With half the cores of the Ryzen Threadripper 9980X, and basically for half the price at US$2,499 (~RM10,585), the Threadripper 9970X is AMD’s second readily available HEDT CPU on the market, and if you want anything more powerful than that, you’re looking at WX-Series territory.
Now, you would think that running 32-cores, especially after experiencing the raw strength of 64-cores is that the performance would fare worse. Not quite the case, as it turns out.
Specifications And Design
There’s not a whole I can talk about here that I haven’t already said about Shimada Peak in my review of the 9980X. The main differences between the 9970X and 9980X are, obviously, the core count and L3 Cache size, both of which are half the size of the former’s.
Notably, the 9970X’s base clock runs a lot faster at 4GHz, and understandably so: with far fewer cores on the PCB, there’s more speed to go around. Boost clock still remains the same at 5.4GHz, as does the TDP at 350W.
Testbench
As I did with the 9980X, the testbench setup is the same as before. The installation process remains the same for all Threadripper CPUs, meaning that are some extra steps such as sliding the CPU into the retention bracket instead of just freesitting it on top of the pins.
Testing methadology also rmains the same, as you’ll see in the next section.
Benchmarks, Temperature, And Power Consumption
Again, there’s not much I can say here that I haven’t already said about the Threadripper 9000 Series in my review of the 9980X. So, I’ll keep this as curt as possible.
Despite having half the cores of the 9980X, the 9970X is still very much a beast in its own right. Sure, 3DMark paints a rather contrary picture, especially when pitted against both the 7950X and 9950X, but compared to its more powerful sibling, it really doesn’t have any trouble keeping up.
In PCMark 10, the 9970X pulls off the same feat again, and somehow manages to pull ahead in the normal test. That being said, the limitation of having less cores than the 9980X begins to show in the other more CPU-bound tests such as Cinebench and Blender.
Once more, that doesn’t mean it’s a slowpoke, by any measure of the word. Being able to run the entire full CPU test on Blender in a little more than 10 minutes is impressive.
While not made specifically with the segment in fine, the 9970X is very clearly and obviously more than capable of holding it own, albeit with some of the same bottlenecks as its sibling. Of the three titles I am using here, Helldivers 2 seems to be the game performs the “worst”, but to be fair, the average frame count never dipped below 60 fps during missions.
The other titles had no issue sustaining frames well over the 100 fps mark, with Doom The Dark Ages, a game that has ray tracing baked in, actually beating out the 9980X. Again, and I’m really running the risk of being labelled a forgetful old crone: more cores doesn’t necessarily translate into better gaming performance.
Power consumption is maxed out at the 9970X’s rated TDP of 350W, but to my surprise, it runs hotter than the 9980X. This CPU actually came close to boiling point, hitting 93.8°C at full whack during the synthetic testings, and I could hear the fans on the provided AIO cooler running at full whack. Of course, when it came to gaming, it nary made a din.
Conclusion
Look, if you’re still adamant on purchasing one of AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 9000 Series HEDT CPUs, I truly believe that this is the more sensible of the two consumer-ready SKUs to own. It’ll still cost you a small fortune, mind you, but at least that’s RM11,000 less that you didn’t spend on the CPU alone, which in turn means that you can allocate more of that budget to other components.
As a gamer, though, there’s hardly a good reason to purchase the 9970X for anything other than posturing or bragging rights. Honestly, you’d get far better performance with any of the consumer-segment Ryzen 9000 Series, even more so with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which currently ranks as one of the best gaming CPUs right now, and with good reason.
To summarise: Is it powerful? Yes, it is. Does it sit side-by-side with the 9980X? Sure, why not. Would I recommend it for anything else other than gaming, such as producitivity and large scale rendering? Absolutely.
Photography by John Law.
