I think the best person to ask this would be Juraj since from what I remember from the forum threads he has the 3990x on both air and loop but I might be wrong :)
@ADVenturePO
I am pretty sure that Blender, Cinebench, and Corona benchmarks don't scale the same way. Maybe I am wrong but from what I've seen on youtube reviews Corona was the only benchmark that was giving 2xperformance versus 3970x.
I never ever ran a Blender benchmark in my life so I can't really talk about that. What I can talk about is real-world performance, and in my case, the results are not always in line with the Corona benchmark.
I won't even mention animation frame rendering (especially frames that are under 20mins) where at least in "my case" the 5950x works the best as it's always the first machine that loads the scene due to the best max turbo on one core. By the time, the 3990x has loaded the scene the 5950x is already a few passes in :).
I would like to hear the opinion of the people who ran their 3990x's on-air and then upgraded to a custom loop. If it's actually that much worth it and their use case scenario since mine is purely from a rendering node perspective :).
Dear VUK,
I am a company that already made 70+ Threadripper Workstations. Few on air, most on LC. I have been comparing times for air and LC. And I'll try to present you my findings.
The problem with 3990x is that for some operations it has to have 8 sticks of RAM - example is video recoding - HWBOT x265 benchmark with 4 sticks 270 FPS and 8 sticks 370 FPS. In rendering that is not the case but with intensive RAM operations the memory configuration is much more influencing.
Also if there's no proper cooling to 3990x its speed will be reduced - also SC Clocks. That is why 5950x which is ultrafast in SC will prepare scene in 3D Max much more faster. 3990x is without OC at best able to speed up single core to 4.3GHz and 5950x is able to run on good cooling up to 5025Mhz and it's memory controller is not demanding at all. 2 sticks? OK because it is Dual Channel architecture.
As for now, I will show you how rendering times of frames drops on TR3 3960 on air compared to i9-7960x on LC.
alpha is i9 and beta is TR3. These are not my results but my clients, who had forced me to make his WS on Dark Rock 4 Pro. The MB was MSI TRX40 PRO Wifi. 8 sticks of RAM - 128GB. When cooler is heated up and AMD CPU find itself heating up faster it will drop Effective Clocks.
Please see attached pictures.
Now, I'm sorry I haven't made this video in English it's in Poilish. But here you have Effective Clocks on air:
2.63 on average.
Here You have effective clocks on LC without OC: 2.875 on average
And here are OC Tests at 3.3GHz with 1300W PSU (which screams and dies a little)
You can see that average Effective Clocks are 3.24+GHz.
From my perspective and from enormous amounts of tests OC is boosting TR3 3970x and 3990x rendering speed. For 3990x the amount of boost is really big.
I'll try to find on which testing M.2 those test are in pictures and send them here.
Cheers