Conclusion

Final Words 

If you are building a high-end DIY PC, and are in need of a seriously proper performing streaming, content creating and/or gaming processor at a fair budget, well yes, at 749 I really can't say it's not a lot of money, but heck the value certainly is there. It's that often referred to bang for that buck of us all. At an MSRP of 749,- you are looking at 47 USD per core and OMG this thing is FAST. Really, after testing (which went pretty fast) my mouth is still open. The 3950X manages to even run past Gen 20 Threadripper, thanks to it's high base and turbo bins as well as that increased IPC that AMD solidified with the ZEN2 architecture. It's yeah ... pretty darn terric man. Right, logistics first; the following paragraph I insert in all our Ryzen 3000 reviews. Do be aware of the fact that if you do not care about PCIe Gen4 or AX WIFI, pair this puppy with a compatible series X470 motherboard and you will get some the very same gaming and application firepower coming at you. Just make sure you purchase a mobo with good VRM design and cooling.  With non-X570 motherboards, however, you do need to latest compatible firmware flashed into the motherboard for the proc to be recognized. There will be no performance differences and, since the memory controllers reside on the CPU, the memory frequency and compatibility will be the same as well.  

Gaming performance

Previous Ryzen reviews have taught me that it is extremely hard to convince a big part of the guru3d community and reader base that Ryzen 1000/2000 was already fast for gaming in the mainstream segment. For Zen2/Matisse based processors that will be less difficult. Combined with the respective platform, ZEN2 offers far more oomph compared to the previous two generations AMD Zen/Zen+ processors. There are mostly wins for Intel, there will be wins for AMD based on competing and price level matched processors. It's a much closer call to make, and that by itself is a win for AMD all thanks to the increased IPC and clock frequencies. We do feel that the gaming performance charts were a bit out of perspective, so we created another 1920x1080 chart showing more games we tested against the 500 USD flagship Intel Core i9 9900K. No yes, we tested with the fastest and severely expensive ~1250 EUR costing consumer GPU available on the planet, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti:

So based on the fastest consumer card on the globe, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, you can see what I am referring to. Yes AMD is a notch slower in games, however, with GPU limitations (a more mainstream graphics card) that difference melts away. Above though is the reality of the fastest GPU available. This is the one caveat for AMD, as in any other application Ryzen tears a hole in everything you fire at it. Who really owns an RTX 2080 Ti? So with a slower card like a RX 5700 or RTX 2070, the results will be even closer towards each other due to GPU limitation. I can't paint teh picture any other way than it is. Also, and you have seen this in our charts, if you game at 2560x1440 or higher, that difference will vanish even further. 

DDR4 Memory

Memory compatibility should not and likely will not be an issue as long as you stick to recently released DIMMs. I'll keep repeating this, but there are some really good Ryzen optimized kits out there. With Ryzen Generation 3 you can go higher in DDR4 clock frequency if you want to. We advise that up-to 3600 MHz and CL16 is fine, after that frequency value 2:1 divider kicks in, and that can have an effect on the Infinity Fabric bandwidth, inter-core CCX bandwidth. We see no reason for faster DDR4 memory anyways, it's expensive and does not bring in added perf, much like what you see on Intel platforms as well. For optimal memory compatibility, please do install the latest BIOS available for your motherboard.

Energy efficiency

With these processors now fabbed at 7nm you may see some interesting energy efficiency, the 105 Watts listed for the 3950X was not necessarily something that scares us at all, heck with 16-cores that is fabulous. Our test results show a nominal increase in power consumption, at IDLE (with an extremely well-equipped motherboard) we sit close to the 80 Watts range. The same system 100% stressed on the processor eats roughly 220 Watts, that's only 20 watts more than the 9900K, and this setup has 8 more processor cores folks. So again, yeah I just can't complain. 

The conclusion

The more you think about how aggressive AMD has been in the processor market the past few years, the more impressed you'll get. The fact is if it where up-to some other manufacturers you'd still be at four or six cores for 400~500 USD. Now there's nothing wrong with that number of CPU cores, even today for gaming that still could be enough. However, things are much better overall with more cores.  Currently late 2019, I do feel the sweet-spot is 8-cores for mainstream and high-end DIY PC builders and Gamers. Anything above that number is harder to justify. Then again, the world is changing with lots of people crunching videos, and do not ever underestimate what kind of effect more cores have for workstations used by developers, etc. The shift in processor land has changed for good and for the better. Also, and albeit this is going very slow, games that use more threads is something that is evolving. So in the long run (as you only purchase a processor every five years or so), that might be a better bet to make. Obviously, the Ryzen 9 3950X manages to impress. Especially desktop workloads where treading is needed the processor just kills anything and everything thanks to its snazzy fast 4.7 GHz turbo bin. The 3.5 GHz base clock seems a little low and will have an effect on gaming to a certain degree. However, we did notice that most cores easily ran 4000~4300 Mhz most of the time under threaded load. You do need to realize that 32 threads and thus 16 cores are another 'game' all by itself (pardon the euphemism), and AMD manages to tame all these cores properly. The TDP at 105 Watts is incredibly fair, and you get the BIOS option to run it at a 65 Watt TDP mode, think about that for a second, and yes that will cost a bit of performance, but still, 65 Watts -> 32-threads. 

Gaming wise Intel still holds a lead with the fastest 9000 series procs, but that's relative and different per game, there will be wins and losses on both sides and to be able to notice these difference you will need either a very expensive graphics card, or game in very low resolutions to break away from the biggest bottleneck for gamers, your graphics cards. Seen from a bigger picture, AMD has got a better and more affordable platform infrastructure to offer, and the threading and the performance derived from it is just staggering. While I do advise gamers these days to go for 8 cores we also have to acknowledge that that PC abiding community is not just gamers. Content creators, builders, developers and a lot of people with demanding workloads will absolutely adore this 16-core part as well as the upcoming Threadripper SKUs. But even with this 16-core part, you get a bit of a beast gaming wise.

Remember, AMD processors currently are safer and less vulnerable processors, they will also be a notch faster due to that CPU hardening as there is no extra software overhead to patch stuff. Overclocking is the weak spot for Ryzen. Where in the past you could easily find 10% more performance in a product, these days all manufacturers driver their products closer towards their maximum. That takes the fun out of tweaking, but .. you'll run a processor that already is close to its max and that saves you the time and sometimes frustration of overclocking. Ergo, we do not recommend to tweak the many-core AMD procs anymore in the year 2019. And that is not necessarily a bad thing you guys, but I also understand that some would have liked to have seen differently. With all that said and done, we have now tested all available Ryzen 3000 processors. The 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X is a beast that fills the Ryzen 3000 product stack for the year 2019 and while the number of CPU cores is overkill for most of us, I stand by my 8-core recommendation for mainstream. Soon you'll see Intel's 18-core Core i9-10980XE launch as well, we predict a proper fight among the two (we'll check out that proc as well). But my man, what a powerhouse of a consumer-targeted Ryzen 9 3950X is, just amazing.

Ryzen 9 3950X will become available in (r)etail starting Monday, November the 25th. 

*Phew* and *whistles* 

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