AMD Ryzen 9 3950X
The 3950X offers huge power for specialist workloads alongside a versatile ecosystem
SCORE
PRICE £575 (£690 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk
There’s a reason the Ryzen 9 3950X costs £690: this mon monster chip is the most powerful p part that’s currently available on AMD’s AMD AM4 platform. Its specifications are enough to make Intel weep. The 16 multithreaded cores compare to the ten for Intel’s i9-10900X process processor and 12 for its i9-10920X chip, and this relative weakness is no doubt why wh Intel is (for once) undercutting AMD on price with costs of £530 and £600.
The 3950X has an impressive specification elsewhere. It has a hefty 64MB of L3 cache, with base and boost clock speeds of 3.9GHz and 4.5GHz. Clock speed is the only area where Intel’s chips can hope to compete on performance – the new i9-10900K has a turbo peak of 5.3GHz, while the i9-10920X tops out at 4.8GHz.
AMD’s use of the existing AM4 platform gives this part an advantage – Intel’s tenth-generation Core chips (code-named Comet Lake) either use new chipsets and sockets that need new motherboards, or more obscure chipsets that require more expensive boards. Conversely, the 3950X slots inside an existing board to provide an instant performance boost. The 3950X is also easier to work with than the Threadripper 3960X, which offers more cores but a much higher price and more obscure, expensive boards – albeit with quad-channel memory.
AMD’s latest AM4 chipsets support PCIe 4, too, which is another area where the Ryzen parts have an advantage over Intel – it means you can use faster storage alongside an AMD CPU. Those AM4 boards don’t support faster networking natively, like Intel’s new Z490 chipset, but motherboard manufacturers often add that hardware themselves – so it’s not a huge problem.
Down to business. AMD’s huge core count means that this part should excel in multithreaded workloads. Apps that handle video encoding, 3D rendering, scientific simulation and high-end photography all benefit – as well as more conventional software, such as working with huge databases and spreadsheets in Office tools.
Unsurprisingly, then, the 3950X blasted through g our application benchmarks. In the image-editing test it topped the table with a score of 217, but its video-editing tally of 474 was what really set it apart from both the 3900X and the far-distant Core i9 chips: it was typically 20% faster than its Intel rivals, a reflection of its core count advantage. It was the only processor that came anywhere close to the Threadripper in our most demanding test: multitasking.
This gulf in multithreaded tasks was emphasised again in Geekbench and Cinebench’s multicore tests, and it dominated in Blender. It was fast in SiSoftware Sandra and Y-Cruncher’s multicore computation tests, too.
The AMD chip even managed to outpace most other parts in singlethreaded tests – the one rival to beat it in Cinebench and Geekbench was Intel’s new i9-10900K, and the gulfs were not huge. AMD’s part led the way in Premiere Pro and was only a little behind the Core i9 in Photoshop.
The sole CPU to regularly beat the 3950X in content-creation tests is the Threadripper 3960X. That’s no surprise considering its 24 cores, but that part does cost a mighty £1,260. As ever, while adding co cores delivers extra performance, it also leads to diminishing gains in most of these situations – multicore scaling is rarely perfect.
The 3950X isn’t the best gaming chip, either; Intel’s parts proved consistently faster in our tests. Note that the AMD part only offers middling efficiency too. While its peak power draw of 196W 9 is better than Intel’s chips, a processor such as the Ryzen 9 3900X offers multicore ability while consuming less power.
Still, AMD’s high-end 3950X is an incredible processor. It has a huge advantage over Intel’s chips in the vast majority of multithreaded workloads – so if you run creative applications or any other contentcreation tools, this chip will be a boon. The 3950X is surprisingly impressive in single-core tests, too; only Intel’s Core i9-10900K is better.
The AMD chip does all of this without being ruinously expensive. Its £690 price is certainly high, and note this CPU doesn’t come with a cooler, but AMD’s reliance on existing platforms and chipsets can cut costs when compared to Intel’s newest chips.
If you’re interested in gaming or single-threaded speed, the Intel Core i9-10900K ( see p86) is better. If you need multicore pace but can’t shell out this much, AMD’s Ryzen 9 3900X is also excellent. But if you want a chip that offers unbeatable productivity power and content-creation ntent-creation grunt while hile still working with existing, mainstream platforms, there’s nothing better than the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X.
“If you run creative applications or any other content-creation tools, the Ryzen 9 3950X will be a boon”
KEY SPECS
3.5GHz/4.7GHz base/ peak clock speed 16 cores 32 threads
64MB L3 cache no graphics AMD Zen 2 architecture AMD AM4 socket 105W TDP