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 ESTSection by Gavin Bonshor
X570 Motherboards: PCIe 4.0 For Everybody
One of the biggest additions to AMD's AM4 socket is the introduction of the PCIe 4.0 interface. The new generation of X570 motherboards marks the first consumer motherboard chipset to feature PCIe 4.0 natively, which looks to offer users looking for even faster storage, and potentially better bandwidth for next-generation graphics cards over previous iterations of the current GPU architecture. We know that the Zen 2 processors have implemented the new TSMC 7nm manufacturing process with double the L3 cache compared with Zen 1. This new centrally focused IO chiplet is there regardless of the core count and uses the Infinity Fabric interconnect; the AMD X570 chipset uses four PCIe 4.0 lanes to uplink and downlink to the CPU IO die.
Looking at a direct comparison between AMD's AM4 X series chipsets, the X570 chipset adds PCIe 4.0 lanes over the previous X470 and X370's reliance on PCIe 3.0. A big plus point to the new X570 chipset is more support for USB 3.1 Gen2 with AMD allowing motherboard manufacturers to play with 12 flexible PCIe 4.0 lanes and implement features how they wish. This includes 8 x PCIe 4.0 lanes, with two blocks of PCIe 4.0 x4 to play with which vendors can add SATA, PCIe 4.0 x1 slots, and even support for 3 x PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 slots.
| AMD X570, X470 and X370 Chipset Comparison | |||
| Feature | X570 | X470 | X370 |
| PCIe Interface (to peripherals) | 4.0 | 2.0 | 2.0 |
| Max PCH PCIe Lanes | 24 | 24 | 24 |
| USB 3.1 Gen2 | 8 | 2 | 2 |
| Max USB 3.1 (Gen2/Gen1) | 8/4 | 2/6 | 2/6 |
| DDR4 Support | 3200 | 2933 | 2667 |
| Max SATA Ports | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| PCIe GPU Config | x16 x8/x8 x8/x8/x8* |
x16 x8/x8 x8/x8/x4 |
x16 x8/x8 x8/x8/x4 |
| Memory Channels (Dual) | 2/2 | 2/2 | 2/2 |
| Integrated 802.11ac WiFi MAC | N | N | N |
| Chipset TDP | 11W | 4.8W | 6.8W |
| Overclocking Support | Y | Y | Y |
| XFR2/PB2 Support | Y | Y | N |
One of the biggest changes in the chipset is within its architecture. The X570 chipset is the first Ryzen chipset to be manufactured and designed in-house by AMD, with some helping ASMedia IP blocks, whereas previously with the X470 and X370 chipsets, ASMedia directly developed and produced it using a 55nm process. While going from X370 at 6.8 W TDP at maximum load, X470 was improved upon in terms of power consumption to a lower TDP of 4.8 W. For X570, this has increased massively to an 11 W TDP which causes most vendors to now require small active cooling of the new chip.
Another major change due to the increased power consumption of the X570 chipset when compared to X470 and X370 is the cooling required. All but one of the launched product stack features an actively cooled chipset heatsink which is needed due to the increased power draw when using PCIe 4.0 due to the more complex implementation requirements over PCIe 3.0. While it is expected AMD will work on improving the TDP on future generations when using PCIe 4.0, it's forced manufacturers to implement more premium and more effective ways of keeping componentry on X570 cooler.
This also stretches to the power delivery, as AMD announced that a 16-core desktop Ryzen 3950X processor is set to launch later on in the year, meaning motherboard manufacturers needed to implement the new power deliveries on the new X570 boards with requirements of the high-end chip in mind, with better heatsinks capable of keeping the 105 W TDP processors efficient.
Memory support has also been improved with a seemingly better IMC on the Ryzen 3000 line-up when compared against the Ryzen 2000 and 1000 series of processors. Some motherboard vendors are advertising speeds of up to DDR4-4400 which until X570, was unheard of. X570 also marks a jump up to DDR4-3200 up from DDR4-2933 on X470, and DDR4-2667 on X370. As we investigated in our Ryzen 7 Memory Scaling piece back in 2017, we found out that the Infinity Fabric Interconnect scales well with frequency, and it is something that we will be analyzing once we get the launch of X570 out of the way, and potentially allow motherboard vendors to work on their infant firmware for AMD's new 7nm silicon.
