The 3950X: A Processor Worth Considering?

For those who are curious about the 3950X, a 16-core chip from AMD, I have to say that it's an amazing processor. However, when you put it into perspective with the current market prices, I'm not sure if it's worth spending $700 on it right now. The price of a processor is just one factor to consider when deciding whether or not to upgrade.

I've benchmarked and tested the 3950X, and it's truly impressive. But, as you go down the product stack, I have to say that I'm becoming increasingly bothered by the prices. The 500 series motherboards, on the other hand, are great. They offer amazing features, capabilities, and improvements over the previous 300 and 400 series boards. In fact, they're a dramatic improvement.

But, if you're in the market for a new processor, there's one thing to consider: whether or not you need it. If you have a Zen 2 processor, you don't necessarily need a Zen 3. And, if you have an older chip, your motherboard might prevent you from taking advantage of all the features that the newer Zen 3 processor has to offer.

The question then becomes: do you buy a full-priced Zen 3 at launch or wait for a discounted Zen 2? Or, do you wait for Intel's 11th generation Rocket Lake CPUs to hit the market. These new CPUs will be supported by existing 400 series Intel motherboards, which is a significant improvement over the previous generations.

For those who are wondering, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 10th generation Intel desktop CPUs all share the same core architecture. It's only with the introduction of Rocket Lake that we'll see some real improvements. And, let's be honest, four gigahertz i7 6700k and a four gigahertz any tenth generation chip quarter core clock to clock is more or less the same CPU.

But, what's new and exciting is the introduction of Willow Cove, which marks the first IPC improvement from Intel in quite some time. However, it won't be available on the desktop market for a while. Instead, we'll have to wait until the 12th generation Alder Lake CPUs hit the market in the fourth quarter of 2021.

In the meantime, if you're interested in learning more about the 3950X or any other processor, I encourage you to check out my upgrade analysis videos. They're a great resource for anyone who wants to stay up-to-date on the latest processor technology and what it means for their specific needs and budget.

One thing that's not new is the existence of affiliate links in the video description below. If you click on them before making a purchase, I'll get paid a commission on it, which helps support the channel at no extra cost to you. It's always helpful when you shop through these links because they do support the channel and allow me to create more content like this.

And, finally, I want to thank all of my viewers for watching this video. I know it took me a while to get everything up, but I'm glad I could share my thoughts and opinions with you in a timely manner. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel below, because it's free, and if you love this video, be sure to share it with your friends.

Links to products mentioned in this article can be found in the description box below. Remember, these links are affiliate links that support the channel at no extra cost to you.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello and welcome to tech deals zen 3 is here we have an official launch date november 5th we have official product names they are the 5000 series of cpus we have prices ranging from 300 to 800 and many more details this is an unscripted video so if it's long i apologize but i've got my handy laptop here i have amd's press tech i'm gonna go through them one at a time and i'm going to talk to you today about the specific details of these cpus give you my initial thoughts and recommendations on what you might want to focus on because all four cpus being announced are not equal and that of course we will take a look at them when they launch on november 5th we have benchmarks provided by amd but there are no third-party benchmarks at the moment so we have to go off of what amd provides which of course is going to be a best case scenario that's what all manufacturers do but i'll give my thoughts read a little bit between the lines because i've spent a lot of time with the existing ryzen cpus and hopefully by the end of this we will have all learned something in march of 2017 amd launched the ryzen 7 series of cpus and changed the pc landscape dramatically prior to that date four core cpus were normal and had been for more than 10 years now amd is not a new company by any stretch in fact they go back to the very early days of the pc world my first amd cpu personally was an amd k5 back in the mid 90's then they had the k6 then the athlon and of course many more beyond that while i don't have boxes to some of those early cpus because why would i i do have a variety of earlier cpus here some of which are better than others and for a while there it was questionable as to whether or not amd was going to survive because while there was a time an amd fx series cpu was a good budget option it certainly never really held a candle to intel although with eight threads at an early date it actually has not aged too poorly but man the frame times can be terrible in cases moving on from the past because we're not here to talk about the past we're here