let's get this out of the way even the most ardent a d fan knows that Intel is
king when it comes to gaming and AMD always has been and always will be
nothing but a second choice for poor people
and everyone including myself has only
themself to blame for getting wrapped up in the hype around the 3rd
gen rise and launch and jumping on the bandwagon too early
let's throw up some numbers here shall we so as you guys can see here a simple die
shrink was never going to um
a simple die shrink was hey
um AMD is tied with Intel yeah
yeah that's csgo that that that's known to favor Intel
yeah well i mean are you sure you labeled this correctly
yeah Intel goes here andy goes here this is gaming yeah usually
is it sure that's right
could it be that Intel
is behind AMD for gaming
we are going to need to go a little bit deeper here folks
speaking of deeper if you ever want to take a deeper look at what's going on
with your network connection glasswire allows you to monitor your network
activity and block badly behaving apps use offer code Linus to get 25 off at
the link in the video description
let's do the technical stuff first at the core of this launch is zen 2 AMD's
aptly named next generation zen micro architecture that incorporates a new
chiplet layout consisting of multiple 7 nanometer CPU dies and a dedicated 12
nanometer io die all joined together by an infinity fabric interconnect that
runs at double the bandwidth of the previous generation in order to reduce
latency AMD has also thrown in a more efficient
branch predictor much faster avx support for super fast frequency switching a
feature that improves both performance and efficiency kind of like Intel's
speed shift and finally game cash
one of the dumbest bits of branding that we've seen since super
graphics cards as it turns out game cash
is just marketing speak for doubling the amount of level 3 cash on the CPU
the good news is that stupid name aside it does help feed ryzen's hunger for
extremely fast data access to the point where AMD claims that this optimization
alone is worth double the benefit of going from ddr4 2666 all the way to 3600
on the previous generations improving matters even further 3rd gen
ryzen now natively supports ddr4 3200
and has been seen overclocking as high as 5100 megahertz to put that in
perspective first gen ryzen was so picky
about memory that for a while you needed high-end samsung bdi modules in order to
hit 3 200 megahertz by contrast 3rd gen ryzen's new off-die
memory controller design has AMD claiming a sweet spot of ddr4 3733
that's frankly astounding so they managed all this by optimizing trace
routing to the CPU and decoupling the memory frequency from the infinity
fabric clock that means that you're no longer overclocking the infinity fabric
when you overclock your memory speaking of overclocking AMD's updated ryzen
master utility provides full timing control while booted to the os
and lets you import and export those settings including settings that are
generated by third-party ryzen memory overclocking calculators
so if you've got a similar setup to an exported profile from someone you know
then you can actually use those numbers as a jumping off point which is really
cool we're hoping to follow up with a full overclocking guide but in a
nutshell it's pretty different but in a good way
there's even more that AMD's done here too but the tl dr is that this is far
more than just a die shrink and it all adds up to a pretty hefty performance
improvement and the crazy part is that's all before
we even get to the new motherboards now many second generation and some
first-gen ryzen boards should get support for 3rd gen chips but for the
best experience AMD is of course recommending their new x570 chipset with
x570 supported devices including the
chipset itself and the link that it has to the CPU are gonna run at pci express
gen 4 which is capable of double the bandwidth of the previous generation
that means that high performance devices like multi-gigabit network cards usb 4
controllers NVMe storage and future graphics cards will be able to run their
best on x570
okay so that was a lot of new stuff to take in so i'm just going to sum it up
here AMD now has much faster course and
making matters worse for Intel their modular approach to chip design has
enabled them to pack in more of them today right now AMD has a 12 core
24 thread consumer CPU on store shelves
and it's priced to match the core i9 9900k with a measly eight cores and 16
threads and what's even crazier is it's got 105 watt
TDP which Intel happens to measure at their base clock and AMD measures at
their boost of course it's one thing to be told all
of this and quite another to see it so here's the test setup that we're using
today we're going to be pitting the best that both teams have to offer against
each other with the most current software and firmware patches on as
equal footing as possible it's worth mentioning up front that we did observe
some interesting behavior when testing between ddr4 3200 and 3600 on both Intel
and AMD here we settled on 3600 for this
review but let us know if you'd like to see a follow-up on performance at
different memory speeds now let's finally get back to those
gaming charts immediately we see that not everything
is ryzen friendly but AMD has closed the
gap considerably over 2nd gen with even
our much less expensive ryzen 7 sample
pulling off respectable numbers compared to Intel's flagship consumer core i9
9900k but
mere numbers do not tell the whole story here
take battlefield 5 for example this looks like a clear win for Intel that is
until we fire up obs in the background and start streaming our gameplay
now AMD's on top now you might think that that's simply because AMD has more
cores and a more efficient interconnect but
