ASUS ROG Zenith Extreme Alpha – ASUS Takes Threadripper to The Next Level

 

Blender

Blender is a great test as it is a good representation of real world productivity with image rendering capability on the CPU or GPU. We test both to show how platform changes can give better performance.

Blender shows the difference between test 1 which is CPU based rendering and 2 which is GPU based. as you can see the CPU bound render the Zenith Extreme Alpha and 2990WX reduces the blender time by over half. The GPU test once again we see the architectural differences at play and the GPU render actually takes a little longer and I can only assume that is due to the slower CPU clock rate.

Cinebench R15

Cinebench is all about rendering out images and doing this on the CPU is hard work, and it offers tests for both single and multi-threaded renders along with even an OpenGL GPU based workload.

Cinebench is probably the go-to as of recent as far as testing CPU performance. and much to my dismay as the benchmark can vary from run to run so this definitely takes more runs to get a  good solid average that is comparable. The single core score shows the immediate weakness once again for AMD in general as it pulls a bit behind the Intel-based parts.

the multi core result shows the Zenith Extreme Alpha and the 2990WX pulverize all of the others on our charts. pulling over 5K on the multi-core test is nothing to scoff at. This CPU as we know is really showing its strengths as a workstation powerhouse while also proving something even AMD themselves have tried to explain. The 2990WX is simply not for gamers, it is more a prosumer part..

Handbrake

Handbrake is a popular open source video transcoder available free to anyone. We test transcoding a large video file from X264 MKV to MP4

Here we see what would look like a pretty insane chart but I did pull the granularity to 1400 -* 1650 to at least show the stepping between different benches. One thing to note is that yes the 7900X did actually perform quite a bit slower, which is not really a surprise as the 9900K is only sans 2 cores/4 threads. But it has a massive all core clockspeed advantage in comparison. If I had a working 7980XE/9980XE on hand I think this result would be a bit different as its higher core count would help scale it more in line with our data we see above. With that being said, the 2990WX can stretch its legs a bit here, as its 32 Cores and 64 Threads now has some work to chew through and once windows scheduler can be sorted I imagine this scaling will be even better.

7-Zip

7-Zip is a free open source file compression utility and also a good way to show your PC’s capability to perform compression tasks.

The 7Zip benchmark shows the compression capabilities of the platform. The 2990WX and Zenith Extreme Alpha here, unfortunately, do not get any favors as this application/task really likes clock speed, something which unfortunately Ryzen as a whole is not blessed with an abundance of.