to talk about the future and the future is zen 3. now ryzen 1 was amazing in 2017 it had its flaws but the fact of the matter is it was reasonably good enough with 8 cores and 16 threads for 329 and that value proposition less money than an i7 7700k which had four cores eight threads it was such an interesting value proposition that a lot of the early teething issues could be if not completely overlooked at least understood and accepted that the first six months were going to be a bit rough and to be completely blunt they were but i built a ryzen 7 1700 i used a ryzen 7 1700 for my channel and so i had a chance to witness the improvement throughout 2017 as bios updates came ram support improved etc windows got updated software got updated i used adobe premiere pro for our video editing it got improved and through the course of 2017 the experience progressively got better as amd just hammered away at it and made things shall we say nicer less fussy and more dependable the following year they released zen plus which you know was the ryzen 2000 series cpus ryzen 7 2700x was the peak there they didn't bother making a 2800x 329 they dropped the idea of trying to sell 500 eight core chips which really didn't make any sense with the 1800x and i'm pleased to report it was a solid improvement in several ways first a 1700 x has a 3.5 gigahertz all-core turbo whereas a 2700x has a 4.2 gigahertz all-core turbo that's a fairly solid 700 megahertz jump but more importantly while the ipc didn't improve the instructions per clock cycle didn't improve tremendously they did improve the quarter core latency and they did improve overall system responsiveness using a 1700x and using a 2700x the difference in raw compute like running cinebench running blender renders running adobe premiere pro rendering video output is not substantially faster but using the windows desktop opening programs opening chrome browsing websites waiting for youtube to start playing youtube videos start playing the 2700x is snappier and more responsive and so they made some really nice improvements kept it competitive kept the clock speed up and then of course intel woke up and went hey maybe we should provide the consumers with more than four cores which they did in the 8700k and then the 9900k for 500. and introduce the i9 branding but they did and i did a launch review of the i9 9900k and compared it to the then best 2700x and in that video i said the 2700x provides compelling value but if you want the best it's still intel and for the 200 price difference between the two at the time i said you know the 2700x makes a lot of sense but honestly the i9 still crushes it if you're a premium user now that was true then but it's not true now fast forward to today and lo and behold at least according to amd amd now makes the fastest gaming cpu in the world now that has not been individual independently tested or verified but it's a bold claim they claim that the new ryzen 9 5900x beats the i9 10 900k at 1080p gaming with a really good video card which i hope you're not doing but it does and that's fine because intel tests the same way too they love testing 1080p to show their high frame rates and so if that's true challenge to intel we'll have to see what rocket lake looked like next year now the most impressive number i'm going to show you the slides here in a second the most impressive number that just left out at the screen to me and said whoa look at this was far cry new dawn if you've watched my benchmarks at all in the past year i've said over and over and over when i've test benched a far cry new dawn across amd and intel this is a game that favors intel chips and so if you want to make intel look good run far cry because it just runs really well on intel processors and it does maybe until now so we'll have to i promise you i will test that as soon as i get a hold of the cpus hopefully it launched but we'll see uh then definitely that will be in the test because if it closes the gap there that'll tell me right up front that it's going to close the gap almost everywhere else this is exciting taking a a rewind just for a second i said 2700x versus i9 you'll see in front of me i have some newer boxes or at least these two are i looked and looked and could not find my 3700 xbox that's actually a 2700x but whatever just pretend it's a 3700x box because these certainly are third gem zen 2 closed 90 of the gap with intel they didn't match it in general in gaming an i9 10 900k and frankly an i9 9900k is still faster in gaming than a ryzen 9 3900x but not by much uh 10 give or take it's close in a blind test without the benchmarks running without the frame rate numbers running if you're not looking at a chart going hmm look at this graph look at that oh that bar is four frames per second faster it wins okay you're never gonna tell four frames per second in the real world that's just ridiculous of course if you're playing at 4k your graphics card is usually the bottleneck but a lot of people like to point to those graphs and say c c it's faster but if the difference is not substantial if you're not looking at you know 20 percent difference when you turn the graphs off you turn the numbers and the msi after burner off and you just play the game do you know what you're really going to notice more than anything else is the game responsive is it smooth is there any input lag and are the frames delivered consistently