After months of rumors, we were finally able to publish our review of the 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X CPU last month, and suffice to say, the chip left us highly impressed. So much so that we crowned it with an Editor's Choice award. Now, it looks like the chip is finally available for purchase and can be had at its $1999 MSRP directly from Amazon, and shipped to you within just a couple of days (depending on your location).
The somewhat more mainstream AMD Ryzen 9 3950X was still nearly impossible to obtain a few weeks after the review embargo lifted, with your only choices being hugely price-surged chips on eBay, and various European re- and e-tailers had also lifted their prices significantly above MSRP. In Germany, the situation was so dire that for every unit local resellers were able to ship, they had 16 unfulfilled preorders and weren't able to quote delivery dates. Thankfully that CPU is now readily available at MSRP too.
AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 3970X is a chip that's worth bowing down to with its 32-core 64-thread internals. The best performing cores boost at up to 4.5 GHz, and it has a hefty 280 TDP, so you'll have to ensure you have an adequate cooler designed to handle this CPU: most typical LGA115x or AM4-compatible CPU coolers won't suffice. You'll also need a new TRX40 motherboard with an sTRX4 socket to house the chip.
Of course, those are things that probably don't concern you that much if you're in the market for the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X. Chances are that, next to the lavish number of CPU cores, you're also attracted to the 88 PCI-Express 4.0 lanes, 64 of which are available for you to freely allocate across your devices such as SSDs, graphics cards, and more.
If gaming is your only priority, this chip obviously isn't for you, but you should instead look at AMD's AM4-based Ryzen 3000 offerings and its competition. The Threadripper 3970X is for those who need serious CPU horsepower for tasks such as video rendering, graphical work, scientific work, or any workload where lots and lots of threads are involved and time is of the essence. For the time being, it's a king at its price point in the HEDT space -- until we hear more about the rumored 48-core 3980X and the 64-core 3990X that AMD announced last month.
