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: CPU Office Tests
The Office test suite is designed to focus around more industry standard tests that focus on office workflows, system meetings, some synthetics, but we also bundle compiler performance in with this section. For users that have to evaluate hardware in general, these are usually the benchmarks that most consider.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
PCMark 10: Industry Standard System Profiler
Futuremark, now known as UL, has developed benchmarks that have become industry standards for around two decades. The latest complete system test suite is PCMark 10, upgrading over PCMark 8 with updated tests and more OpenCL invested into use cases such as video streaming.
PCMark splits its scores into about 14 different areas, including application startup, web, spreadsheets, photo editing, rendering, video conferencing, and physics. We post all of these numbers in our benchmark database, Bench, however the key metric for the review is the overall score.
We're investigating the PCMark results, which seem abnormally high.
Update: We can't do a direct comparison due to the lack of a RX460 for PCMark for the moment
3DMark Physics: In-Game Physics Compute
Alongside PCMark is 3DMark, Futuremark’s (UL’s) gaming test suite. Each gaming tests consists of one or two GPU heavy scenes, along with a physics test that is indicative of when the test was written and the platform it is aimed at. The main overriding tests, in order of complexity, are Ice Storm, Cloud Gate, Sky Diver, Fire Strike, and Time Spy.
Some of the subtests offer variants, such as Ice Storm Unlimited, which is aimed at mobile platforms with an off-screen rendering, or Fire Strike Ultra which is aimed at high-end 4K systems with lots of the added features turned on. Time Spy also currently has an AVX-512 mode (which we may be using in the future).
For our tests, we report in Bench the results from every physics test, but for the sake of the review we keep it to the most demanding of each scene: Ice Storm Unlimited, Cloud Gate, Sky Diver, Fire Strike Ultra, and Time Spy.
The older Ice Storm test didn't much like the Core i9-9900K, pushing it back behind the R7 1800X. For the more modern tests focused on PCs, the 9900K wins out. The lack of HT is hurting the other two parts.
GeekBench4: Synthetics
A common tool for cross-platform testing between mobile, PC, and Mac, GeekBench 4 is an ultimate exercise in synthetic testing across a range of algorithms looking for peak throughput. Tests include encryption, compression, fast Fourier transform, memory operations, n-body physics, matrix operations, histogram manipulation, and HTML parsing.
I’m including this test due to popular demand, although the results do come across as overly synthetic, and a lot of users often put a lot of weight behind the test due to the fact that it is compiled across different platforms (although with different compilers).
We record the main subtest scores (Crypto, Integer, Floating Point, Memory) in our benchmark database, but for the review we post the overall single and multi-threaded results.
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kd_ - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
Take it easy, BobIrata - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
Did you bother to read Andrei F's twitter post regarding the Bios update - it includes a nice graph where you can see the 3900x's cores boosting to what looks like 4.6 Ghz.Xyler94 - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
Oh god, you're still on about that?Intel doesn't guarantee boost clocks. It's literally on their website. The only guarantee is base clocks. Boost clocks depend on cooling and power delivery.
atl - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
While 3900X vs i9-7920K and 3700X vs i7-9900K is a no-brainer, i would really wanna see how performs (overclocked) 3600 vs this bunch of CPUs.This will help making some interesting decisions for optimizing budged.
Mugur - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
Check Hardware Unboxed / Gamers Nexus on Youtube or Techspot site...beginning - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
Are these benchmarks of Intel CPUs after applying all the patches released so far for addressing vulnerabilities?GreenReaper - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
The BIOS in the Intel motherboards tested are from 2018; most appear to only have microcode to handle Meltdown/Spectre (despite the availability of BIOS versions that would work). So... no.beginning - Thursday, July 11, 2019 - link
Thank you for your responseMeteor2 - Monday, July 15, 2019 - link
No; they didn't retest the Intels on Windows 10 1903, which includes the OS-side patches for the MDS flaws. The motherboard firmware patches may never come.This really does invalidate the Intel numbers, but it's not critical: on a up-to-date system, they'll be slower, and Ryzen 3000 even further ahead.
529th - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
Will there be updated OC results with the new bios?