A New King Has Ryzen!
The wait for Zen 2 is over and Ryzen 3000 is here! I know I’m kinda spoiling the result by announcing the new king is here, but I don’t think anyone will be surprised with the results we will see today. AMD announced the new Ryzen 3000 series including the two CPUs we have today, the Ryzen 9 3900X and the Ryzen 7 3700X. A short while ago and when AMD demo’d the new Zen 2 based CPU via a Cinebench run head to head and beating the 8700K, I knew we would be in store for something special. How special, I was not sure and while I know, I can tell you that the mainstream king CPU the Core i9 9900K has been usurped.
I really simplified that but I hope you get the point. The CPU wars have been heating up since Zen initially launched a few years back and AMD has been slowly chiseling away at Intel’s market share primarily, but also their performance lead as well. This has been a rather quick progression but in small steps as Ryzen 1st gen and second gen used the initial Zen, then Zen+ which was a more refined version of the initial ZEN core. Now we have Zen 2 which is slated to flip the CPU market on its head if AMD’s initial claims were to be believed. And now its time to dig in and follow the path of what the new platform has to offer and what it can do.
Here we see one of our new X570 boards used for testing the new Ryzen 3000 processors. X570 is not necessary to use a Ryzen 3000 CPU, as AMD has claimed performance parity if using RTyzen 3000 in a X470 based board as well. If you are not using an X570 though you will lose out on the PCIe 4.0 compatibility which could be a bummer to some of you, especially if you had aspirations to use one of the new super-fast PCIe 4.0 SSD’s that are just launching. We have one from Corsair, and I can say without a doubt it is awesome.
The CPUs we will be testing today:
- Intel Core i9 9900K $484.99 (Source: )
- AMD RYZEN 9 3900X w/ Wraith Prism RGB cooler $499
- AMD RYZEN 7 3700X w/ Wraith Prism RGB cooler $329
Ok, so now you see that the 12 Core Ryzen 9 3900X come to market at a little over 10 dollars over the reigning champion the Core i9 9900K. Now, the other CPU we have is massively cheaper at 329 with the Ryzen 7 3700X and its measly 65W TDP. BNut the low clock speeds had us questioning if it even stood a chance against the 9900K and its up to 5.0GHz turbo speed. Let’s read on and see how not just the 12 Core 3900X but the 8 core 3700X fares and how the new Ryzen 3000 silicon compares to the now aging Skylake based chips which are the current top dogs of the Intel mainstream 115X socket.
Processor Number | Base Clock Speed (GHz) | Boost Maximum (GHz) | Cores / Threads | TDP | Cache |
Intel® Core™ i9-9900K |  3.6 |  5.0 |  8/16 |  95W |  16MB |
Ryzen 9 3900X | Â 3.8 | Â 4.6 | Â 12/24 | Â 105W | Â 6+64MB |
Ryzen 7 3700X | Â 3.6 | Â 4.4 | Â 8/16 | Â 65W | Â 4+32MB |
Processor Number | Unlocked | Included Cooler | Memory Support | PCIe Support | Retail Price |
Intel® Core™ i9-9900K |  Yes |  N/A |  Two channels DDR4-2666 | 3.0 |  $484 |
Ryzen 9 3900X | Â Yes | Wraith Prism | Â Two channels DDR4-3200 | Â 4.0 | Â $499 |
Ryzen 7 3700X | Â Yes | Wraith Prism | Â Two channels DDR4-3200 | Â 4.0 | Â $329 |
One takeaway from this straight off the bat is that the clocks are severely deficient, so the only chance Ryzen would have would be some major IPC improvements in place to gain ground vs the 9900K.
now let’s take a look at some of the material form AMD explaining the new Ryzen 3000 CPUs.