AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9980X and 9970X: Everything you Need to Know

When you think of gaming CPUs, you often think of AMD. So, with the release of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series, we thought we'd give you a rundown.

The 9980X is your successor to the AMD Ryzen 7980X, with the same price-point at a whopping $4,999 and a large increase in performance. Along with that, the 9970X is the next generation of the AMD Ryzen 7970X, also holding a similar position to the previous generation pricewise, at a base cost of $2,499.

Threadripper CPUs can play games for sure, and can provide some pretty good performance. However, they are not designed for this and the cost is so high that compared to something like the Ryzen 9 9900X3D, the price to performance ratio becomes untenable.

The 9980X & 9970X are both not meant for hardcore gaming. This is partly because they have less than stellar single-core performance, with their performance in this area 18.1% lower than the Intel Core Ultra 9 and 11.0% lower than the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D. Though not being gaming related and having minimal single-core power doesn't mean these CPUs are weak. Far from it.

These CPUs specialize in tons of fields like medical modeling, financial simulations, rendering, AI/ML training, and most things besides gaming. They are great with multi-core performance, outperforming the past generation by a large amount.

As you can see in the specs above, there is only one compatible chipset for this series of CPU. This is a unique E-ATX motherboard with tons of features created for the Threadripper (TR - X50) series itself.

It is one of the most balanced boards on the market and provides tons of power for larger and stronger CPUs such as those found in the Threadripper series.

With a new generation of CPUs comes performance increases. Well, that's the hope, right? We researched the changes across a few fields and documented them below.

As you can see from the statistics, the Threadripper 9980X and 9970X have increased performance in many areas, though there is a negligible increase in gaming from the past generation, so small in fact that we left it out.

This CPU has the same high power consumption that the older Threadrippers have been known for, but it is a solace to know it has not increased by much.

It is also important to note that the change in architecture from Zen 4 to Zen 5 has netted an approximate boost of about a ~16% increase in Geomean of 10 Workstation Benchmarks and a whopping ~25% increase in performance in SPEC Workstation - AI & Machine Learning Benchmarks. This is great for the future and for developing smarter and stronger AI.

These hefty CPUs are some of the best you can get for professionals in rendering, simulations, or people that work with heavy parallel workloads like machine learning. It should also be clear that this is definitely not a value buy, with its price points in the thousands.

Also, if you are interested in this CPU, cooling is especially important so consider any of these CORSAIR CPU coolers. If you just want to play games however, something like the 9800X3D would be a much better fit for you.