AMD RYZEN 9 3950X
Make way for the 16-core, 32-thread monster
BACK IN JULY, AMD launched a massive 7nm offensive in the CPU world. What can it do for an encore? More cores, more threads, and potentially higher clock speeds. The Ryzen 9 3950X really impresses in some areas, though it’s not quite as awesome in other respects.
Let’s start with the best use case, which is anything in the content-creation realm. With 33 percent more cores than the 3900X, and similar clock speeds, it’s usually 25–30 percent faster. If you do video editing, 3D rendering, or any other task that can benefit from a 32-thread processor, you’ll love the 3950X. For tasks that don’t scale well to 16 cores, though, you’re better off with a less expensive part. Even though the 3950X is nominally a consumer CPU, it costs a lot more. It’s an HEDT CPU for the mainstream AM4 socket, priced 50 percent higher than the 3900X, which might not seem like that big of a deal for 33 percent more cores, but it doesn’t include a cooler in the box. AMD recommends liquid cooling to get the most out of the 3950X.
Overclocking is a bit of an afterthought for the 3950X. You can probably do 4.1–4.3GHz on all 16 cores with the right cooling, but you’ll give up maximum single-threaded performance in doing so. At stock, we saw all-core clock speeds hover in the 3,900–4,000MHz range, depending on the workload, and games would routinely run at 4,200–4,300MHz.
Gaming performance isn’t the primary purpose of the 3950X. It can run games, but it does best when dealing with more difficult workloads that scale with core and thread counts, with clock speed being less of a factor. Compared to the 3900X, the 3950X is up to 33 percent faster in heavily threaded workloads. Overall, however, it’s only 17 percent faster in multithreaded testing. Even with several different 3D rendering engines, video encoding, and cryptographic workloads, scaling beyond a 24-thread processor is difficult.
RIVAL RESULTS
Looking at Intel’s CPUs, the competition isn’t even close. The 3900X already beats the 9900K and 9900KS in multithreaded performance, although a few tasks, such as VeraCrypt AES, favor Intel’s processors. With twice as many cores and threads, that’s hardly surprising.
What about Intel’s $2,000 18-core i9-9980XE? It does manage to hang on to the overall multithreaded performance crown, but by no means is it a clean sweep. It’s 12 percent faster on average in multithreaded performance, but the 3950X does claim wins in Cinebench, POV-Ray, Blender, and Handbrake. It also leads in PCMark 10 results, which aren’t quite as multithreaded-friendly. And it does all this while using substantially less power.
Where AMD’s Ryzen 9 3950X shines is in the prosumer space. If you’re doing serious work, but don’t quite have a blank check to go out and buy a $5,000– $10,000 workstation, you can get roughly the same level of performance with the 3950X and save a few thousand. It’s also generally a more efficient CPU than any of the workstation or HEDT parts, because the AM4 platform keeps things sensible.
And if you want to go HEDT, AMD has 32-core chips waiting in the wings, and it probably won’t stop there. AMD has a great CPU portfolio right now, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see Intel adopt something like AMD’s chiplet strategy in future products. The 3950X would have been a far more costly product if AMD had tried to build the whole thing out of a single monolithic die.
We’re still years away from most people wanting, let alone needing, 16core processors at home. Heck, outside of playing the latest PC games, we can still do 95 percent of our work on a laptop from 2014. But while that laptop is fine for typing articles and minor image editing, it chokes on more complex tasks, like video editing. If that’s the type of work you do on your PC, give the 3950X some serious consideration.