Recent spate of abyssmal Threadripper 5995wx scores

[frazzlesnap]

I have a Threadripper 3955wx that is serving me well in video editing. My real dream is a 5995wx, but I see that it has been faring very poorly lately. After very light investigation, it seems that these incidents involve systems with only 32GB of RAM! Why would anyone buy a 64 core workstation CPU and only install 32GB of RAM, and is this part of the poor score equation, or is something else amiss?
I want to upgrade my swrx80 system sometime soon for better video editing and processing speed. I don't care much about games, but I do use the system for gaming as well. I currently have 128GB 3200MHz DDR4. I was thinking of going with a Threadripper 5965wx and 256GB of RAM for the upgrade. What are your thoughts?
Thanks!

[David (PassMark)]

64+ Core systems only make sense for very niche applications.
Nearly all software will hit a RAM, GPU, network, disk or software bottleneck (e.g. semaphores, database row locking) before being able to full use 64 CPU cores. This isn't going to change soon either.

I don't think going to 256GB of RAM will fix this, as more RAM doesn't mean faster RAM. It might help a bit in rare cases of the software using NUMA, and more RAM means more RAM per NUMA node (so less average latency), but nearly no software supports NUMA.

A Ryzen 5 5600 ($150) can match the performance of a 5995wx ($6500) in many applications.

See these older post for more discussion
https://forums.passmark.com/pc-hardw...-amd-epyc-7742
https://forums.passmark.com/performa...d-threadripper

Especially see the graphs showing the diminishing, or negative returns, of adding more cores in this post.

[frazzlesnap]

I think I understand what you've stated. It just seems odd that the average score for the 5995wx went from 103000 something to barely more than a 5975wx. If it had started there, I could have better accepted it. I know a Ryzen 5 5600 has better per-core performance, but it is going to be in trouble doing serious video work, compared to a Threadripper. I've seen the results first hand. Sure, it's fine for something lightly threaded, like Photoshop. It really depends on what you're building your computer to do. I can see a 5995wx being overkill for almost anything, which is one of the reasons (the other being price) that I was looking at a 5965wx. Thanks for the quick response!

[David (PassMark)]

The CPU was exclusive, rare and expensive, up until now. Now it is just expensive.
Having so few results to create an average means the result will jump around a bit until the CPU becomes more common place (which might never happen for this model).
Current average result as of today (4/Aug/2022) is 100,011.
There were also a couple of low results which have now been excluded from the average.