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Maxiking - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
I said a few times... I don't tend to buy amd products so no, I am not gonna sue anybody.And as pointed out in the video, in his German one, he works for a retailer selling prebuilt pcs.. People keep returning pcs with AMD cpus becaue they do not boost to the promised frequency. You there, there are something like laws, if you write on the box 4.6ghz, it must reach it.
You are so knowledgeable, sharp minded and analytical when comes to meaning of words and what people want to say, you should sue Intel on your own, should be easy.
Atom2 - Monday, July 29, 2019 - link
ICC compiler is 3x faster than LLVM and AVX512 is 2x faster than AVX2. And both were left out of comparison? The comparison designed purely only for the LLVM compiler users? Used by who?Rudde - Saturday, August 10, 2019 - link
ICC is proprietary afaik and Anandtech prefers open compilers. AVX512 should be found in 3DPM and shows utter demolition by the only processor that supports it (7920X).MasterE - Wednesday, August 7, 2019 - link
I considered going with the Ryzen 9 3900X chip and an x570 motherboard for a new rendering system but since these chips aren't available for less than $820+ anywhere, I guess I'll be back to either the threadripper or Intel 9000+ series. There is simply no way I'm paying that kind of price for a chip with a Manufacters Suggested Retail Price of $499.gglaw - Friday, August 23, 2019 - link
@Andrei - I was just digging through reviews again before biting the bullet on a 3900X and one of the big questions that is not agreed upon in the tech community is gaming performance for PBO vs all-core overclock, yet you only run 2 benches on the overclocked settings. How can a review be complete with only 2 benches run, neither related to gaming? In a PURELY single threaded scenario PBO gives a tiny 2.X percent increase in single threaded Cinebench. This indicates to me that it is not sustaining the max 4.6 on a single core or it would have scaled better, so it may not be really comparing 4.6 vs 4.3 even for single threaded performance. Almost all recent game engines can at least utilize 4 threads, so I feel your exact same test run through the gaming suite would have shown a consistent winner with 4.3 all-core OC vs PBO. And in heavily threaded scenarios the gap would keep growing larger, but specifically in today's GAMES, especially if you consider very few of us have 0 background activity, all-core OC would hands-down win is my guess, but we could have better evidence of this if you could run a complete benchmarking suite. (unless I'm blind and missed it, in case my apologies :)I've been messing around with a 3700X, and even with a 14cm Noctua cooling it, it does not sustain max allowed boost on even a single core with PBO which is another thing I wish you touched on more. During your testing do you monitor the boost speeds and what percent of the time it can stay at the max boost over XX minutes?
Maxiking - Monday, August 26, 2019 - link
Veni, vidi viciYeah, I was right.
I would like to thank my family for all the support I have received whilst fighting amd fanboys.
It was difficult, sometimes I was seriously thinking about giving up but the truth can not be stopped!
The AMD fraud has been confirmed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/cusn2t/...
Ninjawithagun - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link
Now all you have to do is have all these benchmarks ran again after applying the 1.0.0.3. ABBA BIOS update ;-)quadibloc - Tuesday, November 12, 2019 - link
I am confused by the diagram of the current used by individual cores as the number of threads is increased. Since SMT doesn't double the performance of a core, on the 3900X, for example, shouldn't the number of cores in use increase to all 12 for the first 12 threads, one core for each thread, with all cores then remaining in use as the number of threads continues to increase to 24?Or is it just that this chart represents power consumption under a particular setting that minimizes the number of cores in use, and other settings that maximize performance are also possible?
SjLeonardo - Saturday, December 14, 2019 - link
Core and uncore get supplied by different VRMs, right?Parkab0y - Sunday, October 4, 2020 - link
I really want to see something like this about zen3 5000