it's a really big day for all pc gamers
and content creators and everybody who loves high performance processors it was
only two years ago that AMD doubled the core counts of Intel's competing
mainstream products like for real this time and then
just when it seemed like until it finally clawed their way back into the
fight AMD sent us this for review
the ryzen 9 3950x is a desktop processor
that not only has 16 true multi-threaded
processing cores it even has a higher
boost clock than any of its predecessors guys i haven't been this excited for a
consumer CPU since i got my first quad
core in 2006.
i am almost as excited about it as i am about this segway to our sponsor team
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when AMD announced this thing back at e3 2019 the biggest question everyone had
was how i mean we knew that they were doing
it with two separate two ccx dies just
like the ryzen 9 3900x except that that
processor not only had two cores per die
disabled it also ran pretty toasty
surely then with 16 instead of 12 cores
and the highest boost clocks out of the entire ryzen family it couldn't possibly
perform the way that AMD was claiming that it could except it does almost to
the point where AMD is killing other
more lucrative parts of their own product lineup never mind the
competition cause here's the thing at 750 dollars
it's not cheap but it's also taking the position that
was formally held by AMD's threadripper
series of cpus and with only a few trade-offs so first up you lose 40 CPU
pci express lanes bringing the total to 24 with four of those being used to
communicate with the chipset so if you need a ton of pci express expansion
threadripper might still hold some appeal for you but remember too guys pci
express gen 4 means that the link between the CPU and the chipset is
effectively twice as wide as first and
second gen ryzen that means less congestion on that link even if you are
using mostly pci express gen 3 devices
downstream so second you lose quad channel memory and
the extra memory capacity that threadripper offers although the 3950x
can still handle up to 128 gigs of RAM so most people will
probably be fine especially given that the supported memory speed is far higher
and as we all know that's super important for AMD ryzen the icing on the
cake here then is that you no longer have to contend with switching pneuma
versus yuma nodes for a given workload
oh and the motherboards are much less expensive to get into too so
all in all the 3950x is a faster CPU
compared to first and second generation threadripper and as a gamer or even a
prosumer you're giving up very little of value unless you're into
multi-way GPU setups or huge NVMe
storage arrays uh if you are into those things by the way get subscribed so you don't miss our
review of the next-gen threadrippers now though is the moment you've all been
waiting for graphs glorious graphs hot
piles of numbers it's been a long week uh we used a
number of different platforms this time around so here's what we came up with
there's more AMD than Intel here because
frankly speaking Intel doesn't really have a lot to compare against it and we
just want to do a shout out here for puget for providing us access to a core
i9 9960x which Intel wouldn't send us
for comparison presumably to avoid direct 16 core to 16 core you know
graphs and wow i can see why they did that because this thing is a
productivity monster remember guys we're just looking at bars
on a graph here so it's easy to lose track but these are thread rippers and
core i9s that we are comparing it to and the 3950x is on top in virtually every
test we threw at it thanks to its high core count and high core clocks compared
especially to Intel's atdt platform now pay particular attention to the
benchmarks that measure time here we are shaving literally minutes off of the
3900x which already trounced Intel's
9900k and then comparing directly to the 9900k the 3950x finished our handbrake
transcode in nearly half the time what's
more impressive here is that the single threaded and lightly threaded results
are also quite competitive with everything else in our test suite last
gen threadripper guys is looking noticeably last gen right about now
especially because threadripper's main disadvantage came into play when its
professional users wanted to take a break at the end of the day and play
some games here the 3950x shines though as
advertised it is consistently as fast or
faster than any of AMD's lower core count chips which means that we are
looking at the processor that somehow combines the best of high core counts
and high frequencies guys this is the closest that AMD has come yet to
decisively dethroning Intel in
gaming and it's so close in some cases that if i was sitting over at Intel
watching this i would probably need a new pair of underpants at this point
um by the way lttstore.com but then
all of this must come at a price mustn't it and not
just one that hits your wallet right wrong so we were expecting the 3950x to
be a a blazing inferno but under synthetic load we are nearly
10 degrees cooler than the 3900x
and that thing's down 4 course now as we can see it does dip slightly below base
clocks under these conditions but so too does the 3900x and if we were
hoping for the power consumption to reveal some horrible secret tough luck
there too the 3950x also manages to draw
4 watts less than the 3 900 i like what
blood sacrifice did team red make to do this when we look a bit closely here we
see that no blood sacrifice was required in fact the 3950x achieves this through
some very very careful power management it actually runs at a v core of less
than one volt under load in prime95 and
only just more than that in cinebench r20 it's actually only in lightly
threaded workloads that the voltage really ramps up and there well it
doesn't affect total chip power consumption as much because there's so
many fewer cores that are actually drawing power
so thing is while AMD recommends that you run out and buy a beefy cooler for
the 3950x unless you're overclocking
i'm not so sure because this thing is easier to cool than a ryzen 7 when we
ran it with a memory overclock and the BIOS performance enhancements enabled to
relax precision boost's restrictions yeah it did draw more power and it got
hotter but again not by a huge amount v-core
only went up by about 10 and we're still within 10 degrees of
stock under load not to mention that the performance improvement this got us in
multi-threaded workloads put us well above our stock results and even got us
on par or better than our stock core i9 9900k in terms of gaming so what then is
this just really good binning we're paying for kind of like Intel's 9900ks
that they recently released just just please hold on to that gaming crown we
need it probably i mean there's a reason that AMD decided to hold off until now
to release this chip after all but now that it is here it seems like if you've
always liked high-end desktop cpus for their huge core counts but hated their
outlandish prices and expensive motherboards you finally have the
processor that you always dreamed of honestly the guys this thing is
incredible it's crazy fast it works on reasonably priced boards and it even has
ecc memory support if you want to use it in a budget workstation this thing is so
good that if AMD wants to have any hope of us recommending a third gen
threadripper they're gonna have to pull a serious rabbit out of their hat by the
way guys if you like this video but hate the price tag check out our recent
upload on editing 4k video on a budget it is amazing what kind of options that
AMD has in the lower end of their lineup as well
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linked below so thanks so much for watching guys and uh let's all just
take a moment and be excited together