Workstation articles

Monitor calibration is very important to a creative professional's workflow, but pretty much anyone can benefit from it. Calibration will deliver color accuracy and correct problems with white balance, gamma, and oversaturation. It'll also help color matching multiple monitors for a consistent experience.

Today we're looking at the most expensive desktop CPU to ever exist, and shockingly it's not from Intel. The Threadripper 3990X is a 64-core, 128-thread Zen 2-based processor that AMD fully acknowledges is a special purpose processor that combines both high frequency and high core counts into a single package.

As anticipated earlier this week when we tested AMD's HEDT Threadripper, Intel is also coming out with their own new high-end desktop series codenamed Cascade Lake-X. You already saw some preliminary data on the Core i9-10980XE, and now we're bringing you a full series review by testing the 10980XE, 10940X, 10920X and 10900X CPUs.

The latest 32-core and 24-core high-end desktop CPUs from AMD have now landed. And yes, we've benchmarked the heck out of them. The Threadripper 3970X is a 32-core, 64-thread chip with a massive 128MB L3 cache, runs at 3.7 GHz and it's priced at $2,000 making it AMD's most expensive desktop CPU ever. If that's too rich, maybe the 3960X costs $1,400 for 24 cores and 48 threads.

It's finally time to review AMD's new 3rd-gen Ryzen processors. The Ryzen 9 3900X is a 12-core, 24-thread processor with a massive 64MB L3 cache. It costs $500, placing it in direct competition with the Core i9-9900K. Then the Ryzen 7 3700X costs $330 and AMD suggests it's taking on the more expensive 9700K.

If you've been in the PC community for a while, you may have heard the name Puget Systems before. They are a custom system builder specializing in workstations and gaming PCs. This includes workloads such as engineering, content creation, 3D modeling, ML/AI, streaming, and more.

AMD is launching new 12 and 24-core 2nd-gen Threadripper parts known as the 2920X and 2970WX. Spec-wise the 12-core part is virtually identical to the 16-core part we saw in August, minus the obvious reduction in core count and the same is true when comparing the 24-core and 32-core parts. In our review we benchmark and check out the added value offered by these new CPUs.

With AMD's 2nd generation Threadripper out in the wild, the company has decided to slash prices of first gen parts. The Threadripper 1920X is now down to just $400, which on paper for a 12-core/24-thread high-end processor is insane.

After our long look at the new Threadripper 2990WX and 2950X processors, many called us out on benchmarks that only ran a single application at a time. We had already planned to make a separate multi-tasking focused benchmark, and so here we are after a few additional days of testing with more results to discuss.