First Ryzen Threadripper gaming benchmarks arrive (video)

Linus Tech Tips scored another exclusive as AMD allowed him to publish world's first gaming benchmarks of the Alienware Area-51 THREADRIPPER EDITION. The results are similar to what we saw with the launch of Ryzen, the chip excels in use cases that take advantage of heavy parallelization so you get monster scores in benchmarks like Cinebench R15.

Two gaming benchmarks were tested by Linus. In synthetic 3DMark testing the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X fails to beat the Intel Core i9 7900X. He also tested Rise of the Tomb Raider in both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 mode. In that game, the Threadripper 1950X ranked behind the Core i9 7900X and Core i7 7700K, and was a tad faster than the Ryzen 7 1800X. But the differences were very minimal.

All four test systems were equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition and 32GB DDR4 memory. One key difference is that the Alienware system with the Threadripper CPU used DDR4 clocked at 2666MHz, while the DDR4 of the other three system ran at a frequency of 3200MHz. There were also some potential thermal throttling issues with the Alienware rig that could have negatively impacted performance.

More detailed benchmarks can be expected on August 10.