Ryzen Threadripper 16-core processor impresses with a beefy overclock to 4.1GHz

Threadripper 1950X shows a serious turn of speed

AMD’s first batch of mighty Ryzen Threadripper processors officially launch today, but folks who’ve got hold of a chip already have been testing out its overclocking potential, and the good news is it seems the 1950X is a seriously strong performer in this department.

This leak comes from a Reddit denizen (going by the name ‘calling the wolf’) who claims to have pushed a Threadripper 1950X to 4.1GHz across all 16-cores, a good chunk above its base clock speed of 3.4GHz.

This was pulled off using liquid cooling (Thermaltake Water 3.0 – which can be had for around $170, or £130 in the UK) in an ASRock X399 Professional Gaming motherboard.

At this speed, the processor achieved a multi-core score of 58,391 points in Geekbench 3, which compares favorably to Intel’s Core i9-7900X, which generally hits around the 45,000 mark with a similarly chunky overclock (depending on the exact overclock and test system you look at).

In Cinebench R15, the 1950X recorded a score of 3,337 running at 4.0GHz, which as PC Gamer observes is considerably nippier than the aforementioned Core i9-7900X, which racks up around 2,460 at 4.6GHz.

The Intel chip is a 10-core model rather than 16-cores, granted, but the thing is it’s in the same price bracket as the 1950X (they’re both pitched at $999 in the US, and a roughly equivalent price in pounds in the UK – although Intel’s CPU is about £100 cheaper right now, looking at online prices in this country).

Running temps

The 4.1GHz overclock for the 1950X was achieved using 1.4V, and saw the processor’s temperatures reach around 85C, which may well sound a little warm for comfort (at least in the long-term) to some. Notching the voltage down to 1.25V for a 4.0GHz overclock cooled things down to a much more palatable 65C.

So, the overclocking story is looking pretty rosy for those who are thinking of getting a Threadripper chip. We’ve already taken the Alienware Area 51 Threadripper Edition PC, which features the 1950X, for a benchmarking spin – see the highly impressive results here.

Of course, it’ll be interesting to see how this beefy range of top-end Ryzen processors performs with air cooling.

Meanwhile, other chatter on the CPU grapevine suggests that there are more variants of Threadripper in the pipeline, with 1900, 1920 and 1950 models (which drop the ‘X’ meaning they don’t have XFR tech) expected to be announced with somewhat cheaper pricing.