The AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen Deep Dive Review: 3700X and 3900X Raising The Bar
by Andrei Frumusanu & Gavin Bonshor on July 7, 2019 9:00 AM EST** = Old results marked were performed with the original BIOS & boost behaviour as published on 7/7.
Benchmarking Performance: Web Tests
While more the focus of low-end and small form factor systems, web-based benchmarks are notoriously difficult to standardize. Modern web browsers are frequently updated, with no recourse to disable those updates, and as such there is difficulty in keeping a common platform. The fast paced nature of browser development means that version numbers (and performance) can change from week to week. Despite this, web tests are often a good measure of user experience: a lot of what most office work is today revolves around web applications, particularly email and office apps, but also interfaces and development environments. Our web tests include some of the industry standard tests, as well as a few popular but older tests.
We have also included our legacy benchmarks in this section, representing a stack of older code for popular benchmarks.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
WebXPRT 3: Modern Real-World Web Tasks, including AI
The company behind the XPRT test suites, Principled Technologies, has recently released the latest web-test, and rather than attach a year to the name have just called it ‘3’. This latest test (as we started the suite) has built upon and developed the ethos of previous tests: user interaction, office compute, graph generation, list sorting, HTML5, image manipulation, and even goes as far as some AI testing.
For our benchmark, we run the standard test which goes through the benchmark list seven times and provides a final result. We run this standard test four times, and take an average.
Users can access the WebXPRT test at http://principledtechnologies.com/benchmarkxprt/webxprt/
WebXPRT 2015: HTML5 and Javascript Web UX Testing
The older version of WebXPRT is the 2015 edition, which focuses on a slightly different set of web technologies and frameworks that are in use today. This is still a relevant test, especially for users interacting with not-the-latest web applications in the market, of which there are a lot. Web framework development is often very quick but with high turnover, meaning that frameworks are quickly developed, built-upon, used, and then developers move on to the next, and adjusting an application to a new framework is a difficult arduous task, especially with rapid development cycles. This leaves a lot of applications as ‘fixed-in-time’, and relevant to user experience for many years.
Similar to WebXPRT3, the main benchmark is a sectional run repeated seven times, with a final score. We repeat the whole thing four times, and average those final scores.
Speedometer 2: JavaScript Frameworks
Our newest web test is Speedometer 2, which is a accrued test over a series of javascript frameworks to do three simple things: built a list, enable each item in the list, and remove the list. All the frameworks implement the same visual cues, but obviously apply them from different coding angles.
Our test goes through the list of frameworks, and produces a final score indicative of ‘rpm’, one of the benchmarks internal metrics. We report this final score.
Google Octane 2.0: Core Web Compute
A popular web test for several years, but now no longer being updated, is Octane, developed by Google. Version 2.0 of the test performs the best part of two-dozen compute related tasks, such as regular expressions, cryptography, ray tracing, emulation, and Navier-Stokes physics calculations.
The test gives each sub-test a score and produces a geometric mean of the set as a final result. We run the full benchmark four times, and average the final results.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1: Core Web Compute
Even older than Octane is Kraken, this time developed by Mozilla. This is an older test that does similar computational mechanics, such as audio processing or image filtering. Kraken seems to produce a highly variable result depending on the browser version, as it is a test that is keenly optimized for.
The main benchmark runs through each of the sub-tests ten times and produces an average time to completion for each loop, given in milliseconds. We run the full benchmark four times and take an average of the time taken.
Web Tests Analysis
Overall, in the web tests, the new Ryzen 3900X and 3700X perform very well with both chips showcasing quite large improvements over the 2700X.
We’re seeing quite an interesting match-up against Intel’s 9700K here, which is leading all of the benchmarks. The reason for this is that SKU has SMT turned off. The singe-threaded performance advantage of this is that the CPU core no longer has to share the µOP cache structure between to different threads, and has the whole capacity dedicated to one thread. Web workloads in particular are amongst the most instruction pressure heavy workloads out there, and they benefit extremely from turning SMT off on modern cores.
Whilst we didn’t have the time yet to test the new 3900X and 3700X with SMT off, AMD’s core and op cache works the same in that it’s sharing the capacity amongst two threads, statically partitioning it. I’m pretty sure we’d see larger increases in the web benchmarks when turning off SMT as well, and we’ll be sure to revisit this particular point in the future.
