PC World - USA (2020-12)

DECEMBER 2020 PCWorld 47

suspect would run faster on the Ryzen 9 if we
only had a faster GPU. That in itself is insane,
because our card is the $1,200 GeForce RTX
2080 Ti, but there are definitely faster
graphics cards out today—we just didn’t have
access to any for our testing.
If it doesn’t seem like a big deal to be
basically slightly faster to about the same as the
Core i9, you have to remember that AMD
hasn’t beaten Intel in gaming ever. It’s a huge
accomplishment for the company. Like single-
threaded performance victories in productivity
applications, Ryzen 9 basically does everything
Core i9 can do—except it can do it better.

CPU THREADSCALING

Before we reach our conclusion, we do want

to look at how well the new Ryzens scale

across their cores, because software doesn’t

always run on a single core or all cores. For

that we use Cinebench R15 and run it from

one thread to the maximum threads available

Cinebench Threading

Percent Change

Ryzen 7 2700X versus Core i7-8700K

1T

2T

3T

4T

5T

6T

7T

8T

9T

10T

11T

12T

13T

14T

15T

16T

-14

8

-11

15

-12

8

0

24

-12

8

-10

20

-10

9

8

29

1T

2T

3T

4T

5T

6T

7T

8T

9T

10T

11T

12T

13T

14T

15T

16T

17T

18T

19T

20T

21T

22T

23T

24T

16

34

17

44

22

38

4

29

21

25

36

4

24

17

18

41

8

31

22

Percent Performance

Increase

Core i9-9900K (MCE on) versus

Ryzen 9 3900X (PBO off)

2

1

1

1

1