AMD Ryzen 7 3800X
The 3800X beats the Core i7-10700K in the majority o of tests despite having a muc much lower price
SCORE
PRICE £282 (£338 inc VAT) from overclockers.co.uk
The 3800X is AMD’s beefiest Ryzen 7 chip, which means a meaty spec and price. Yet, at £338 it undercuts Intel’s i7-10700K ( see p83) by almost £100. That’s hard to argue with, especially when you factor in the rest of its strengths.
AMD’s part uses the familiar Zen 2 architecture, which results in a clean, modular design with slick internal I/O and a 7nm manufacturing process. That means it’s more efficient than the older Skylake hardware in Intel’s chips, not to mention AMD chips based on its Zen+ architecture.
The 3800X has eight multithreaded cores, which matches the Intel part, and it runs at 3.9GHz and 4.5GHz. This gives Intel a ray of hope, as the 10700K
The 3950X is the most expensive CPU here by some distance – at £1,260, it costs almost twice as much as its nearest rival. There’s a reason for the lofty price, though: this Threadripper chip offers a monster 24 cores that support 48 concurrent threads, and this CPU adds support for quad-channel memory – alongside a mighty 128MB of L3 cache and 64 dedicated PCI lanes. That formidable specification sits alongside base and boost clock speeds of 3.8GHz and 4.5GHz. Unsurprisingly, the 280W TDP is higher than anything else, too.
The Threadripper’s monster spec means the chip is physically larger beats that latter speed with a turbo peak of 4.9GHz. Elsewhere, AMD’s chip has 32MB of L3 cache, 24 PCI lanes, faster native memory speeds and PCIe 4 support, which makes it better than Intel’s silicon in all four departments. It also includes a cooler, while Intel doesn’t bundle one.
The AMD chip impressed beyond its spec, too. In our benchmarks, it was faster than the Intel CPU in every test, with an overall result of 345 that gave it a ten-point advantage. This gap lengthened in Cinebench’s multicore test, while it led its Intel rival in both the SiSoftware Sandra benchmarks and Y-Cruncher’s multithreaded benchmark. Impressively, it did this while consuming less power than than anything else in the Labs, which means a new socket. It’s called sTRX4, works with the X399 chipset and includes PCIe 4 support. These boards aren’t cheap, starting at around £400.
Threadripper chips tackle tough content-creation tasks and other productivity tools where multicore performance is a priority. It excelled here: with quad-channel memory installed, it delivered 501 in our videoencoding benchmark –almost 100 more than the Core i9-10920X with quad-channel memory.
Its Cinebench and Geekbench multicore results are thousands of points ahead of anything else here, e Intel chip, both in benchmarks d when stress-tested.
AMD didn’t have things all its own ay. The 3800X was slower than the 7 10700K in both Geekbench tests, in nebench’s single-core benchmark, d in both Adobe tools. It was also wer in Blender. The gaps were tiny, ough – when it comes to real-world rformance, the difference will be rely perceptible unless you’re asing every sliver of speed.
The AMD chip is more ordinary in mes, with slower scores in 3DMark d in the majority of our test games, here Intel often opened up average frame rate leads of more than 6fps. Even Intel’s cheaper Core i5-10600K is faster in real-world games tests.
For gaming and running Adobe software, then, the Intel silicon is better. For single-threaded speed there’s little between the two chips, though, and in most multicore tests the AMD part is faster. Combine this with its lower price and you’ve got one scintillating bit of silicon – unless you have very specific computing needs.
KEY SPECS
3.9GHz/4.5GHz base/peak clock speed 8 cores 16 threads 32MB L3 cache no graphics AMD Zen 2 architecture AMD AM4 socket 105W TDP and it outpaced every other CPU in Premiere miere Pro. Unsurprisingly, it handled dled multicore tests in SiSoftware Sandra, ndra, Y-Cruncher and Blender with more e speed than other chips too.
Still, this specialist silicon is not infallible. allible. Intel’s new i9-10900K and AMD’s Ryzen 9 3950X were a little faster in Photoshop, and the Threadripper didn’t top the results tables es in tests where single-threaded pace e is important. It’s also mediocre in games, ames, but this isn’t a gaming chip.
It’s t’s vital to use quad-channel memory mory with the 3960X; switching to dual-channel l-channel RAM saw performance decline ine across a multitude of tests. Moreover, chips such as this offer diminishing returns when it comes to per-core ability: performance gains tend to shrink as the core count rises, and perfect scaling is rare.
If you need a chip for professional, workstation-level content creation and productivity, though, nothing in the Labs is as effective as this. It’s very expensive but will pay for itself if you’re able to speed through work.
3.8GHz/4.5GHz base/peak clock speed 24 cores 48 threads 128MB L3 cache no graphics AMD Zen 2 architecture AMD sTRX4 socket 280W TDP