Maximum PC - UK (2019-09)

The past month has been

busy in the hardware testing

labs. Between AMD’s RX

5700 series, third-gen Ryzen,

and Nvidia RTX Super cards,

I’ve had my plate more than

full. Ryzen looks good, but

gaming performance still

trails Intel by a small margin.

The bigger problem has been

AMD’s launch drivers (19.7.1)

for the graphics cards. We

Nvidia releases new RTX

Super cards, AMD drops the

prices of its new GPUs just

before they hit shelves, and

Intel announces it will have

7nm chips by 2021—I’ve been

enjoying this subtle yet not so

subtle “we gotta one-up each

other” war. But I feel bad for

those who bought a 20-series

right before the Supers were

announced; the 2060 Super

ran into several performance

anomalies—a nice way of

saying that we encountered

driver bugs and performance

regressions. It’s not clear

what happened, but the 19.5.2

drivers were about 5–10

percent faster than 19.7.1

with an RX 590. Let’s hope it’s

sorted soon, as another 10

percent out of the 5700 cards

would be awesome.

has on-par performance with

the 2070 for $100 less. The

2070 Super’s performance is

nearly the same as the 2080

for $200 less. Of course, price

varies from manufacturer

to manufacturer, but the

entire Super line, when

comparing MSRP and

performance to the original

cards, makes the 20-series

feel unnecessarily bloated.

JARRED WALTON

Senior Editor

JOANNA NELIUS

Hardware Staff Writer

EVER BUILT A PC in a cardboard box? OK,

what I’m talking about today isn’t exactly a

full PC build, but it was a fully functioning

PC, and it lived in a giant cardboard box.

I’m not usually the one to do our CPU

testing and reviews, but due to a number

of unforeseen complications—namely

Jarred planning a family vacation and then

us finding out AMD’s Ryzen 3000 parts

would be launching in the middle of it—I

found myself the unlikely benchmarker of

the Ryzen 7 3700X and Ryzen 9 3900X. As

I’m not a regular CPU tester (and I work

from home), I don’t have a full test bench

area set up for the purpose. So, when AMD

sent me the Ryzen parts to benchmark, I

had to make do with what was available:

the very box they shipped in.

You can see the cardboard test bench I

assembled in the image, above-right. Sure,

it’s not pretty, but it got the job done. And

when I say “job,” I mostly mean keeping

my cats from pouncing on the extremely

tantalizing spinning fans and sparkling

lights. (Side note: AMD’s Wraith coolers

are very pretty.) My

test bench—er, box—

served its purpose,

though. I would run

benchmarks by day,

then close the top flaps

to keep cats out at

night. Never mind that

the whole thing was

probably a huge fire

hazard (for the record,

I did keep it well ventilated while on, and

unplugged while boxed up). Thankfully, my

cardboard misadventures didn’t set back

the testing process at all, and we had our

Ryzen 3000 reviews ready for launch.

If you don’t have a spare case, use what’s available

Cardboard

Benchmark

She may not look like

much, but she’s got it

where it counts.

BO MOORE, HARDWARE LEAD

92 MAXIMUMPC SEP 2019 maximumpc.com

in the lab