so i'm at the local computer store and i don't know what to do do i choose the
ryzen x or the ryzen xt
which one's more extreme i gotta say my
patience for AMD's crazy naming schemes is starting to wear a little thin you
know first they so funny copied Intel's chipset naming
scheme for am4 then there's the 3000
series ryzen mobile cpus that aren't third gen and now they're bringing xt
their higher performance suffix for graphics cards to three new entries in
their CPU lineup i just can't wait to
have my search results for 5th gen ryzen processors full of navi Radeon graphics
cards but rant over these new chips are in
fact higher performance so let's see what they're all about shall we
just like we're gonna see what our sponsor is all about glasswire is the
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okay that bit about being in the store and being confused that's real the new
xt chips are not a replacement for the x
series processors AMD made that very clear to us in our briefing and in fact
the x series is going to continue to sit on store shelves right alongside the xts
for the same price now you could be forgiven for thinking that this is
offset somewhat by the cost of the cooler that they don't have to include
in the box for the xt's except that the ryzen 5 3600 xt does in
fact come with a cooler in the box meaning that unless you're getting a
really good deal there's even less reason than ever before to bother with
the 3600x in fact AMD's reasoning for not
including a cooler in the 3800 xt and 3900 xt that most consumers who buy
ryzen 7 and ryzen 9 will probably buy an aftermarket cooler anyway
makes sense and more or less obsoletes
their x series equivalents as well so what are they doing
when pressed about this AMD responded that they are giving consumers more
choice by doing it this way and that while the suggested retail price is the
same they're gonna leave the exact pricing up to the vendors
that's a strange way of handling it but they hammered home this choice angle by
proclaiming that the ryzen xt series doesn't even require a BIOS update which
means that even oem motherboards like the kind you might get in a pre-built
gaming system and that probably won't get regular BIOS updates can make use of
these new cpus as well i mean fair enough i guess but this is still
going to cause a ton of confusion on forum threads all over the internet so
what are these then AMD says that the xt chips are the
result of the maturation of the seven nanometer manufacturing process and the
experience that they gained in producing third gen threadripper which is allowing
them to not only improve boost clocks by 100 to 200 megahertz but also to improve
residency at those boost clocks in a nutshell that means you'll see them
boost higher and for longer given that AMD's precision boost 2 algorithm relies
almost exclusively on thermal and power budget for boost in the first place
though what exactly that means is something we're going to have to
discover for ourselves in the real world to do that we filled our water bottle
from lttstore.com and gathered no fewer than eight cpus
with the lion's share of them being AMD to see how they tick
without a BIOS update it definitely does boot up so let's see how AMD's claims
hold up performance wise well we have a look at this graphics
there's a new BIOS it's optimized again
this doesn't make any sense yeah i know the ryzen 9 3900 xt is going slower than
the 3900x that shouldn't be possible no it doesn't
make any sense so we might have to call it the review
well no wait hold on a second no no i think we're okay i mean AMD said we
don't need a BIOS update in the first place and our older BIOS performs better with
the xt even if the optimized one is worse no i
think we're good we're going to go ahead with AMD's guidance we're going to use our original BIOS
yeah so maybe down the line you'll see some performance gains with tuned BIOS's
for these xt chips but for now we're going to evaluate as is especially
because things are looking pretty good AMD has managed a measurable performance
improvement in gaming far more than you might expect from a mere two percent
clock improvement on the 3900 xt and 3600 xt and in fact the ryzen 9 3900 xt
is now just shy of Intel's core i5 while
having more course than either of team blue's ships which is darn impressive
given that CPU is sometimes faster than its core i9 cousin when it comes to
gaming overall depending on the game these new
cpus manage anywhere from negligible to 10-ish percent improvements over their
x-series counterparts the new hardware accelerated GPU
scheduling feature in Windows 10 might help things even further in the near
future and we're going to be diving into that soon so make sure you get subscribed so you don't miss it
unsurprisingly these performance improvements also spill over into
productivity where scores are measurably higher and consequently AMD ends up
pulling farther ahead of Intel than before we're looking at just shy of a
minute shaved off of the firefox compile test for both ryzen 9 and ryzen 5 and
where the performance makes a real impact is in creative cloud where we see
significant gains by reaching for the xt versus an x our ryzen 9 3900 xt pulled
off a staggering 18 percent higher score in photoshop with its mere 100 megahertz
boost clock improvement but then while the ryzen 5 pulled off better times in
blender the ryzen 9 seems to be no better off than before so what's up with
that maybe our thermal performance charts can
shed some light in blender we found that the 3900 xt
displays some of that stay boosted higher and more often promise in the
early stages but it hovers between 4.1 gigahertz and
the 3900x is 4 gigahertz and eventually
tapers off to mostly four gigahertz by the latter half of the run then when we
look at the power draw it's pretty baffling it's drawing far more power for
the same or a slightly higher clock speed about 145 watts that's well above
both its rated 105 watt TDP and the x's
maximum of around 140 watts when it drops to 4 gigahertz that translates
into significantly more heat output and with an h115i our 3900xt landed about 10
degrees celsius hotter than the 3900x on the hottest eye the same thing doesn't
happen though with the lower end xt chips which maintain their higher
performance level over their x counterparts throughout the run and i
gotta level with you guys here i don't really know how to interpret
that it could be that power delivery is wonky
on this older firmware for the high core count chip and it could be that it's
something that's fixable in the future or it could be that higher thermal
output means that precision boost 2 is simply dropping the turbo down sooner
than those lower core count chips if it's power related i don't expect that
this will be a problem with future firmware revisions as the 3950x with 16
cores runs fine in this particular board but your mileage may vary a little in
terms of thermals and sustained performance on launch day on the subject
of launch day after AMD retired their original store mi solution based on an
modis fuse drive which allowed you to accelerate a hard drive with a solid
state cache they teased that a new solution would become available this
year and it's launching now storm i 2.0
AMD's internally developed read-only caching solution is apparently a whole
lot easier to configure with support for any size of SSD and hard drive
it's purely done in software which should mean it's compatible with
anything but right now it only supports third gen
ryzen chips on the x570 chipset as for
why AMD says they're going to gradually roll out support for other chipsets and
cpus so either they're artificially limiting the
software feature to try to add value to x570 in the wake of the b550 launch
or they want their most enthusiastic customers to participate in a beta
program the good news is that given that it's a read-only caching solution any
data that you store on it shouldn't be at risk so
i don't know give it a try and let us know how it goes over on
linustechtips.com in the forum overall this launch feels like a strange sort of
weird message from AMD they're not replacing the x-series processors or
formally discounting them so the bad news is that it's kind of confusing but
the good news is that the only difficult part of our original choice
is whether we want to take advantage of the marketing kickback programs or
bundle deals that AMD seems to be hinting at
or pony up msrp for a little bit more
performance with an xt you know the cynic in me actually
totally going off script here might say that they're keeping the old skus just
so that they can have like more shelf space taken up by AMD
products i've seen moves like that there was a really dark time in the GPU space
when graphics card boxes started to get like this literally this big i remember
uh chaintech chaintech used to have these
gigantic graphics card boxes remember this is before the cards were even dual
slot even like there was no reason for it whatsoever other than to make it take
up as much space as possible so yeah it could be that as well speaking of things
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so thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed this video go check out our
recent video on what it takes to cool Intel's core i9 10 900k
you might have noticed we didn't criticize AMD too hard for the extra
power draw or the extra 10 degrees because they were already in pretty good
shape as for Intel that thing can draw over
250 watts
spicy