AMD YD195XA8AEWOF Ryzen Threadripper 1950X (16-core/32-thread) Desktop Processor

There are a lot of claims going around that this CPU requires water cooling so I tested it. Mine easily and stably overclocks to 4.0GHz with a single-fan noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3. Could possibly clock a little higher with liquid cooling but I haven't attempted it, even though there's plenty of thermal headroom. My CPU only runs a degree or 2 hotter with the noctua than with h115i. This processor also plays nice with high speed RAM, just make sure you get an asus motherboard if you want to hit 3600mhz on 128GB. I tested 3600mhz on 64gb with the zenith extreme and it works, but I ultimately chose the asrock x399 fatal1ty professional gaming for size reasons and my GPU wouldn't fit on the first slot of the zenith extreme. There are lots of other benefits to the asus boards but there are some unique benefits to the fatal1ty board, like onboard 10G lan for what that's worth. So with the asrock board I've been able to run 3200mhz on 64gb. It doesn't say anywhere in the manual or elsewhere that the board does not support 3600mhz, but if you select 3733mhz, it will revert to 2166 when you boot into windows. And when I selected 3600mhz, it'd boot and run at that number but crash as soon as i ran a program like google chrome. Tried it at lower and lower rates until I got to 3200mhz which is completely stable, so I'm guessing that's just a known limit but asrock's customer support is unaware of it. So yeah the threadripper is an amazing CPU but there are some things you gotta plan out in advance for your system. By the way, if you want to boot off an NVMe RAID array, this is definitely the platform to go with. The setup isn't trivial but it's this versus intel VROC, so there you go.

CAUTION - THE INCLUDED SCREWDRIVER LIKE MANY OTHERS DID NOT RELEASE ON THE RIGHT TENSION! THIS CAN CAUSE DAMAGE IF YOU OVERTIGHTEN!Aside from the initial issue of the screwdriver; I stopped as I felt it was too much force and watched install videos, confirming I have put about as many turns as they have without it popping out to indicate it's tightened. I would recommend watching these so you don't overtighten as this can damage the motherboards socket or the CPU.The CPU:I have long since been an intel fanboy, but not anymore.Temperatures: With a Noctua TR4 cooler, expect 23C-33C Idle with 40-48C under load. The max I believe I've seen was 53C with a very high amount of CPU usage likely from an unoptimized piece of software.It runs cooler than all of my intel chips, including one that was watercooled while this is on an air cooler.Performance: It does everything. At once. You'll need lots of RAM if you want to do everything at once depending on what you do. If you want to play a game, stream said game, render graphics to a file you should get no less than 32GB of 3600 MHz memory, most of these TR4 boards support up to 128GB RAM.If you do graphics work, video editing, rendering and still want a PC you can use to have fun; this is a great CPU. I'll never get less than this in the future and it makes a quad core look like a toaster.Normal retail price is $800, it's been on sale often for $200, and moves up to $262 lately. The boards are expensive generally around $250-$350, but well worth the cost to have up to 3 NVMEs, 8 DIMM slots and a high cap of 128GB RAM.10/10 Highly recommend, and would recommend further Threadripper CPUs they release.

Holy crap, this thing's fast. I upgraded from a 4 core I7 Intel processor. My old rig couldn't keep up with editing 4K video without badly stuttering. This thing does 4K previews with transitions and effects at something like 20% CPU utilization. I did mate it with a killer graphics card (ASUS ROG-STRIX-GTX1080TI 11GB), but this CPU deserves the best! I'm not an overclocker, so I'm not pushing the limits, but I suspect this thing has enough horsepower for anything without overclocking.I had never built a water cooled rig before, but it was pretty straightforward. I used an all in one NZXT Kraken X52 and it works fine.For the motherboard, I used a ASRock X399 Professional Gaming board, populated it with 64 GB in four 16 GB DDR4 2400 ECC Kingston Valueram. I like the fact that AMD allows this "consumer" CPU the ability to use ECC RAM, unlike Intel which now requires the use of the "server" chips if you want to use ECC.The only integration glitch I had was installing Windows 10 - I had to disable the IOMMU option in the BIOS (I think it was buried in the Northbridge or Southbridge sub menu).

I have to admit, I'm completely blown away. I've hand-built 30+ PCs in my life, and every single one was Intel-based. There was a time when AMD simply couldn't compete on anything but price, which was never of interest to me because I value performance. I lean heavily on my computers for high-end 3D animation/design/rendering work, as well as gaming and other common functions. I bought this processor to test as a potential replacement for my existing rig, which had two 10-core Xeon chips ($1,000 each) on a server-grade motherboard. This 1950x CPU shreds that setup in Cinebench and real-world render times, is way faster to boot up, runs cooler and was almost 1/3 the cost! It's been completely reliable and capable. Seriously, if you're the kind of person who's always built around Intel CPUs, now is the time to reconsider AMD.I would highly recommend this CPU to anyone who needs lots of cores for 3D/DCC or other applications that will benefit from having 32 threads.