THE BUILD-UP to AMD’s launch party for its
Ryzen 3000 CPUs, aka third-gen Ryzen,
aka Zen 2, has been huge. The Ryzen 3000
processors are the first mainstream
CPUs to utilize a 7nm manufacturing
process, and after flirting with the crown
for the first two Ryzen generations, this
could be the day AMD claims an outright
victory. Will the Ryzen 9 3900X be the
best CPU for gaming—and everything
else? It’s time to find out.
Zen 2 adds an improved L2 TAGE
branch predictor, has a larger micro-op
cache, doubles the maximum size of the
L3 cache, and doubles the AVX floating
point performance. There’s also a third
address generation unit, larger buffers,
multiplication latency is reduced to three
cycles, and there are wider buses to
improve bandwidth. PCIe Gen 4 support
is included, along with changes to the
Infinity Fabric that links everything
together, and there are improvements
in memory compatibility. Wrap all of that
up in a 7nm bow, then move the memory
controller out of the main CPU chiplet
and into a secondary IO chiplet, with
the option to have dual CPU chiplets on
higher-tier models. That’s the Ryzen
3000 family, with the current king of the
hill being the Ryzen 9 3900X: 24 threads
spread out over two CPU chiplets. Whew!
So, how does third-gen Ryzen perform?
That’s the question we’ve been waiting to
answer for several months. In particular,
we want to see if AMD can truly close
the gap. The good news is that gaming
performance is improved by nearly 10AMD’s third-gen Ryzen vies for the CPU throne
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
9
VERDICT AMD Ryzen 9 3900XTO THE NINES Great
multithreaded performance;
PCIe Gen 4; comes with an
excellent Wraith Prism cooler.
HARD TIMES Still beaten by Intel for
high-end gaming; not much potential
for overclocking.
$500, http://www.amd.comSPECIFICATIONSBase/Turbo Clock 3.8/4.6GHz
Cores/Threads 12/24
Lithography 7nm
Cache 64MB L3
Memory Support 128GB DDR4
Memory Channels 2
Max PCIe Lanes 16
Graphics N/A
TDP 105WAMD Ryzen 9 3900X Intel Core i9-9900K
Blender 2.80 Beta BMW (pps) 4,348 3,281
Cinebench R15 Single/Multi (Index) 203/3,086 221 /2,073
POV-Ray 3.7.1 Single/Multi (pps) 516/6,474 624 /5,477
Shadow of the Tomb Raider (fps) 128 150
Metro Exodus (fps) 91 95
Division 2 (fps) 145 152
Total War: Warhammer II (fps) 98 108BENCHMARKSBest scores are in bold. Our test bed consists of an Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi (X570) motherboard, 16GB
of G.Skill TridentZ Royal DDR4-3600, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, and a Gigabyte Aorus NVMe Gen 4 1TB SSD.
All games are tested at their highest graphical profile, at 1080p.percent on average relative to the Ryzen
7 2700X. The bad news is that the Core
i9-9900K is still about 10 percent faster
overall. The other good news is that
the difference in gaming performance
between AMD and Intel CPUs really only
matters at 1080p ultra with an RTX 2080
Ti—maybe you’re aiming for 144fps and
above. If you run a slightly slower GPU,
even an RTX 2080 or 2070 Super, the
gaming performance gap shrinks.PICKING UP SPEED
That’s not to say that Intel’s CPUs aren’t
faster—they are. AMD loses in absolute
gaming performance, again, but not by
much. We wish that weren’t the case,
because even if AMD just tied Intel in
gaming performance, it would make this
a clean sweep. As it stands, the Zen 2
architecture improves performance
compared to Zen+, but doesn’t fully close
the gaming performance gap.
The other side of the coin is non-
gaming performance, and here AMD
makes massive inroads against Intel. The
Core i7-8700K was slower overall than
the Ryzen 7 2700X last year, which is why
Intel released the Core i9-9900K. That’s
an eight-core/16-thread CPU, and going
up against the 12-core/24-thread Ryzen
9 3900X, it’s not even close; AMD’s 3900X
is 21 percent faster than Intel’s Core i9-
9900K, at the same nominal price.
How much do those differences really
matter? It depends on how you use your
PC. 3D rendering and video encoding
aren’t things most people do on a regularbasis. The reality is that most non-
enthusiasts and non-professionals likely
wouldn’t notice a difference between
any of the Core i5/i7/i9 and Ryzen 5/7/9
products in day-to-day use. We have
definitely hit a plateau in terms of what
“typical” people ask of their PCs.
If you’ve been debating between an
AMD or Intel rig for your next build, AMD
is the better pick now. You can get
excellent multithreaded performance,
gaming performance is close enough
that only benchmarks or extremely
competitive gamers would likely notice
(and then only with an extreme GPU,
such as a 2080 Ti). Price and features
are also in AMD’s favor. You get PCIe
Gen 4, a dedicated x4 PCIe connection
for your primary M.2 SSD, more cores,
even lower power use. What’s more,
you get all of that at equivalent or lower
prices than you’d pay for Intel. If you’re an
enthusiast or professional, and your PC
has a pre-Ryzen AMD or Intel seventh-
gen or earlier CPU, now is a great time to
upgrade to Ryzen 3000. –JARRED WALTONin the lab
72 MAXIMUMPC SEP 2019 maximumpc.com