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Death666Angel - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
Well, the thing is that motherboard manufacturers, motherboard revisions, motherboard layout and BIOS versions do play a role as well, though. The memory controller is just one piece of the puzzle. If you have a CPU with a great memory controller, it doesn't mean it performs the same on all boards. And it doesn't mean it performs the same with all RAM either. Sometimes the actual traces on motherboards are crap for certain clockspeeds. Sometimes the BIOS numbers for secondary and tertiary timings are crap at certain clockspeeds and get better in later revisions, seemingly allowing for better memory clockspeeds when it really was just a question of auto vs manual if you knew what you were doing. Sometimes the SoC voltage is worse on that board vs the other and that influences things. The thing is, across the board, X570 motherboards have higher advertised OC clockspeeds for the memory and Ryzen 3000 has higher guaranteed clockspeeds. And Anandtech believes that is the thing that counts, not if you can get x clockspeed stable. At least in the vanilla CPU articles. They do separate RAM articles often.BLu3HaZe - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
"Some motherboard vendors are advertising speeds of up to DDR4-4400 which until Zen 2, was unheard of. Zen 2 also marks a jump up to DDR4-3200 up from DDR4-2933 on Zen+, and DDR4-2667 on Zen."How about now? :)
And I believe the authors mean to say that official support for is up to 3200 on X570 boards, while older boards were rated lower "officially" corresponding to the generation they launched with. Speeds above that would be listed with (OC) clearly marked in memory support.
Anything above the 'rated' speeds, you're technically overclocking the Infinity Fabric until you run in 2:1 mode which is only on Zen 2 anyhow, so your mileage will definitely vary.
Even the 9900K 'officially' supports only DDR4-2666 but we all know how high it can go without any issues combined with XMP OC.
Ratman6161 - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
In Zen and Zen +, the infinity fabric speed was tied to the memory speed. So overclock the RAM and you were also overclocking the infinity fabric. In Zen 2 infinity fabric is independent of the RAM speed.Targon - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
I am curious about the DDR4-3200 CL16 memory in the Ryzen test. CL16 RAM is considered the "cheap crap" when it comes to DDR4-3200, and my own Hynix M-die garbage memory is exactly that, G.skill Ripjaws V 3200CL16. On first generation Ryzen, getting it to 3200 speeds just hasn't happened, and I know that for gaming, CL16 vs. CL14 is enough to cause the slight loss to Intel(meaning Intel wouldn't have the lead in the gaming tests).Ninjawithagun - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
Regardless of whether or not a 'crap' DRAM kit having CL16 vs. a much more expensive kit with lower CL rating, it isn't going to make any significant difference in performance. This has been proven again and again.Ratman6161 - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
"CL16 RAM is considered the "cheap crap" when it comes to DDR4-3200"Since when? Yes its cheap(er) but I'd disagree with the "crap" part. I needed 32 Gb of RAM so that's either 2x16 with 16 GB modules usually being double sided (a crap shoot) or 4x8 with 4 modules being a crap shoot. Looking at current pricing (not the much higher prices from back when I bought) New egg has the G-skill ripjaws 2x16 CAS 16 kit for $135 while the Trident Z 2x16 CAS 15 for $210 or the CAS 14 Trident Z for $250. So I'd be paying $75 to $115 more...for something that isn't likely to do any better in my real world configuration. Even if I could hit its advertised CAS 15 or 14, how much is that worth. So I'd say the RipJaws is not "cheap crap". Its a "value" :)
Domaldel - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
It's considered "cheap crap" because you can't guarantee that it's Samsung B-die at those speeds while you can with DDR4 3200 MHz CL14 as nothing else is able to reach those speeds and latencies then a good B-die.What that means is that you can actually have a shot at manually overclocking it further while keeping compatibility with Ryzen (if you tweak the timings and sub-timings) while you couldn't really with other memory kids on the first two generations of Ryzen.
I don't have a Ryzen 3xxx series of chip so I can't really comment on those...
WaltC - Monday, July 15, 2019 - link
Since about the 2nd AGESA implementation, on my original x370 Ryzen 1 mboard, my "cheap crap"...;)...Patriot Viper Elite 16CL 2x8GB has had no problem with 3200Mhz at stock timings. used the same on a x47- mboard, and now it's running at 3200MHz on my x570 Aorus Master board--no problems.jgraham11 - Tuesday, July 16, 2019 - link
DDR4 3200 is apparently not an overclock. Says so on AMD's specs page for the 3700Xhttps://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-7-37...
RoboJ1M - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Wait, the memory controllers on the IO for Zen 2, right?I'm sure it's on the IO Die.