AMD confirms Threadripper specs and pricing

AMD has officially confirmed the specifications, pricing, and availability of three Ryzen Threadripper CPUs: the $999 Threadripper 1950X, the $799 Threadripper 1920X, and the $549 Threadripper 1900X.

If you don’t already know, Threadripper is AMD’s new Zen-based high-end desktop (HEDT) offering and answer to Intel’s X299 CPUs. Much of what we’re about to detail has already been leaked prior or even talked about by AMD itself, but the information here is all completely official and confirmed now.

At the top of the stack is the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X. Sporting a ridiculous 16 cores and 32 threads (16c/32t), it has base and boost clocks of 3.4GHz and 4.0GHz respectively, with dual-core boosting to a maximum of 4.2GHz with Extended Frequency Range (XFR) provided your cooling permits it. It will launch on August 10th for $999, the same MSRP as the Intel 10c/20t Core i9-7900X, which AMD claims it can outperform by up  38 percent, at least when you go by The One Benchmark To Rule Them All, Cinebench.

Next, we have the Ryzen Threadripper 1920X, a 12c/24t CPU with base and boost clocks of 3.5GHz and 4.0GHz respectively and the same XFR support as the model above. It will come in at $799 again on August 10th, undercutting the Core i9-7900X by 20 percent but still offering up to 11 percent more performance according to AMD.

Lastly, there’s the Ryzen Threadripper 1900X, which has eight cores and 16 threads and will launch a bit later on August 31st for $549 – eight percent less than the MSRP for Intel’s eight-core Core i7-7820X. Base and boost clocks this time are set to 3.8GHz and 4.0GHz respectively.

All three CPUs support a whopping 64 PCIe 3.0 lanes (four are given to the X399 chipset, leaving 60 available) and quad-channel DDR4 memory. They are also all unlocked for overclocking purposes. As AMD is keen to point out, it isn’t ‘defeaturing’ its CPUs as you move down the stack like Intel does by limiting PCIe lanes.

AMD has also promised a full ecosystem of motherboards will be available at launch from ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI. It had some of these on display at the launch event, and it’s safe to say that grey is very much the new black. Such an absence of colour is likely to be made up for by RGB lighting, of course.

Ryzen Threadripper CPUs are big. Really big. Using Socket TR4, they are so big that they render most coolers incompatible by default thanks to the CPU’s heatspreader being too large for most cooler contact plates, as confirmed by Noctua. Nonetheless, AMD is promising day one compatibility with 20 modern all-in-one liquid-coolers and five air cooler options all capable of fitting the socket and dealing with the 180W Threadripper TDP.

AMD has also granted Dell and its Alienware brand exclusive use of Threadripper for OEM use through 2017. Alienware should now (or very soon) be taking pre-orders for its Area-51 Threadripper Edition PC, one SKU of which was also on display at the launch.

UK pricing was not confirmed, but you can expect it to be essentially the same in pounds as it is in dollars once VAT is factored in. Pre-orders for the Threadripper 1950X and Threadripper 1920X open later today.