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Workstation 2990wx or 7980xe?

Pat Butcher 3

Pat Butcher 3

Pat Butcher 3

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Joined
30 Sep 2016
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30
Hi just wanted to know what people would recommend for a workstation build. At present on a dual Xeon e5-2620v3 which is almost unusable at times. I put this down to the low clock speed this cpu runs at as I have serve lag and awful viewport performance in programmes. I use 3ds max Autocad and the usually Adobe stuff.

The 2990wx looks good on paper but again worried about the low clock speed on these cpus

Any advice would be great due to my boss demanding I get one immediately. And money . And money although important is not the major factor as it not a personal pc.

thanks
 
Pat Butcher 3 said:
The 2990wx looks good on paper but again worried about the low clock speed on these cpus
Click to expand...

You do know the 7980xe has a base clock is 2.6GHz and a boost clock of 4.2GHz where as the 2990WX has a base of 3GHz and a boost bf 4.2GHz? So there isn't much difference in actual raw clock speed.

What sort of disk subsystem do you need to run on the workstation, and is your time mainly designing with some rendering or do you find yourself often waiting for renders to complete? How much RAM do you use?

I'm sure there are more questions, but more background would be helpful first. :)
 
This really is a no brainer considering your usage. The 2990wx blows the 7980xe out of the water on all sorts of levels with the exception of overclocking. As your usage is as a workstation, overclocking shouldn't come into play really anyway.
Considering what you run currently, going to a 2990wx would be like jumping from a bi-plane to a Eurofighter. On that basis i wouldn't worry about clockspeed at all.
 
kitfit1 said:
This really is a no brainer considering your usage. The 2990wx blows the 7980xe out of the water on all sorts of levels with the exception of overclocking. As your usage is as a workstation, overclocking shouldn't come into play really anyway.
Considering what you run currently, going to a 2990wx would be like jumping from a bi-plane to a Eurofighter. On that basis i wouldn't worry about clockspeed at all.
Click to expand...

+1

7980xe = 18 core 36 threads at 2.6Ghz - 4.2Ghz vs 2990wx 32 core 64 threads at 3Ghz - 4.2Ghz.

Threadripper knocks the snot out of the snotty little Exon :)
 
Hi thanks for the replies.

Reason i am a little stuck on this is that you can overclock the 7980xe and also the 9980xe boots higher. I do wait for renders but I wait a lot more with the dire performance i get from the dual Xeons. Autocad and 3ds Max view ports and modelling are also unbelievably slow. The Xeons have a base or 2.4 and are supposed to boost to 3.2 but never seem to.

The 2990wx looks to be lagging behind intel in specviewperf 13 which concerns me.

At the end of the day I just dont want to be in the same boat again because its mental torture at times when you have deadlines to meet and all I seem to be doing is watching a blue icon spinning round for most of it.
 
Pat Butcher 3 said:
Hi thanks for the replies.

Reason i am a little stuck on this is that you can overclock the 7980xe and also the 9980xe boots higher. I do wait for renders but I wait a lot more with the dire performance i get from the dual Xeons. Autocad and 3ds Max view ports and modelling are also unbelievably slow. The Xeons have a base or 2.4 and are supposed to boost to 3.2 but never seem to.

The 2990wx looks to be lagging behind intel in specviewperf 13 which concerns me.

At the end of the day I just dont want to be in the same boat again because its mental torture at times when you have deadlines to meet and all I seem to be doing is watching a blue icon spinning round for most of it.
Click to expand...

Check out benchmarks as it seems the TR wins some and the 7980xe/9980xe wins some. Depends what software.
 
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Total: £3,599.88 (includes shipping: £9.90)
​




£400 saving is basically 32gig of 3200 DDR4 RAM covered too


My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £407.69 (includes shipping: £8.70)
​
 
Pat Butcher 3 said:
At the end of the day I just dont want to be in the same boat again because its mental torture at times when you have deadlines to meet and all I seem to be doing is watching a blue icon spinning round for most of it.
Click to expand...

Flip a coin? 2990WX will rip the 9980xe to shreds when rendering using some programs, but maybe slower doing other stuff. I'm not sure if you are looking for stability you'd want to overclocking either system too far, given the delays an unstable system could cause as you very well know by what you've already commented.
 
Either are going to be a massive step up from your current system.

Are you honestly going to overclock both chips to the highest you can get them to run 100% stable?

According to the reviews online the current versions of Adobe and AUTOCAD are poorly threaded especially in 2D, so outright speed wins there. So for the next 6 months if you are overclocking the 9980xe is about 15% faster than the Threadripper - again this is only according to reviews - I have not run the software or have the chips.

Moving forward the Threadripper is going to slowly equal and then pull away from the 9980XE as new software editions come out that do take advantage of the threads.

