AMD Ryzen 3000 series
AMD’s new CPUs promise more cores and more speed than Intel’s rivals – at a far lower price. Can they deliver the goods?
Ryzen 7 3700X
SCORE PRICE £267 (£320 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk
Ryzen 9 3900X
SCORE PRICE £400 (£480 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk
It’s been a couple of years since AMD released its first range of Ryzen CPUs. They were a huge success, making AMD a competitive high-performance desktop choice for the first time in years.
Now AMD’s third generation of Ryzen chips have arrived, and they use a new architecture: Zen 2. Several significant changes deliver an impressive performance boost while allowing AMD to slash its prices.
The Zen 2 architecture
AMD’s first big change involves shrinking its manufacturing process from 14nm to 7nm. AMD has beaten Intel to the punch here, and this improves performance and efficiency – as there are now more transistors using less electricity.
The second big change revolves around how AMD arranges Zen 2’s cores. AMD now builds its CPUs from “chiplets”, smaller dies that each contain six or eight cores. All of the cores are multithreaded, so six-core and eight-core chiplets can address 12 or 16 concurrent threads.
The move to a chiplet-based design means that AMD can effectively build modular CPUs, with its new range requiring either one or two chiplets each. It makes the manufacturing process easier – which reduces cost.
Modularity is used throughout. AMD has bumped all of Zen 2’s input/ output (IO) functionality to its own die. These dies address multiple chiplets, meaning only one is needed per CPU and they use a 12nm manufacturing process, not 7nm. That’s good enough for functions and it makes these parts cheaper.
Elsewhere, Zen 2 delivers 4MB of L3 cache per core, which is double the amount included in older chips. AMD has also improved its dynamic boosting technology, giving each CPU higher clock limits. The new chips are quicker to change speed and alter at 25MHz increments – better than Intel’s 100MHz increments. That gives AMD more responsive performance.
AMD’s parts also support PCI Express 4.0. This doubles the bandwidth of PCI Express 3.0, from 32GB/sec to 64GB/sec, which means more bandwidth for graphics cards and SSDs.
“The new AMD chips are quicker to change speed and alter at 25MHz increments – better than Intel’s 100MHz”
Consumer graphics cards don’t currently need this bandwidth, but the first PCI Express 4.0 SSDs deliver a significant speed boost and are about to arrive. Intel hasn’t said when it will start to support PCI Express 4.0.
The full range
The first wave of Ryzen 3000 CPUs includes five new chips. At the top of the stack is the current flagship, the Ryzen 9 3900X.
It’s AMD’s first mainstream 12-core CPU, and is the only new part that needs two chiplets. The move to two chiplets also means you get 64MB of L3 cache, which is twice as much as AMD’s other new CPUs.
The 3900X runs at 3.8GHz with a Boost peak of 4.6GHz, and it costs £480. It competes with Intel’s Core i9-9920X, which also has 12 cores. That chip has inferior clock speeds of 3.5GHz and 4.5GHz, and costs a huge £1,250. Impressively, the AMD chip has a 105W TDP – while the 9920X sits at 165W.
There are two new Ryzen 7 CPUs. The Ryzen 7 3700X and 3800X are eight-core parts with one chiplet, which means 32MB of cache. The 3700X runs at 3.6GHz and 4.4GHz, and it costs £320. It squares up against the Core i7-9700K, which has eight cores and speeds of 3.6GHz and 4.9GHz – but the Intel CPU has no multithreading, and it costs £380. The
3700X has a modest 65W TDP while the i7-9700K sits at 95W.
The 3800X is clocked to 3.9GHz and 4.5GHz and costs £380, and it competes with Intel’s Core i9-9900K. That chip has eight multithreaded cores, and it runs at 3.6GHz and 5GHz – but it costs £480. AMD’s chip has a 105W TDP, which is 10W higher than its Intel rival.
AMD’s most affordable new CPUs are the Ryzen 5 3600 and 3600X. They’re six-core, multithreaded chips that cost £189 and £240. They run with base speeds of 3.6GHz and 3.8GHz, and Boost peaks of 4.2GHz and 4.4GHz. They’re aligned with the Intel Core i5-9600K, which has six cores and speeds of 3.7GHz and 4.6GHz, but it has no multithreading and a price of £250.
