AMD
2019 is shaping up to be a great year for AMD, with new CPU and graphics card launches that are capturing massive attention from the industry and hardware fans as a whole. But that’s not to say it doesn’t have stiff competition in both camps Its new Ryzen 3000 CPUs are set to go head to head with Intel’s best when they debut in July, and it’s in for a close fight.
There are great comparisons to be made throughout the new range of Ryzen chips, but at the top end, $500 price, we have the Core i9-9900K versus the Ryzen 9 3900X. Which will be the best chip of them all?
Gaming
Intel Core i9- 9900K
Intel has held a performance edge in gaming for more than a decade, and even with AMD’s fantastic first and second-generation Ryzen CPUs, that held true. The eighth and ninth-generation of Intel’s chips still hold a commanding a solid lead in the result gamers care most about: Frames per second. That could change with Ryzen 3000 CPUs though, with higher clock speeds, increased instruction per clock performance, and even more cores for offloading backgrounds tasks.
Only eclipsed by its 16-core brethren, the Ryzen 9 3900X is the most powerful mainstream CPU AMD has ever released and it has some fantastically powerful specifications. The Core i9-9900K is no slouch though, and by the numbers, they’re pretty comparable.
Intel Core i9 9900K
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
Process node
14nm
7nm
Cores
8
12
Threads
16
24
L2/L3 cache
2MB / 16MB
6MB / 64MB
Base clock speed
3.6GHz
3.8GHz
Boost clock speed
4.7GHz (all cores) 5GHz (one core)
4.6GHz (per-core boost clocks currently unknown)
Graphics
Intel UHD Graphics 630
No
TDP
95w
105w
The 3900X has more cores and threads, while Intel’s has the stronger clock speed, especially when it comes to single-threaded workloads. Most games utilize a handful of cores in 2019, though, so unless you’re overclocking, you won’t typically see 5GHz frequencies when gaming on a 9900K. We still don’t know whether the 3900X will boost to 4.6GHz on more than one core. It is unlikely to be able to leverage all of its cores and threads during even the most intensive of games, though.
Just because the 3900X falls behind on clock speed, however, doesn’t mean it’s inherently weaker at gaming. In fact, with a claimed increase in instructions per clock of 15 percent over Ryzen 2000 CPUs, the 3900X could well be more powerful than the 9900K clock for clock. With its massive L2 and L3 cache too, memory latency concerns should have been all but eliminated, allowing for a more capable gaming CPU all round.
We’ll need to wait for third-party benchmarks to see for sure how these chips compare in games, but AMD did release some head to head gaming benchmark details at E3 2019, and the results were impressive.
AMD even claimed that it used best-case scenario results for Intel for these tests, which means no Spectre mitigations. Those have had multiple percent point impacts on CPU performance in some cases. It also didn’t utilize the recent Windows 10 1903 update, which has reportedly aided AMD Ryzen CPU performance as well.
Overall, the 3900X looks comparable, and in some cases, even more capable, than the 9900K in gaming.
Although only important for a smaller segment of the gaming market, AMD also showed off how the Ryzen 3900X handles simultaneous game playing and streaming at E3. It suggested that the four additional cores and eight threads of the 3900X make it far more capable at handling high-end gaming and streaming at the same time than the 9900K.
Again, we’ll have to wait until closer to launch to test these ourselves, but these early results look very promising for the AMD chip.
Productivity
Heavily multi-threaded productivity tasks like video transcoding and editing have been more AMD’s wheelhouse for the past couple of years, with its Ryzen and Threadripper chips competing directly and even pulling ahead of Intel’s more expensive options. With the 3900X and 9900K set to be priced around the same $500 mark, AMD’s new CPU will need to retain a performance lead in this segment to remain relevant.
With the support of extra cores and threads, that seems likely, and AMD’s internal benchmarks suggest as such. It didn’t bother showcasing it against the 9900K at E3 and instead put it up against a CPU that’s more than twice the price, the 12-core, 24-thread, $1,200 Intel Core i9-9920X.
Despite comparable specifications on core and threads counts, as well as a 4.GHz turbo boost speed, the 9920X falls noticeably behind AMD’s new $500 flagship. It does so at a higher TDP too. More on that below.
We still don’t have a firm head to head between the 9900K and 3900X in productivity tasks, and we’ll want to see third party results of that before we definitely say one is better than the other. That said, the 2700X wasn’t far behind the 9900K in these sorts of tests, so we’d expect the additional four cores, higher clock speeds, and boosted IPC of the 3900X, to give it a commanding lead over Intel’s CPU.
Efficiency
Efficiency isn’t as important on desktop chips as it with mobile, as there’s no battery life to be concerned with. That said, heat is an important factor and the more power a CPU requires, the more heat it outputs. That’s where the somewhat marketing-driven TDP figure comes from, although it can be more related to the base clock speed of the chip, than its full-tilt, all core boost clock.
By the numbers, Intel’s 9900K is the more efficient chip, with a rated TDP of 95 watts, while the 3900X has a TDP of 105 watts. But that’s not the full story.
Research into power demands from Intel’s 9900K around its launch showed it drawing far more power than its TDP rating. Toms Hardware reported that though it remained under its TDP during gaming, when doing heavily multithreaded workloads over prolonged periods, it could require more than 200 watts. That number could increase to 250 i watts if overlocked.
In comparison, the then-Ryzen flagship CPU, the 2700X, didn’t breach its 105-watt TDP. Considering the 3900X is rated at that same wattage and is built on a more efficient, 7nm process, we would expect it to have a lower power draw and thermal output than the 9900K too. We’ll need to wait for real-world third-party testing to be sure, though.
The 3900X could be the new CPU king
As with any pre-release hardware, making a definitive call one way or the other is an exercise in futility or fanboyism. We can’t claim that the 3900X is any better than the 9900K until we’ve tested it ourselves and compared our findings with those of the wider tech press and end users.
That said, everything is pointing towards the 3900X being an absolutely monstrous processor. It has the potential to compete head to head and even slightly outpace Intel’s 9900K in gaming, it is more than likely to take a commanding lead in multi-threaded workloads, and with some speculation, it’s likely to be the more efficient chip too.
We’ll hold off on the coronation until July 7 when the new Ryzen CPUs are finally released, but as it stands, the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X could be the most powerful all-round CPU in the world. And it might even take the gaming performance crown too.
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