If your boss will swing for it I would be getting the 2970WX This year and then get the 7nm Threadripper next year as it will drop into the existing socket and give you a big update on cores, IPC and speed.
 
Even though my heart would tell you to go for AMD system, seeing you are using Autocad, I'm on the fence here. I use Autocad with my Xeon E5-1620 v3 and it is excruciating to work :(
Boosting to 4.2 on AMD would rectify the issue a little bit, especially when 2990WX will be able to sustain the boost clock throughout the whole operation.
On the other hand buying into Intel system is like a lottery, you don't know if its dead end system or not :D
Option to upgrade to 7nm next year is quite interesting as well, as the clocks should jump quite a bit.

Edit: I wouldn't trust Autodesk to come up with magic that is multithreading. They had so many years to work on the issue, but its still mainly single threaded pain :(
On the other hand rendering on other mentioned software will be much quicker, to say the least :D much quicker with 32 cores
 
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I hate working on Autocad drawings on this machine. Sheet redraws can take up to 5 minutes.

Problem is I dont think Autocad will ever be multi-threaded, something to do with its code. Its a old, terrible and cumbersome programme but has the market tied up.

If the AMD system will boost to 4.2 all day long when in Autocad and Max then I am sold. This is not the case with the Xeons though and these run constant 2.4 when not rendering.
 
Yeah, I have my gripes with Autodesk. My workstation got "upgraded" several months ago, I call it a downgrade though :D In 3 years I got from Sandy bridge [email protected] to Haswell 1620 @3.5ghz. They added SSD instead of that noisy HDD. But Autocad is as sluggish as it ever was, and nvidia workstation GPU (from K2000 to P2000 (yeah, our company doesn't care about us)) is not doing any favours there as well. And yes, blue circle is my everyday view :D :D

Keep in mind, 4.2ghz is single core boost. You will not see all cores boost to those levels. But yeah, for Autocad it will be always 4.2ghz, as its single threaded. Your renders and other software which can see the cores, will see unbelievable speedups, since you will be going from 12 threads to 64.
Obviously proper NVMe SSDs will not hurt :)
 
Tell me about that blue circle!

But if you are saying that TR will boost to 4.2 at all times in apps (single threaded) then its perfect. I can imagine its the same as these Xeons thou where view port performance is not really considered and so remains at the base clock.
 
What I'll do, I will fire up CAD on my home PC with Ryzen 2700X, and play around with some drawings, to see how it behaves on AMD system. 2700X single thread should be representative of Threadripper single thread. Give me couple of days to make arrangements, and I'll post it back here. My Ryzen boosts single thread up to 4.3ghz, so will have clear indication on actual cad performance, though my Vega 64 will be miles ahead in cad performance than my "workstation" special P2000
 
Go for the 2990WX/2970WX purely based on the X399 platform:
  • Future Proof - TR3 (Zen2) on 7nm is shaping to be quite exceptional based on EPYC information.
  • Bootable NVMe RAID
  • Way better IO
  • More PCIe Lanes
Also note that a lot of the early 2990WX reviews have awful performance under some programs/workloads due to a windows scheduler issue - made obvious by comparing against Linux benchmarks.
I gather it was partially corrected by running a Dynamic Local Mode in AMD Ryzen Master, but from memory MS will push Windows scheduler updates.
See here: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=2990wx-linwin-scale&num=3
https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2018/10/05/previewing-dynamic-local-mode-for-the-amd-ryzen-threadripper-wx-series-processors
 
Yeah my initial thought was to go for the 2990wx, I havent had a AMD chip for like 20 years. If the low base speed will boost all day to 4.2 single thread, then I am happy.

Musigaz that would be much appreciated if you could have a look if its not to much trouble.

thanks
 
Pat Butcher 3 said:
Yeah my initial thought was to go for the 2990wx, I havent had a AMD chip for like 20 years. If the low base speed will boost all day to 4.2 single thread, then I am happy.

Musigaz that would be much appreciated if you could have a look if its not to much trouble.

thanks
Click to expand...

Go with the TR - I have had my 1950x (16c/32t) @3.7 base with 2 core 4 thread boost of around 4.1 (I sometimes see it at 4.2 though) and although I don't have Autodesk Cad so cant really give you an idea there, I can vouch for the performance being top notch. I really haven't had any issues with anything that I run. Even in lightroom when my friend had a blast he was surprised at just how fast it was for his workflow which is timelapse/hdr (granted I have 64gb of fast ram and am running it as fast as I can compared to his 16 but lightroom eats it all in his workflow). The thing that I think would sway me is that when (at stock) the 7980xe wins out the margin is 15% or something but when you get onto something that can use the cores/threads that 2990wx is just going to decimate pretty much everything else you can currently buy on a consumer socket.

Also socket future compatibility is a big plus and when 7nm comes I can just throw one in and crack on :)
 
 
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