and one thing the ryzen 9 does really well actually more than the ryzen 7 even though it doesn't show up in benchmark charts is smooth frame times and part of that is due to the cores and part of that is due to the on-chip 70 megabyte cache which dwarfs the ryzen 7 and dwarfs intel's on-chip cache really helps if memory latency is an issue or large data sets are moving and i really do like the ryzen 9 for a premium gaming experience but that was a year ago actually a year and a half ago when amd launched zenit2 and now they're launching zen three so that's a bit of a history lesson and now we have to look forward to see what this accomplishes now i'm gonna go full screen here i'm gonna show you the slides we're gonna talk through i know that was a long intro i said this was unscripted uh that was a long intro but i wanted to talk a little bit about where amd came from what they did in 2017 and beyond and i have to honestly tell you i'm excited because we've got a real race right now between intel and amd and the only winner of this race is you and us because frankly we love making content on this stuff but the truth is whether you buy a ryzen 9 or an i9 or a ryzen 7 or an i7 or a ryzen 5 or an i5 the fact that both companies are rapidly iterating and rapidly coming out with content and improving year after year rather than 10 improvements for 10 years intel uh the fact that they're doing that means that you get improving products at a rapid rate and just frankly all of us as consumers are the winner even intel who's kind of had their butt handed to them in the past year by amd here's the funny thing a lot of people keep saying intel is dead intel's making record profits there is nothing like competition to kick a company in the butt and say hey be better and they have been they've been iterating they've dropped prices they've improved their products and they're making more money today than they did three years ago when they were sitting on their butts so everybody wins even intel here we are with our first slide amd where gaming begins i have to say that's a really pretty picture it's almost like a smiley face and it just demonstrates the chiplet design that amd is using the fact that they can customize their products up and down the product stack and not have to use the unified die actually gives them a lot of options and cost competitiveness compared to shall we say teen blue this next slide is simply meant to demonstrate the fact that third generation of ryzen otherwise known as ryzen 3000 was a step above the normal progress of improvement that has occurred over the past x number of years a little bit of a dig at intel here but the truth of the matter is first to second gen ryzen was not a huge leap going from a 1700 1700x to a 2700x it was nice it was a small improvement but it wasn't going to blow your skirt up but the truth is a 3700x was a noticeable improvement if you switch from a 1700x to a 3700x you don't need benchmarks to tell the difference windows runs faster updates run faster everything on your computer is just more very responsive my wife has used all of those she's got a 2700x on her streaming machine she used to have a 3700x at home we downgraded her to a 3600x because we needed a chip and she now has a 3900x at the office and uh you can take her 3 900 x if you can dodge the frying pan she'll throw at you because frankly the the improvement is dramatic and noticeable it doesn't show up in benchmark charts very well if you look at benchmark numbers you think what's the big deal use them and then you'll understand delivering as promised 14 and 12 nanometers in zen and zen plus and then seven nanometers in july of 2019 and now in the fourth quarter of 2020 we've got a refreshed seven nanometer in the form of zen three for what it's worth there's another company you may have heard of that's been on 14 nanometers since 2015. i can't seem to quite think of the name of the maybe some of you can help me out in the comment section below but i do believe we're up to 14 nanometer plus plus plus plus i might need two hands for this you'll have to help me anyway um the fact that they've done this and the fact that they have delivered on iterations every year for a company with the resources of amd i gotta give them two gold stars because that's pretty impressive here you can see the zen journey they've kind of grouped zen and zen plus here together but i personally think that while those really are sort of the same chip with some refreshes and updates they almost deserve their own story because there is a difference between them and there are different levels and models of chips but moving on from that you have zen two and one thing i want to draw your attention to is this is the move to the chiplet design this is the move to seven nanometer and this is the move to 16 megabytes of l3 cache per complex that increase in cache count really helps make up for the quarter core latencies the ccx complex latencies the latencies of the chiplets and connecting to an io die it is not as efficient as intel's design let's be completely blunt there's a reason why the ryzen 9 3900x needs a 70 megabyte on chip cache it is masking the inefficiencies in the design a rhizome 3900x for those of you curious is actually four three core chips glued together it has infinity fabric going this way and this way and this way and this way and this way and all of that