AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and Core i9 9900K evaluation • iGamesNews.com

So far, the verdict is that the Ryzen 7 3700X, priced at $ 329, is an excellent CPU that can compete well with the Intel Core i7 9700K, which costs $ 385, in games, and can be used in many applications such as video rendering or streaming. Thread content creation tasks stand out. This helped the 3700X become the most popular processor among a German retailer and caused AMD to surpass Intel in reports in South Korea and Japan. But what about the fare for the Ryzen 9 3900X? We have tested Intel's top product Core i9 9900K to see which company has won the overall PC gaming championship.

First, let's discuss what we are working on. The Ryzen 9 3900X is a fully enabled Zen 2 design, which means it includes 12 cores and 24 threads distributed across its two small chips. Compared with the Ryzen 7 3700X, it has four more cores and eight more threads, so we hope to see significantly better performance in tasks such as video rendering, which are easily broken down and executed in parallel. The flagship chip also has a higher single-core boost frequency than similar mid-range products, which will also translate into better single-threaded performance.

This is a completely different beast compared to the Zen and Zen + designs of the past. I / O is transferred to its own chip using a mature 12nm process, and each CPU chiplet uses a novel 7nm process, which can provide higher performance than previous generations of products while using less power (And therefore less heat). This architectural change is accompanied by a series of small but still important changes: the size of the L3 cache has been doubled to alleviate latency issues, a more efficient branch predictor has been used, and AVX instructions have finally been processed correctly .

All of this sounds great, but just looking at the spec sheet or reading the feature list does not make it clear what the actual performance of these processors is in games, especially older versions of the game that were not designed to use too many cores and threads, Not sure. The only way to solve this problem is to browse a series of recent and less popular games at different resolutions-this is exactly what we did.

Before delving into the results, it is necessary to briefly describe how we perform these tests. We set up a new Windows 10 installation on fast SSD storage-including the latest security and AMD scheduler fixes, and a gigabyte 2TB PCIe 4.0 drive for AMD's Ryzen third-generation testing, and others A SATA SSD is used on the platform.

The main benchmark tests were performed on the entry-level 180 MSI MPG X570 Gaming Plus and supplementary tests were performed on the high-end motherboard 450 Prestige X570 Creation, both of which were provided by MSI. Although Gaming Plus is the cheapest MSI option on the X570 platform, the Creation board may make sense for those who are considering doing a lot of overclocking or using multiple PCIe 4.0 devices. This is because in addition to strong power supply capabilities and support for overclocking of extreme memory beyond 4600MHz, the Creation board also includes active chipset cooling and a complete PCI-e 4.0 channel. There is even a PCI-e 4.0 add-in card that can connect two additional M.2 drives. Meanwhile, the second-generation Ryzen was tested on the 380 ASUS ROG Crosshair 8, and the Core i9 9900K was tested on the 480 ASUS ROG Maximus XI Extreme.

The Ryzen chip uses the amazing AMD Wraith Prism air cooler, which is bundled with all Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 processors as well as Core i9 9900K and Gaming Storm Castle 240mm AiO, so the cooling tasks are different. In each case, we use GSkill Trident Z Royal 3600MHz CL16 RAM provided by AMD, a huge 850W PSU and an open-air test bench.

Although game performance will be the focus here, we wouldn't mention performance in content creation tasks such as video rendering and transcoding. While recording the video, our own Alex Battalgia performed a lyrical analysis of the relative strength of the 3900X compared to the previous 1700X-powered workstation, but is there a clear gap between the second and third generation Ryzen? How are Intel's chips stacked?

Once the answer can be found, Cinebench is a realistic benchmark-if any, it can simulate rendering tasks in professional video software Cinema 4D. Testing of older R15 versions can be completed before modern CPUs reach their normal temperature limits, so the new R20 version includes more challenging workloads and better reflects continuous performance. Both single-threaded and multi-threaded tests are provided, which allows us to understand how Ryzen is passed down from generation to generation in the context of Intel's offerings.

The Core i9 9900K is still the king of single cores, but the Ryzen 9 3900X is only a few points behind. This is largely due to the 2700X that we saw on the 3700X with a 21% generation advantage. Close results indicate that the 3900X should remain competitive even in older games that have not been designed for modern systems, which is not something the first or second generation Ryzen can say, but we have to see how these games work . Multi-threaded results show that the 3900X is 38% ahead, thanks to the increasing number of cores and threads of AMD's flagship chips.

Video encoding in the popular open source tool Handbrake is a more realistic example, and this is where we will now discuss. For this test, we encoded the same example video file using the x264 (h.264) and x265 (HEVC) compression standards on the CRF 18 preset production quality standards. The Ryzen 9 3900X shows the same general trend as the Ryzen 7 3700X. This is due to the better AVX instruction processing capabilities we mentioned earlier, which resulted in a slight increase in h.264 encoding speed and a significant increase in HEVC encoding. The larger number of cores even embarrassed the Core i9 9900K. AMD's current number one consumer CPU is 37% and 25% ahead of 9900K in both h.264 and HEVC-outstanding results.

When you look at the power consumption data (measured from the wall during the HEVC encoding test), it is very impressive. AMD's 7nm chipset boosts the performance of the Ryzen 9 3900X to 9900K, but consumes much less power. The maximum power we measured was 228W, while the maximum power of Intel systems was 266W, a difference of about 15%.

To say the least, these are reliable results, but let's not be fascinated. Our passion is to test performance in games, which may be quite different from synthetic benchmarks and content creation workloads. AMD has always been competitive in getting the job done, but can they beat Intel at home with outstanding gaming performance and really drive it out of the market?

In order to answer this question in some way, we need to find important game scenes that can be displayed repeatedly. These scenes can show the differences between different game CPUs. This is harder than it sounds, because CPU-bound situations are more susceptible to random interference from operating system processes and simple run-to-run differences than CPU-bound situations. Even with everything, different parts of the same minute-to-minute test scene can still lead Intel ahead of AMD and vice versa. Therefore, we recommend that you check the video comments embedded above, or at least watch the real-time metrics as each test scene plays, because you will have a deeper understanding of the relative performance of these chips compared to the average or in isolated cases The worst frame time indicator is only 1%. After overcoming minor hassles and delaying the posting of this review, we are finally ready to share our findings.

We tested every game with 1080p, 1440p and 2160p using the best consumer GPU on the market: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. The 1080p benchmark reflects a high-end system designed to take extremely high frame rates to take advantage of high-refresh rate monitors, although it does mean dealing with stuttering caused by frequent CPU-bound conditions. The 1440p result will be relevant to anyone at the "best point" of the current resolution, where mid-to-high-end systems can achieve frame rates in excess of 60fps without sacrificing visual fidelity, typically Close to 120fps. Finally, our 4K test results are arguably the most balanced situation, where there is considerable CPU overhead, and you are more likely to be GPU-bound outside some esports games.

AMD Ryzen 9 3900X analysis