It’s a good slate of chips and, in September, AMD will introduce a new flagship: the Ryzen 9 3950X will be a 16-core CPU at 3.5GHz and 4.7GHz. Expect it to cost around £750.
AMD has also released two APUs with Ryzen 3000 branding: the Ryzen 3 3200G and Ryzen 5 3400G. They’re affordable, at £95 and £140, and are good for entry-level machines – but don’t be fooled by their names. They don’t use Zen 2; instead, they use older Raven Ridge designs with a modest die shrink and speed upgrade.
Chipset support
The new X570 chipset supercedes last year’s X470. It improves support for faster USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, while upping native memory support to 3,200MHz. It supports 16 PCI Express 4.0 lanes and 12 SATA ports – twice as many as the X470.
It’s not all good news. This beefier chipset has a 15W TDP, which is three times the power requirement of the X470. That means more heat, so some motherboards now require southbridge fans for extra cooling.
The X570 is also more expensive, and it’s the only new chipset introduced with Ryzen 3000. That means pricey motherboards, with the cheapest at £170. It’ll cost extra if you want a PCI Express 4.0 SSD, too.
However, motherboards with AMD’s older X470 and B450 chipsets will support Ryzen 3000 CPUs – they use the same AM4 socket, so they only need a BIOS update. As long as manufacturers release those updates – and as long as you’re not fussed about missing the X570’s features – those boards start at £70.
But this is one area where Intel has a cost advantage. Z390 boards start at £110 and boards with lesser chipsets often have sub-£60 prices.
Talking speed
AMD supplied us with two chips for testing: the 3700X and 3900X. The latter immediately impressed, delivering scores of 200 and 417 in our image and video-editing tests – seven and 53 points beyond the Core i9-9920X, which costs £1,250. The AMD chip was quicker in multitasking, too, and its overall score of 432 easily beat the Intel chip’s 384.
AMD’s chip opened modest leads in both Geekbench tests, and it was also quicker in Cinebench R15’s single and multicore benchmarks. There was little to choose between the two in gaming tests, and AMD’s chip was consistently cooler and more frugal – no surprise due to its lower TDP.
When it comes to the Ryzen 9 3900X and the Core i9-9920X, the AMD part is faster and cheaper.The fly in the ointment is that, if you don’t need 12 cores, the Intel Core i9-9900K costs £480 and has better singlethreaded performance – although with weaker multicore abilities.
The Ryzen 7 3700X is another excellent chip. It outpaced the Core i7-9700K in our benchmarks, with a small lead in the single-threaded image-editing test and more significant gaps in multicore tests. Its overall result of 338 trumped the 270 scored by the i7-9700K.
In Cinebench and Geekbench, Intel maintained small single-threaded leads but AMD delivered larger advantages in multithreaded tests.
The AMD chip also delivered a substantial improvement over the Ryzen 7 2700X – it was around 700 points better in Geekbench’s singlecore test and 7,000 points better in the multicore benchmark.
The 3700X and i7-9700K were almost equal in gaming tests, with Intel maintaining a slim lead. AMD’s part consumed a little less power at load – but the margins were very fine.
“The 3900X delivered scores of 200 and 417 in our image and video-editing tests – seven and 53 points beyond the Core i9-9920X”
Which to buy
AMD’s new chips are fearsome. The architectural improvements are smart, delivering more performance, improved efficiency and more affordable construction. They’re faster than rivals in multithreaded tests while being more power-efficient. Intel still has a slim lead in some single-threaded tests and gaming, though.
We can draw several conclusions from our tests. In multithreaded applications, the AMD chips deliver a significant benefit. They’ll almost keep up with Intel in single-threaded tasks and games, and many users won’t notice AMD’s slightly weaker performance.
AMD’s chips are cheaper than Intel’s parts, too, although their affordability may be hindered by pricier X570 motherboards.
If you need multithreaded power, AMD is the clear winner on price and performance – and its competence and lower prices also mean we’d recommend them for single-threaded rigs, too. Ryzen 3000 isn’t always the quickest, but its balanced performance makes it a triumph. SPECIFICATIONS
Ryzen 3700X: 3.6GHz/4.4GHz base/boost speed 8 cores, 16 threads 32MB L3 cache 65W TDP. Ryzen 3900X: 3.8GHz/4.6GHz base/boost speed 12 cores, 24 threads 64MB L3 cache 105W TDP