AMD’s 64-core CPU went on sale Friday for $3,989.99, and the early reviews of the new processor suggest that it is a a very strong specialized processor for specific workloads.

Anandtech's review concludes that the Threadripper 3990X is stunningly fast in some workloads (Corona, Blender, NAMD), but many times it has issues outrunning the 32-core Threadripper 3970X at half its price. The situation is different in the enterprise level, where the single-chip Threadripper 3990X seems to outpace the $20,000 dual-socket Xeon chips. The review also shows that disabling SMT in the CPU in Windows 10 Pro yielded better performance in some workloads, while Windows 10 Enterprise performed far better.

Tom’s Hardware also showed the Threadripper 3990X outpacing Intel’s dual socket Xeon chips but also added that “outside of AMD’s targeted workloads, most software can’t extract the best performance from this processor.”

Other reviews underline the high power consumption of the Threadripper 3990X, rating it at about 800W. This means that adding a high-end graphics card and custom liquid cooling will significantly boost the overall power requirements of a system. In addition, the Threadripper 3990X supports up to 256GB of RAM, which is a mere quarter of what Intel’s Xeon W-3175X can take.