AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, 12C/24T, 3.80-4.60GHz, boxed

Das Gesamtpaket der neusten RYZEN Generation in Form des RYZEN 7 3700X und RYZEN 9 3900X ist sehr überzeugend. Neben der Leistung stimmt auch die Leistungsaufnahme und der Preis. Auch wenn der maximale Turbotakt noch nicht erreicht wird, liegt die Leistung im Vergleich zu INTEL gleich auf oder sogar höher. Das trifft vor allem dann zu, wenn wir die IPC-Leistung vergleichen.

Jetzt aktualisiert: AMD bringt mit dem Ryzen 9 3900X erstmals einen 12-Kerner mit 4.6 GHz in den Mainstream-Desktopmarkt und schickt sich an, Intels i9-9900K in die Schranken zu verweisen. Wir haben den Zwölfkerner Ryzen 9 3900X sowie den Achtkerner Ryzen 7 3700X durch unseren Benchmark-Parcours gejagt und erklären die wichtigsten Neuerungen.

Looking at our benchmark results, we can confirm definite performance improvements with the new AMD chipset drivers across the board. Especially low-threaded applications benefit in a significant way, some posting several percent improvements, which is big—Intel sold us such gains wrapped up in a new processor generation. What's slightly surprising is that heavily-threaded applications do lose a little bit of performance, especially rendering seems affected. Overall, I'd say those results are definitely favorable. Trading a small loss in multi-threaded performance for better low-threaded performance certainly seems worth it to me—I guess the people complaining on social media about losing 100 points in Cinebench nT and declaring this update a disaster might disagree with me.

The Ryzen 9 3900X remains the fastest processor in our bench even with SMT disabled, beating the Core i9-9900K across multi-threaded tests. It also beats an untouched Ryzen 7 3700X. It's settled then that 12 physical cores beat 8-core/16-thread. However, the lack of SMT shaves a significant amount of performance off of the Ryzen 9 3900X. This goes to show that AMD's implementation of SMT is a sincere engineering feat and has a tangible performance gain. "Zen" simply wouldn't be the same without SMT, and AMD has been kind/smart enough to provide the feature on all its processor models priced north of $140 rather than keeping it exclusive to those above $300.

Ryzen 9 3900X is the most powerful AMD processor launching today. It features an amazing 12 cores and 24 threads, which is unheard of in a mainstream desktop platform. I'm sure Intel would still be selling up overpriced quad-core processors if it weren't for AMD Ryzen. Later this year, AMD will even release the 16-core / 32-thread Ryzen 9 3950X, which will work on the same AM4 platform, too.

Our first impressions with 3rd generation Ryzen's memory overclocking capabilities are very optimistic. The processor is capable of memory frequencies well beyond the DDR4-3600 most 2nd generation Ryzen chips cap out at as stability of the Infinity Fabric interconnect beyond that point starts to buckle. Frequencies such as DDR4-4000 require a lot of skill and a lot more luck with the older Ryzens.

At the outset, we offer our profound gratitude to AMD for offering backwards compatibility for its 3rd generation Ryzen processors on motherboards that were designed way back in 2016. Motherboard designers back then would not have anticipated CPU core counts to increase two-fold for a total of 16 cores in just a couple of years, not to mention the added electrical and wiring requirements of the meticulously put together processors.