look closely here we saw a lot of run to run variation in
frame rate seemingly at random what this
suggests to us is that the CPU isn't
always using the most efficient group of cores to run the game
assigning the game to only one of the dies made things a lot more stable and
faster so with some Windows scheduler or game optimization we think AMD could
have significantly more performance on their hands speaking of more performance
productivity is ryzen's traditional stomping ground and stomping i think
would be a generous way to describe Intel's treatment under AMD's heels here
at worst AMD roughly matches Intel in per thread performance while also having
more cores at the same price and at best it's like watching that south park
episode where the kids hockey team plays the detroit red wings check out this
mozilla firefox compile test that is the
ryzen 7 3700x running over a minute and
a half faster than Intel's flagship consumer core i9 9900k
now normally when we run through these graphs we feel like we need to provide
voice over commentary about which kinds of workloads lean more towards which
product or if you're this kind of professional maybe you should consider
this but today we kind of are just killing time while the graphs
roll because it's as simple as if you've got real work to do on your computer you
should buy a ryzen 3rd gen and the good news keeps rolling AMD's thermal
performance which can finally be measured without applying a temperature
offset calculation is pretty decent the new chips sit at cozy but manageable
temperatures which is especially relevant because AMD's precision boost
unlike Intel's turbo boost does not have a duration limit so much like a GPU
ryzen 3rd gen will keep boosting for as long as it can within its thermal and
power budgets in other words these things are designed to redline
under a prime95 small fft load that translates to a sustained frequency not
a whole lot higher than bass clock but that's okay because under a more
realistic scenario like a long blender render ryzen 3rd gen cpus manage to
consistently stay a few hundred megahertz over bass when we try
disabling the power limits and enabling the most aggressive options for
precision boost overdrive things did heat up quickly and i suspect that
voltage tweaking is going to be the main way to get better overclocks on these
higher end verizon chips with upgraded cooling of course required leading us
perfectly to one of the major downsides of the x570 platform the active cooling
usually in the form of a small fan required to control the heat output of
the motherboard chipset it's a real bummer for me to see this
cooling trend come back because tiny proprietary cooling fans tend to be one
of the least reliable components in a pc
which means that if it fails the best case is that you're jury-rigging a
cooler to limp along and the worst case is that your motherboard throttles your
performance or cooks itself before you realize that anything is wrong
unfortunately this cooling is a necessary evil apparently due to the
additional power required by pci express gen 4.
the good news is that at least it does make a difference for storage throughput
right now we're looking at nearly two gigabytes per second worth and we could
expect more in the future it's also worth noting here that even
while we were hitting our aorus SSD with four continuous looping file copies of
about a gig of photos each crystaldiskmark's sequential right
numbers barely dipped below what you might consider reasonable for an
entry-level NVMe SSD without any additional load on it not too shabby
but pci express gen 4 seems to contribute to toasty operation on the
other side of the link as well and our SSD got
really hot during benchmarking despite its massive heatsink
i think we're gonna have to start coming up with some really creative SSD cooling
solutions folks because while you want the controller to be cool the nand
itself actually if it gets too cool its reliability gets hurt
anyway that's a conversation for another time for now now that we've made our way
through performance it's time to talk value and there's just no way to dance
around this Intel must adjust their prices the ryzen 7 3700x mostly matches
the core i9 9900k blow for blow but is
priced lower than a core i7 9700k which
lacks hyper threading so it's a bad story now and we haven't even looked at
AMD's less expensive overclocking capable chips remember every ryzen is
unlocked or AMD's upcoming 16 core ryzen
3rd gen now strictly speaking if you're a gamer Intel can
technically still claim to be on top and the core i7 9700k could still appeal to
you if you're all about that raw frame rate but Intel's margin of victory is
very thin compared to what we're used to seeing and we're only expecting the gap
to shrink so if you do almost anything else on your computer it gets pretty
tough to justify so then guys
this is it take in the moment because for the first
time in over a decade AMD is essentially
on top of the consumer CPU race and much
like in the athlon 64 days Intel has
no meaningful response on their roadmap meaning that it is Intel who is going to
have to slash their prices in order to stay competitive
and the craziest part of all of this is that with team blue still trying to ramp
up 10 nanometer production AMD may end
up having a response for that by the time it rolls out
so the final word and i really can't stress enough how important this is
is whether you like AMD or hate AMD
they're back in a big way and you should
be absolutely freaking stoked because competition is always good for
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at ifixit.com Linus we're gonna have that linked below
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sorry wow i can try one more time