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It’s finally time to review AMD’s new 3rd-gen Ryzen processors.
The Ryzen 9 3900X is a 12-core, 24-thread processor with a massive 64MB L3 cache.
It runs at a base frequency of 3.8 GHz with a boost frequency of 4.6 GHz.
It costs $500, placing it in direct competition with theCore i9-9900K.
Then the Ryzen 7 3700X costs $330 and AMD suggests it’s taking on the more expensive9700K.
We’ll also provide some 3900X and 3700X performance figures using an all-in-one liquid cooler.
Finally, our graphics card of choice was the MSI Trio GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.
Scoring an incredible 7086 points makes it 24% faster than the Threadripper 2920X.
Moreover, it decimated the Core i9-9900K by a 45% margin.
The Ryzen 7 3700X was equally impressive.
These new 3rd-gen Ryzen parts are already looking like kings of productivity.
Here we have some memory bandwidth figures and this is sustained read/write performance.
Overall a remarkable performance uplift over the 2nd-gen parts.
Moving on to 7-zip, first we have the compression test where traditionally Ryzen hasn’t done that well.
For example, you might see how the 2700X is 14% slower than the 9900K.
King of productivity right there.
Then when it comes to decompression work, 3rd-gen Ryzen still enjoys a handy performance advantage.
Here the 3700X was 11% faster than the 9900K and a whopping 52% faster than the 9700K.
We use Adobe Premiere on a daily basis, currently with a TR 2950X.
Making these results more impressive is that Premiere is a very pro-Intel piece of software.
Using the older build the 3900X took 48 seconds to complete the workload while the 3700X took 68 seconds.
This meant the 3700X was slightly slower than the 9900K but much faster than the 9700K.
Meanwhile the 3900X beat everything including the 2920X.
Despite that the 3900X easily conquered all while the 3700X wasn’t much slower than the 9900K.
The 3700X was also 12% faster than the 2700X, a decent uplift.
The last system we’re going to look at is Blender.
Power Consumption
Well, would you look at that.
The R7 3700X consumed less power than the previous-gen 2600 and even less than the Core i7-8700K.
In fact it was comparable to the Ryzen 5 2600 and 1600 along with the old quad-core 7700K.
This is an stellar result for AMD and on that high note lets cautiously move into the gaming benchmarks.
It’s really close, so let’s see what happens at 1440p.
The 9700K was also 6% faster than the 3700X.
Not a huge margin but we were hoping we’d see less of a gap at 1440p.
Battlefield V sees 3rd-gen Ryzen parts trailing Intel’s Core i9s again.
At 1440p the 9900K was just 4% faster than the 3900X which is a close call.
The 3700X did better relative to the 9700K, but again gaming looks solid on Intel’s side.
Bumping the resolution up to 1440p reduces the margins significantly.
We were hoping these 3rd-gen Ryzen processors would be a little more punchy in The Division 2.
Far Cry New Dawn has always been troublesome for Ryzen processors.
The 9900K is now just 10% faster than both the 3900X and 3700X.
The 9900K and 9700K do offer slightly better 1% low performance, around 7% better.
Not a big difference though and as you might expect the gaming experience was identical.
The margins at 1440p are reduced and now the 9900K is just 5% faster than the 3900X.
Total War: Three Kingdoms delivers a solid result for AMD.
Basically 2:1 sees the Infinity Fabric clocked at a quarter of the memory speed, while 1:1 is half.
Due to time constraints we didn’t go further in testing memory.
A quick look at gaming performance with World War Z we see no major performance difference on both boards.
At a later time we’ll check out how this looks for B350 and X370 motherboards as well.
The CPU now gets stuck at code 07 after microcode.
We tried running the chip on a different X570 board among other tests before sadly declaring it dead.
This also means we don’t have temperature data of that CPU for now, just the 3700X.
The cooler is very quiet though, so 87 C overclocked is respectable in our book.
Of course, all the 3900X results were recorded with the box cooler as we noted earlier.
Cost Per Frame
What does 3rd-gen Ryzen offer in terms of value?
When we surveyed a group of readers, most seemed to agree that thebe quiet!
Motherboard costs are about the same, so that won’t play a factor in this value comparison.
As for AMD’s first and second-gen Ryzen processors… they’re really cheap these days.
Who Is It For?
PCIe-gen 4 SSDs are nice but for gaming and general usage they’re not worth the premium.
Going back to our gaming benchmark results, we suspect these will provoke the most debate.
The end result is good and 3rd-gen Ryzen has generally shown a big step forward for AMD.
When it comes to power consumption the new Ryzen processors are extremely efficient.
Overall the new Ryzen 3000 series delivers and the improvements in power efficiency are nothing short of amazing.
Pricing is competitive and if this doesn’t force Intel to adjust theirs, nothing will.
