BACK IN JULY, AMD launched a massive
7nm offensive in the CPU world. What
can it do for an encore? More cores,
more threads, and potentially higher
clock speeds. The Ryzen 9 3950X really
impresses in some areas, though it’s not
quite as awesome in other respects.
Let’s start with the best use case,
which is anything in the content-creation
realm. With 33 percent more cores than
the 3900X, and similar clock speeds, it’s
usually 25–30 percent faster. If you do
video editing, 3D rendering, or any other
task that can benefit from a 32-thread
p r o c e s s o r, y o u’l l l o v e t h e 3 9 5 0 X. F o r t a s k s
that don’t scale well to 16 cores, though,
you’re better off with a less expensive
part. Even though the 3950X is nominally
a consumer CPU, it costs a lot more. It’s
an HEDT CPU for the mainstream AM4
socket, priced 50 percent higher than the
3900X, which might not seem like that big
of a deal for 33 percent more cores, but it
doesn’t include a cooler in the box. AMD
recommends liquid cooling to get the
most out of the 3950X.
Overclocking is a bit of an afterthought
for the 3950X. You can probably do
4.1–4.3GHz on all 16 cores with the right
cooling, but you’ll give up maximum
single-threaded performance in doing
so. At stock, we saw all-core clock speeds
hover in the 3,900–4,000MHz range,
depending on the workload, and games
would routinely run at 4,200–4,300MHz.
Gaming performance isn’t the primary
purpose of the 3950X. It can run games,
A multithreaded monster, great for content creators
AMD Ryzen 9 3950X
8
VERDICT AMD Ryzen 9 3950XCORES GALORE Awesome
multithreaded performance;
sensible power draw; great for pros.
SNORE STORE Lackluster overclocking; no
cooler included; expensive.
$750, http://amd.comSPECIFICATIONSBase/Turbo Clock 3.5GHz/4.7GHz
Cores/Threads 16/32
Lithography TSMC 7nm FinFET
Cache 64MB
Memory Support DDR4-3200
Memory Channels 2
Max PCIe Lanes 16
Graphics N/A
TDP 105Wbut it does best when dealing with more
difficult workloads that scale with core
and thread counts, with clock speed being
less of a factor. Compared to the 3900X,
the 3950X is up to 33 percent faster in
heavily threaded workloads. Overall,
however, it’s only 17 percent faster in
multithreaded testing. Even with several
different 3D rendering engines, video
encoding, and cryptographic workloads,
scaling beyond a 24-thread processor
is difficult.RIVAL RESULTS
Looking at Intel’s CPUs, the competition
isn’t even close. The 3900X already beats
the 9900K and 9900KS in multithreaded
performance, although a few tasks,
such as VeraCrypt AES, favor Intel’s
processors. With twice as many cores
and threads, that’s hardly surprising.
What about Intel’s $2,000 18-core
i9-9980XE? It does manage to hang on to
the overall multithreaded performance
crown, but by no means is it a clean
sweep. It’s 12 percent faster on average
in multithreaded performance, but the
3950X does claim wins in Cinebench,
POV-Ray, Blender, and Handbrake. It also
leads in PCMark 10 results, which aren’t
quite as multithreaded-friendly. And it
does all this while using substantially
less power.
Where AMD’s Ryzen 9 3950X shines
is in the prosumer space. If you’re doing
serious work, but don’t quite have a
blank check to go out and buy a $5,000–$10,000 workstation, you can get roughly
the same level of performance with the
3950X and save a few thousand. It’s also
generally a more efficient CPU than any of
the workstation or HEDT parts, because
the AM4 platform keeps things sensible.
And if you want to go HEDT, AMD has
32-core chips waiting in the wings, and
it probably won’t stop there. AMD has
a great CPU portfolio right now, and we
wouldn’t be surprised to see Intel adopt
something like AMD’s chiplet strategy in
future products. The 3950X would have
been a far more costly product if AMD
had tried to build the whole thing out of a
single monolithic die.
We’re still years away from most
people wanting, let alone needing, 16-
core processors at home. Heck, outside
of playing the latest PC games, we can
still do 95 percent of our work on a laptop
from 2014. But while that laptop is fine for
typing articles and minor image editing, it
chokes on more complex tasks, like video
editing. If that’s the type of work you do
on your PC, give the 3950X some serious
consideration. –JARRED WALTONBENCHMARKSAMD Ryzen 9 3950X Intel Core i9-9980XE AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
Blender 2.80 Beta BMW (pps) 5,719 5,128 4,477
Cinebench R15 Single/Multi (Index) 213 /3,992 198/3,765 210/3,160
POV-Ray 3.7.1 Single/Multi (pps) 539 /8,334 464/7,978 522/6,639
PCMark 10 (Index) 7,963 7,428 7,285
Metro Exodus (fps)^909092
Tom Clancey’s The Division 2 (fps) 148 142 148
Total War: Warhammer II (fps) 90 79 98
Best scores are in bold. Our test bench consists of an Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi (X570) motherboard,
16GB of G.Skill TridentZ RGB DDR4-3600, an Nivida GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, and a Gigabyte Aorus NVMeGen 4 1TB
SSD. All games are tested at their highest graphical profile, ay 1080p.maximumpc.com JAN 2020 MAXIMUMPC 77