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Office and Productivity
Test Notes
We tested all Threadripper processors in Creator mode during our application benchmarks.
Web Browser
The Krakken suite evaluates JavaScript performance using several workloads, including audio, imaging, and cryptography. Like most Web browser workloads, single-threaded performance reigns supreme.
AMD's second-gen Threadripper line-up goes a long way to improve the performance of lightly-threaded workloads, but Intel still leads in these tests.
Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX lags the 2990WX in our Krakken benchmark, but automated overclocking functionality does deliver a solid improvement. Meanwhile, there's little to no improvement in the lightly-threaded Krakken from enabling Dynamic Local Mode. This feature does seem to help in MotionMark and WebXPRT.
Productivity
The application start-up metric measures load time snappiness in word processors, GIMP, and Web browsers under warm- and cold-start conditions. Other platform-level considerations affect this test as well, including the storage subsystem.
Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX benefits from Dynamic Local Mode at stock clock rates, but still trails the 2990WX right out of its box. Interestingly, the 2920X and 2950X yield the best performance from any Threadripper CPU. Other desktop processors like the Ryzen 7 2700X and Core i9-9900K fare well, too.
Our video conferencing suite measures performance in single- and multi-user applications that utilize the Windows Media Foundation for playback and encoding. It also performs facial detection to model real-world usage. Again, mainstream processors offer the best value in these types of applications.
The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries using the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized. Unfortunately, the Dynamic Local Mode doesn't benefit all applications. It doesn't necessarily hurt performance, either. The 2% delta between our stock 2970WX falls within UL's 3% threshold for run-to-run variability with PCMark 10.
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