Office and Productivity
We flipped the Threadripper processors into the AMD-recommended Creators Mode for these tests. This setting exposes the full heft of Threadrippers execution resources.
Adobe Creative Cloud
Even though this suite has a few parallelized workloads, its final score is heavily influenced by the lightly-threaded tasks common in most desktop applications.
The Xeon W-3175X joins the 2990WX near the bottom of the overall score chart, which isn't surprising given this tests suites preference for high clock speeds. Tuning proves to be a power addition to the W-3175X's tool box as it grapples with the stock i9-9900K in the overall score. Threadripper 2990WX takes a commanding lead in the Photoshop Heavy test, but the remainder of the subtests go the W-3175X's way.
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 has made great strides in lightly-threaded applications with its second-gen Ryzen chips, but Intel's fleet of high core-count processors still dominate these types of applications. The W-3175X is particularly snappy for such a core-laden chip, which we certainly wouldn't have seen a mere few years ago with HEDT models.
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. Core i9-9900K remains a winner, but the Ryzen 7 2700X is also impressive given its lower price point.
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. Mainstream processors offer the best value in these types of applications, and the tuned -9980XE once again steals the lead from the -3175X.
The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries using the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized, which plays well to the strengths of the Ryzen lineup. These types of tests expose the strengths of the Threadripper architecture, provided that the software is optimized to exploit the tremendous compute resources.
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