU that gives me "some" power for render, knowing that i will never have the Threadripper render capacity.

I have the following configuration in mind, but I have some doubts regarding the Processor, GPU, Motherboard, RAM.


Settings:
Intel Core i9-13900KF 24-Core 2.2GHz c/ Turbo 5.8GHz 36MB Skt1700
Motherboard ATX Asus Prime Z690-P WiFi
Memory RAM G.SKILL Ripjaws S5 Series 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5-5600MHz CL36 Pret
SSD M.2 2280 Samsung 980 Pro 500GB MLC V-NAND NVMe
Graphic Card MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Ventus 2X 8G OCV1 LHR
Power Seasonic Focus Gold GX 750W Full Modular
Water Cooler CPU Corsair iCUE H150i RGB Pro XT 360mm
Case ATX Fractal North

2300Euros approx 2425,69$

Can you hell with this setup? Should i get an AMD Ryzen 7959x or AMD Ryzen 5950x or AMD Ryzen 5900x.
Can a buy a lower Graphics Card since i will have GPU Render Based Render Motor. Wich GPU should i get to have a nice viewport performance in 3DSMax.

Thank you for your time!

Filipe

 

[Alex Glawion]

I answered this in the Article you commented on, will copy/paste it here:

The solution to your issues is rather simple. Corona is a CPU renderer and thrives on high multi-core performance. The interactive renderer, though, needs high clock speeds to be truly interactive, until you’re shown the progressive rendering phase, at which, lots of cores again speeds it up.

The 2990WX is extremely slow for active work. The easy solution, as you already figured out, is to upgrade to a mainstream CPU with fewer cores that are clocked much higher. Both the 13900K and 7950X are considerably faster in both multi-core performance as well as single-core / active work / interactive performance.

For the maximum performance, the 13900K leads the pack. Followed by the 7950X. I would stay clear of Ryzen 5XXX cpus, especially if you’re building a new PC.

The PC Build list you’ve mentioned great! I wouldn’t get a lower-end GPU, as the 3060Ti already is quite minimum compared to the rest of the components. It might very well be that chaos will expand corona to support hybrid rendering, or other software that you might use in the future can make good use of a mid-range GPU. So don’t underpower the GPU too much.

I would certainly increase the amount of RAM, though, go with 64GB from the start (2x 32GB) so the PC will last you a long time.

Cheers,
Alex

 

[Filser]

Alex

Thank you so much for your reply. It's was really helpful with great insights.

Cheers,