combined with all of those cores going to the i o die which then has to go to the memory bus intel's ring bus on their chip is simply superior however it has a limit to scaling you cannot just scale to 20 cores on their ring bus design because then the difference in core latency between the cores becomes a problem that's a topic for another video this is an ingenious design because using the infinity fabric design there's really no theoretical limit there is but there's no reasonable limit to the course that they can go to they haven't after all released a zen 2 64 core threadripper and a epic otherwise known as rome their server cpus with 128 cores under a single integrated heat spreader now that's a lot of chiplets and a lot of complexity but the fact that that works is impressive it it truly is so credit to amd's engineers moving on to zen 3 the boost speeds are improved we have an ipc or instructions per clock cycle uplift there is a new core layout we're going to talk about this more in a second this is a big deal folks that right there is probably the single biggest deal of zen 3 and then a new cache topology we've improved that as well it's seven nanometers just like zen two here you can see a very rough overview of the zen 3 core architecture wider faster and even more efficient well actually that's probably all very true the 8 core complex you can see right in the middle of the screen is the big highlight all of the existing ryzen cpus today used four core ccx complexes so everything was derived off of base four core design they have now changed that to a base eight core design what does that mean well that means that a ryzen 7 3700x is two four core chips glued together a ryzen 7 5800x yes we're skipping the 4000 a 5800x is a single eight core complex with no alternative internal infinity fabric this will improve quarter core latency responsiveness memory bandwidth this will just make the chip run better it also means that a ryzen 9 5900x is no longer four three core chips glued together with a ridiculously complicated infinity fabric layout what it means is that it is two six core chips glued together with a single cross infinity fabric and then links to the i o die now it's still two eight core chiplets but they've had two cores disabled uh certainly for binning and die purposes to find the best ones available because the very best ones become the ryzen 9 5950x which is 800 we'll get to that in a minute this improvement this change means that all of these chips should be faster more responsive and is probably one of the reasons why amd can claim to have the fastest gaming cpu in the world this graph right here is a ridiculously simplified graph that simply says across 25 workloads there is a mean of a 19 instruction per clock cycle uplift i think ipc is a topic that gets tossed around a term that gets mentioned a lot but maybe some of you don't understand exactly what ipc means instructions per clock cycle simply means how much work can be done each time the cpu flips its transistors on and off now billions of cycles per second is a lot think of a light switch you go over to a light switch and go okay turn on turn off turn on turn off now let's do that four billion times per second that's impressive now let's do that across billions of light switches billions of times how these things even work is just truly remarkable effectively ipc means this a ryzen 9 3900x at 4 gigahertz will do less work than a ryzen 9 5900x at 4 gigahertz let's be clear about that point at the same clock speed the new zen 3 chips do more productive work think of this you're out in a field with a shovel and you've got a shovel and you can scoop dirt and every time you scoop dirt you move a certain amount of dirt now there's two factors that affect how much dirt you can move how fast you can move the shovel and how big the scoop on the shovel is clock speed is the speed with which you can shovel the dirt ipc is how big the shovel is if you can make the shovel 19 larger then you can move 19 percent more dirt without improving your speed now if you can improve your speed and the size of the shovel well now you see we're going with this because the boost speeds on zen 3 are higher than zen 2 and the shovel was made bigger this graph shows the change in ccx layout in zen 2 we've got two four core chips essentially glued together with the cache in the center in zen three we have eight cores in a single module with a combined 32 megabytes of level three cache and then of course all the stuff at the bottom this is a very important point in zen 2 four cores can access 16 megs of cash if they want to access the other 16 megs of cash they have to go through infinity fabric there's a latency penalty in doing so it reduces the amount of cash available to each individual core without a latency penalty across the infinity fabric on zen 3 cores now have direct access to 32 gigabytes of cash without any latency penalty that is going to make a difference not across every application every game every program but it is going to make a difference and it's part of the reason of the ipc uplift in zen3 leadership power efficiency i honestly have to say this one's a bit of a dig towards intel because intel has preached their efficiency gains and their low power chips and laptops and ultrabooks and zen books for a number of years and the fact that amd is currently winning this battle is uh shall