Third-gen Threadripper parts are beastly creatures and if you’re after the most extreme desktop CPU then it’s got to be the 32-core monster that is the 3970X. Unlike previous TR releases, we see no weaknesses with excellent single core performance, and when you’ve got 24 or 32 of them, that results in mind-blowing multi-core performance.
Intel has been unable to claim our best extreme desktop CPU pick since mid 2017 when we chose the 10-core Core i9-7900X. A few months later the first-gen Threadripper parts launched and AMD took over since. It’s crazy to think Intel dominated this category for over a decade before that.
In our opinion, with third-gen Threadripper AMD is carving a new category beyond what is offered by 2nd-gen and Intel’s Cascade Lake-X which are more your traditional HEDT parts.
Case in point, there's an even more extreme desktop CPU also available. The Threadripper 3990X is a 64-core, 128-thread processor with 288 MB of cache. The TR 3990X is a superstar for rendering tasks and it better be at $4,000 for the cost of admission. AMD is targeting a niche of professional visual effects artists and other workstation type processes that can take several hours or days to process. The 3990X is not about price-to-performance, rather the idea here is to offer the absolute best performance period for core-heavy workloads. Saving hours per project is worth paying the 3990X’s asking price.