About three and a half months ago, we saw that the AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 Series Launched. At the time, it was an OEM exclusive with the first system being the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 we reviewed with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3995WX. Now, AMD is opening the new series up to the DIY market as well.

AMD Threadripper Pro 5000 Series Goes DIY Market

The big news is that AMD is opening up the Threadripper Pro 5000 series to more than just OEMs like Lenovo and Dell. From what we have heard, the Lenovo P620 is dominating its class in the workstation market right now because of the massive core counts and PCIe connectivity offered.

The systems from these vendors utilize PSB, as we saw with the Threadripper Pro series in Lenovo is Using AMD PSB to Vendor Lock AMD CPUs. That feature makes the CPUs very exclusive to the OEMs that AMD allows to sell the chips first.

Not only does AMD sell the new CPUs exclusively to certain OEMs, but the CPUs cannot be used outside of systems from those vendors.

Luckily, with 3rd party OEMs and the DIY market opening up to the new chips, that means we can have non-PSB-enabled options (PSB makes little sense on a DIY system) in the market. This will bring effectively the AMD EPYC Milan (not Milan-X) to the workstation market.

The new chips do not necessarily increase core counts beyond 64 cores with the Threadripper Pro 5995WX. The one difference is that there is a new 24-core variant, the AMD Threadripper Pro 5965WX. Instead, we get a massive boost from the more unified CCD cache and the microarchitectural improvements that can give 20-30% more performance in many workloads on the server-side. We are excited to see how these fare on the workstation side, but we expect similar results.

Final Words

You are going to see more on this from STH in the coming weeks. We have a new Gigabyte MC62-G40 that just arrived and we will be testing that with the Threadripper Pro 5000 series. We are still awaiting getting Threadripper Pro chips, but we expect to be able to get our hands on some in July/ August to start testing. AMD says that we can expect the DIY chips in July, so we will be looking for them as soon as possible.

AMD also says that the new Threadripper Pro 5000 series is a drop-in (with BIOS update) upgrade for WRX80 motherboards that support it. It also mentioned CPU and memory overclocking in select systems. This is very exciting indeed.