we say rather interesting i do want to call your attention to the fact that the largest gain was the move from first generation ryzen otherwise known as zen to zen two we had a 2x improvement in performance per watt going to zen 3 it's still an improvement but it's not the same big leap forward now this is understandable from zen to zen 2 we went from 14 nanometers to seven but on z3 we're still at seven nanometers so what were you expecting having the power cost that's not how any of this works but we should see a nice power reduction for the same performance when zen 4 comes on five nanometer this right here has to burn a little bit over on team blue now let me just preface this right up front by saying i like the i9 10 900k i mean it i know it uses a lot of power and it's not the cheapest thing in the world but the truth of the matter is having spent a reasonable amount of time since may of 2020 using the thing it's fast it's incredibly responsive you open programs you open a web browser you launch a game you run updaters windows update virus scan you've got music in the background you're playing a youtube video it is very responsive i love ryzen but the truth of the matter is the i9 10 900k is a touch faster and is a touch more responsive than the ryzen 9 3900x not by a lot i can tell the difference going back and forth between them because i literally have both machines sitting next to each other and i can walk over to one and do something and walk to the other and do something and i can kind of go hmm you know and i could so when you're looking at it that closely you can kind of sort of start to pick out what each one does well you can almost over pick out what they do well because if you're just using one the differences become free if i was to be honest they're minor the truth is you'd be happy with either one however the fact that amd is now claiming 2.8 times power efficiency per watt over the i9 10900 k with the ryzen 950 900x that's a lot and yes the i9 10900k uses stupid levels of power so advantage amd introducing the ryzen 9 5900 x 12 course 24 threads up to 4.8 gigahertz boost 70 megabytes of level 2 and 3 cache that's the same as the 3900x and a 105 watt tdp that is also the same as the 3900x it is a faster max boost here's what we don't know what we don't know is what is the typical all-core boost what does it really do when you're playing games what does it really do when you run a ryzen 9 3900x in the real world runs at 4.2 gigahertz plus or minus 50 megahertz under most circumstances in most normal workloads if you put it under a full artificially simulated avx 512 workload then yes it does slow down a bit runs about 4.0 gigahertz unless you manually boost it in the bios these are minor differences so it certainly doesn't run at the speed that is printed on the box now what's interesting is the same is true of the lower level chips a ryzen 7 3700x and a ryzen 5 x also run at 4.2 gigahertz out of the box plus or minus 50 megahertz and they also slow down to 4 gigahertz even when put under a full avx workload the 3600 nx chip is 200 megahertz slower and the xt chips the 3800 xt and 3900 xt are one to 200 megahertz faster all of these are pretty minor differences to be truthful they look nice in benchmarks but they're pretty minor all things considered with these new chips with the 5900x now it's marked as having a max 4.8 gigahertz turbo it is not going to run at that speed out of the box what will it run at my gut tells me 4.5 but i do not know that for sure that's just what i would expect it to do based upon prior experience maybe it'll do 4.6 maybe it'll be 4.4 either way it will be faster than the 3900x in both clock speed and ipc here we have 10 games tested between a ryzen 9 3900x and a ryzen 9 5900x right at 1080p okay i'm sure these numbers are all accurate for whatever scenario they tested how many of you are buying a 500 cpu to play league of legends at 1080p raise your hand if that is you okay the two chuckleheads in the back can put their hand down that's silly nobody is doing that so while it's interesting who cares furthermore i would make the same argument for f1 2019 cs go and honestly just in general in most circumstances i said earlier the far cry new dawn result impressed me the most and the truth of the matter is it does a 22 performance improvement okay it's at 1080p but we're testing cpus here that brings it pretty close to intel now i suspect an i9 10 900k is still going to beat amd here in the real world outside of their tests but you never know well i promise you we will test that cinebench r20 is one of amd's favorite benchmarks why it favors amd cpus i would use it too if i was wanting to show off how wonderful my cpus are that being said credit is due where credit is due the fact of the matter is 631 is an amazing single core score on a ryzen 9 5900 x and given that that's a fairly simple easy repeatable straightforward cpu benchmark i'm going to call this one as accurate i'm sure that if you want to do blender rendering you found your cpus here you can see the ryzen 9 5900x compared to the i9 10 900k and again 1080p resolution which is absurd for 500r cpus none of you should be doing that but well it's certainly an impressive looking chart it'll be interesting to see what it looks like in 1440p with a different graphics card selection and different detail settings it is a very bold claim to say the ryzen 9 