AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000WX CPU Prices Revealed: Zen 3 Far More Expensive Than Its Zen 2 Predecessors
The AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5000WX CPUs are no longer HEDT chips but should rather be considered as workstation parts. Intel is going the same route with its upcoming Sapphire Rapids ‘Fishhawk Falls’ family so it looks like the days of the HEDT segment are done and we will only get either the mainstream or the workstation segments. Now a few days ago, a few listings of AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000WX CPUs appeared online at Chinese outlets that were selling the official retail box-packed chips for insane prices way before the intended DIY launch which is later this year. There’s no harm in buying these chips as they are fully compatible with existing WRX80 platforms but the pricing was seen as a problem because the red team didn’t provide any information regarding its own MSRPs for the workstation CPUs. But it looks like AMD has now officially shared the prices which are listed below (Credit: Tomshardware):
AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5995WX SEP is $6,499 AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5975WX SEP is $3,299 AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX SEP is $2,399
These prices are a big increase over the past generation of Threadripper chips. In fact, the entire Zen 3 lineup has been a price bump over Zen 2 but when compared to their predecessors, the top 5995WX is $1010 US more expensive than the 3995WX ($5489 US), the 5975WX is $550 US more expensive than the 3975WX ($2749). There was no 24-core variant within the Threadripper PRO 3000WX lineup so we can’t compare the 3965WX but we can compare it against a standard Threadripper 3960X SKU which had an MSRP of $1399 US at launch. This is a $1000 US difference. If we compare the standard Threadripper 3000 lineup to the Pro 5000 lineup, the price difference gets way bigger. The 3990X had an MSRP of $3950 US at launch so a $2549 US difference for the latest PRO flagship while the 3970X had an MSRP of $2000 US or a $1299 US difference for the new 32 core variant. That’s a 20% price increase over their Pro predecessors and between 60-150% price difference against the standard Threadripper parts. With these prices, you can see why the HEDT platform provided a solution between the mainstream and workstation PC segments. It didn’t feature the required Pro features, higher memory channels, or PCIe lanes but offered a platform that was still more powerful than the mainstream PCs at a very decent price point based on performance and features. Now, Intel seems to be adopting this route with its Sapphire Rapids family by offering a high-end ‘Expert’ and a standard ‘Mainstream’ workstation family but they are still all labeled as Xeon CPUs and not Core-X series. While AMD and Intel are abandoning HEDT, I think there’s still a lot of room to expand within this segment since they really show the true capabilities of high-end computing on a DIY/consumer-tier scale.
