With just four Threadripper SKUs, AMD has demolished the value proposition of Intel's Core X processor family. At $650, the 2920X is the cheapest 2nd generation Threadripper you can get your hands on. This 12-core/24-thread chip is designed for prosumers, such as freelance video professionals who want to build a reasonably powerful Premier Pro machine while spending as little money as possible. The 2920X beats the Core i9-7900X in most tasks that can take advantage of as many cores as you can throw at them not just because of the extra cores, but also improvements AMD made to its boosting algorithm, which now elevates more cores to increased clock speeds.

Across our video encoding test suite, we find the Ryzen Threadripper 2920X consistently ahead of both the pricier Core i9-7900X and cheaper mainstream-desktop Core i9-9900K. It's quite surprising to see how close it gets to the 16-core Threadripper 2950X in these tests. The 2950X stays ahead because of its four extra cores, despite giving the 2920X a manual overclock or Precision Boost Overdrive tweaks, but not by much considering it has a whopping 33% higher core count! The story is similar with data encryption and compression workloads, which are useful for freelance professionals.

In this review, you'll notice that we've also added test data for the 24-core/48-thread Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX. In prosumer specific tasks such as video productivity, compression, or encryption, the 2970WX is performing worse than the 12-core and 16-core Threadrippers. We re-tested several times over and paid close attention to our settings. The most plausible explanation for these results is that tasks such as multi-threaded video encoding, compression, or encryption are memory-heavy, requiring the CPU cores to be fed a consistent stream of data. On a 2970WX, half the cores do not have direct access to memory and rely on the InfinityFabric interconnect to talk to dies that have local memory access. This appears to be creating a very visible memory bottleneck, which drags down performance of even cores that have local memory access since some of that memory bandwidth is shared with cores without local access. In multi-threaded tasks that aren't as memory-intensive, such as our rendering and simulation test suite, including CineBench and Blender, you'll notice that the 2970WX wipes the floor with every other processor.

Gaming on a Ryzen Threadripper 2920X is very much possible, but isn't its strongest suit. This 12-core chip is clocked relatively low when compared to chips such as the Ryzen 7 2700X or Core i7-9700K, and you're much better off choosing one of those chips along with the much lower platform costs. Still, if you're a video pro that likes to blow off some steam at the end of the day, the Threadripper 2920X is a capable performer. You will most likely have a 4K monitor since your video work demands it, and it's possible you'll either be gaming at 4K or 1440p. The 2920X poses close to zero CPU bottlenecks at 4K and performs within 5 percent of the Core i9-9900K. Those mainstream desktop chips, however, manage to extend their performance leads by anywhere between 7–12 percent at 1440p. These gaps widen to up to 20 percent at 1080p, and a staggering 36 percent at 720p. You won't be gaming at those lower resolutions, but we're trying to expose a CPU-limited scenario to investigate the theoretical limits. The framerates you see at 720p are the most framerates you'll ever get for a given game at any resolution, no matter how powerful your GPU is. It's interesting to see the performance getting dragged back with 1440p. This is probably because Threadrippers are more conservative with the boost clock spread than, say, a 2700X or 2600X; and the penalty of not localizing the game's memory to one of the two dies also kicks in. Perhaps enabling Game Mode through Ryzen Master (which was originally meant for Threadrippers) will help in this scenario.

Power consumption was never a problem area of the 2nd generation Threadrippers, and the 2920X lives up to our expectations. Idle power draw is about 15 W lower than that of the Core i9-7900X, although about 15–20 W higher than mainstream platform processors such as the i7-9700K or 2700X. Even in multi-threaded workloads, the stock 2920X is well-behaved and sips less power than the i9-7900X (which has two fewer cores). It's only when you stress an overclocked 2920X that you'll notice high power draws. We'd like to draw your attention to energy efficiency (power consumed for work done). Here, the 2920X emerges more efficient than even the Core i9-9900K mainstream-desktop processor—getting work done quicker with less power. A remarkable feat.

Overclocking the Threadripper 2920X comes with the same technical pitfalls as the 2950X, and so we recommend you use the method AMD recommends: Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO), which entails tweaking the maximum boost headroom and letting the processor decide when and how to use it. Across our entire suite of tests, we found PBO to yield more performance while being more efficient than manually dialing up clock speeds of all cores. The only exception are tests where all the cores are fully loaded to the maximum, like Cinebench. Here, the manual OC does yield higher performance because PBO will run the processor at slightly lower clocks when all cores are fully loaded.

In conclusion, the Ryzen Threadripper 2920X is an incredible value proposition for professionals on a tight budget, and serves up performance rivaling Intel processors that are several hundred dollars pricier. It will play your games just fine with all the eye candy you want, although if gaming is your machine's predominant occupation, you're recommended to seek out far better-tailored platforms such as the i7-9700K. With core counts as high as 8, chips such as the i7-9700K and 2700X are powerful enough to game and stream in tandem, and you don't really need an HEDT platform for that job.