If it were for money, I would have said no, but if you can get this for practically free, then yeah, it'll be a huge upgrade
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2025
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if you have cooling and power handled, yes. the threadripper has like 3.5x the tdp.
If you run Windows, I don't think this CPU is officially Windows 11 compatible.
I that a bad thing?
Some quick googling suggests that their single-thread performance is really close, but the AMD has triple the cores. Plus extra RAM is always good, and looks to be the newer and faster DDR4.
The main question for you becomes how multi-threaded your needs are. If you don't need more than 4 cores, then switching won't give you anything more. There's also the smaller question about RAM, with the same criteria.
If your needs are highly multi-threaded, or RAM-constrained, then switching will be very worthwhile.
Assuming it's free and you weren't planning to update to the newest stuff, yeah it's a nice upgrade. Next up is a gpu upgrade...
I don't know much about the threadripper, but lol according to these benchmarks, yes, yes its worthwhile to upgrade, especially if you got it for free.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-4790K+%40+4.00GHz
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+Threadripper+1920X
Tldr: 8,000 vs 23,000 multithreaded benchmark score on cpumark
As others have said, for the money, absolutely. The only thing to mind is that if you use high-bandwidth USB applications, like using a multi-bay storage box, you may encounter USB dropouts. This is common to many AMD platforms up to 5th gen Ryzen. If you get hit by that, install a PCIe USB controller and you'd be set.
Is this just specific motherboards, or is it a bug with the actual CPUs? I'm looking to upgrade my old server which is similar to OP, an old i7-4770 and probably going to be buying AMD for next upgrade, haven't heard of this USB dropouts as I haven't really been paying attention.
It's a CPU and chipset bug. AMD CPUs have built-in IO chipset that provides USB among other things. Most chipsets other than X570 use a different IO chip with different performance characteristics. The X570 chipset contains the same IO chip that the CPUs have so it's got the same characteristics. Depending the board some ports might be wired to the CPU others to the chipset. It's hard to know. The only certain combination is that a X570 boards have this issue. I don't know what USB chip is contained in the Threadripper boards. Either way, you use your board and if you notice USB dropouts when using high-bandwidth applications, get a PCIe controller for that. There's no other solution and there's no point spending time trying to workaround it. You can find many reports on the web. I was hit by this and tried even different boards till I finally gave up and got a add-in card. The AM5 platform seems to not suffer from this. I'm using the onboard USB controller on a X870 board at the moment. There's ptobably not much point of getting Intel just for this. I considered that and the performance per dollar was still much better on AMD even if having to buy a USB PCIe controller.
Awesome, thanks for the answer!
Another trick to keep in your arsenal if you need more ports is to get a very high-speed USB adapter and split it using a hub. E.g. 20 or 40Gbps port split via 4/7-port hub still gives you 3-10Gbps per port. Note that over 5Gbps cable quality starts to really matter.