The AMD Ryzen Threadripper is the most powerful processor we’ve ever tested

AMD Ryzen Threadripper’s long awaited release is still three days away, but today we’re spoiling you with a sneak peek of what this extreme processor can do.

TechRadar received an early review unit of the Alienware Area 51 Threadripper Edition, and we can confidently say it is the most powerful system we’ve ever tested. Not only does it feature a 16-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X processor, there’s also an Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti graphics card included as well.

With all of this overwhelming computing power, we saw the Area 51 shred its way through the toughest benchmark tests we could throw at it.

Cinebench’s rendering test typically takes a good half minute to finish, but Threadripper chewed through the task in mere seconds. This is largely due to the fact that the 1950X has four to eight times the number of cores over the average CPU, each of which it can use to render part of the image simultaneously.

The Alienware Area 51’s Cinebench score blows past our previous record holder, the Origin Millennium, which completed the same test with 2,205 points using Intel’s last-generation, deca-core Intel Core i7-6950X Broadwell-E chip.

More impressively, we witnessed 3DMark’s most punishing graphics benchmarks, which typically cause most gaming PC to a stutter, running smoothly. Although it didn’t beat the Millennium’s 28,817 point score in Fire Strike, it came mighty close with just a single Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti versus the earlier’s dual Nvidia GTX 1080 configuration.

Finally, we played Rise of the Tomb Raider on Ultra at 1080p, 1440p and 4K resolutions. From the numbers you can expect a playable experience no matter how many pixels you're asking it to push.

You’ll also likely get a faster frame rate by turning down some of the settings, as for our tests we turned up everything to max including Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing – a very demanding form of anti-aliasing.

This is just a taste of what Threadripper can do. We’ve still got a lot of testing to do here at the TechRadar labs and we’ll have full reviews on both the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and Alienware Area 51 coming soon, so stay tuned.