Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Office & Productivity
Test Notes
We toggled Ryzen Threadripper 1900X into Creator Mode for our application testing. This setting exposes the full might of AMD's 8C/16T design, even if some lightly threaded applications fare better under various combinations of the NUMA/UMA and Legacy mode toggles.
Adobe Creative Cloud
Most of the Adobe Creative Cloud test suite favors Intel's processors.
Ryzen Threadripper 1900X serves up competitive performance and benefits from tuning, but the 1920X's overclocked frequency advantage facilitates a slight win in most tests.
After Affects responds well to increased core counts, so the 1900X competes readily. Ryzen 7 1800X isn't as fast in this test, languishing far below the eight-core 1900X. It seems as if the difference comes from Threadripper's quad-channel memory configuration, as repeating the test in dual-channel mode incurs a ~6-second penalty, putting 1900X at the same level as Ryzen 7 1800X. We also observed similar trends with the Photoshop Heavy and InDesign tests.
Web Browser
The web browsing tests align largely based on per-core performance, so frequency and IPC throughput reign supreme. These lightly-threaded metrics highlight the only drawback to overclocking the 1900X.
That is to say our 1900X's 4 GHz ceiling is the same as its maximum quad-core Precision Boost frequency, so overclocking will speed up workloads that use more than four cores. However, if your cooler is beefy enough, a stock Threadripper 1900X hits a 4.2 GHz Extended Frequency Range peak across four cores. So, in some lightly-threaded tasks, you'll see a stock 1900X outperform the overclocked configuration.
Case in point: a stock 1900X outperforms the tuned configuration in our Kraken JavaScript and MotionMark benchmarks, though the deltas are small. A tuned Ryzen 7 1800X also offers better performance than the 1900X. The Intel processors use their frequency and IPC throughput advantage to top the charts.
Cryptography is important for securing online transactions and many other applications. The Threadripper processors enjoy a big lead over competing Intel models in single-core SHA2-256 hashing performance. They are also competitive in the single-core AES-256 tests. But we can clearly see the benefits of the -7820X's AVX2 performance compared to the Core i7-8700K.
Multi-core AES-256 tests align based largely on core count and frequency, but we can spot the advantages of quad-channel memory. The overclocked 1900X doesn't gain much improvement in the SHA2-256 test.
Productivity
We're incorporating portions of the PCMark 10 suite into our test regimen. The application start-up metric measures load-time snappiness for several types of applications, such as word processors, GIMP, and Web browsers, in both warm- and cold-start conditions.
Intel's Core i7-7820X beats the overclocked Threadripper models by a slight margin, but tuning widens the gap considerably. Interestingly, a stock Core i7-8700K almost matches the best effort of our overclocked -7820K. Coffee Lake truly is an impressive performer here.
Video conferencing measures performance in single- and multi-user applications that utilize the Windows Media Foundation for video playback and encoding. It also performs facial detection during the workload to model real-world performance. The test consists of both native and OpenCL acceleration, so we see small performance improvements with OpenCL. The Threadripper 1900X and 1920X fall into the middle of the test results, while the tuned Ryzen 7 1800X provides more performance with native processing.
The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries that use the ImageMagick library. We can see the big gains with OpenCL acceleration, and the processors with the highest clock rates generally offer the best results. That means Intel's tuned -7820X and AMD's overclocked 1920X provide similar performance. The 1900X benefits from tuning, but Ryzen 7 1800X at 4 GHz is even faster. Native processing leverages Theadripper 1920X's extra threads to great effect.
We tested the 1900X with both dual- and quad-channel memory to ferret out improvements borne of extra bandwidth. The 1900X with quad-channel memory provided ~6% more performance than the dual-channel setup during the writing test (LibreOffice Writer), helping propel the overclocked 1900X to a lead over the tuned 1800X.
MORE: Best CPUs
MORE: Intel & AMD Processor Hierarchy
MORE: All CPUs Content
Intel reportedly demands all board partners implement Intel Default (Baseline) Profile by May 31 — company hopes to fix issues with some Core i9 chips
'Digital Twins' research gains $285 million in CHIPS ACT funding — virtual chip tech could revolutionize semiconductor manufacturing
Explosive HBM demand fueling an expected 20% increase in DDR5 memory pricing — demand for AI GPUs drives production cuts for standard PC memory