5900x is the world's best gaming cpu one of intel's great claims to fame for some time has been we make the fastest gaming cpu in the world yes i'm channeling my inner jeremy clarkston but the fact of the matter is amd is now claiming they make the fastest one in the world we'll all find out on november 5th we finally come to the prices and your eyes do not deceive you we have a price increase yes the ryzen 5 5600x is now 299. the 3600x was 249 at launch this is a 50 price increase in fact we have a 50 price increase across the board the ryzen 7 5800x is 449 as compared to the ryzen 7 3800x which was 399 at launch anybody notice there's no 5700x maybe we'll get one in the future after launch perhaps they're figuring they don't need to right now with a limited number of dies and supplies they want to sell the best ones available for the highest price don't blame them amd could definitely use some profits but there is a fairly large price gap between 300 and 450 which i'm sure will be filled at some point in the future but there is no 5700 or 5700 x coming at launch if you want zen 3 and 8 cores it's not going to be cheap and then on the very top of this particular slide we have the ryzen 9 5900x which is 549 a 50 increase over the 499 launch price of the ryzen 9 3900 3900x but it's also a fairly substantial price increase over the street price of the 3900x now as i'm recording this video the street price of the 3900x is 429 that's what it is on amazon that's what it is on newegg at least on the day of the announcement however over the past couple of weeks and months it has been less we've done live streams all throughout the summer of 2020 and it's been available for between 389 and 409 at either amazon or newegg at various points throughout the summer so i'm just going to call its street price or street value roughly 400 putting a 400 value on it we have a hundred and fifty dollar price difference between the real world price of the 3900x and the launch msrp of a 5900x which it certainly will cost at launch it'll go down at some point i'm sure it'll hit 499 at some point after launch they usually do but is it worth a hundred and fifty dollars more well we'll find out on november uh fifth because we definitely will test that because one of the questions everybody's going to say is well should i go ahead and get zen 3 or should i buy zen 2 and is the savings you know is the performance worth the extra cost or should i save the money and get something less expensive then we also have black friday coming up now this isn't really part of the launch announcement and this will age poorly when we're past black friday but i do want to toss out a thought black friday last year we had amazing deals on amd cpus in 2019 and 2018 and 2017 black friday brought amazing amd cpu deals will we see zen 2 cpus discounted heavily then i actually don't think we will come back and leave a comment after black friday and you could tell me whether i was right or wrong but i actually don't think we're going to see those level of discounts they don't have to because zen 2 is very competitive it's very close to intel they're very good cpus we'll see some discounts but i don't think we're going to see 199.37 x i don't think we're gonna see a 299 3900x they just have no need to sell them that cheap if we can get like a 349.3900x or a 249.30 those would be pretty compelling compared to these launch prices we'll do dollar cost per frame per second charts and testing and we will take a look at that in detail when we have uh real street pricing and availability of both zen 2 and zen 3 when they launch the other thing i want to bring your attention to on these cpus is only the ryzen 5 comes with a boxed cooler the ryzen 7 and ryzen 9 do not amd has come to the realization that people who buy 500 r cpus put aftermarket cooling on them and the wraith prism rgb as nice as it is simply isn't really all that competitive on these new high power cpus so you'll have to factor in the price of an add-on cooler in addition to the cpu performance per dollar is an interesting metric i've done it in a variety of videos in the past dollar cost per frame per second and so on i wish we had the true raw numbers here rather than just graphs with no baselines or percentages because these don't really tell you anything there's no hard data to do any analysis i would draw your attention to the bottom of the screen they're showing 549 for the ryzen 9 5900x and 529 for the i9 10 900k well here's the thing the i9 10900k is virtually impossible to find it has been out of stock all summer long and really it's been replaced by the i9 10 850k what is the difference between the 10 900k and 10 850k nothing nothing you'll care about the only difference is the thermal velocity boost is 5.2 gigahertz on a 10 850 k and 5.3 gigahertz on a 10 900k i have both i've shown them to you in previous live streams in the real world there's no difference between the chips there's no difference between the overclocking unless you have ridiculous monster cooling expensive motherboards and you really just pour stupid levels of money to get another one or 200 megahertz out of it the truth of the matter is they both run up five gigahertz really well they'll run at 5.1 if you push it a bit 5.2 takes everything they've got and 5.3 5.3 is ridiculous it just you just run into a temperature voltage wall that is like running into a brick wall and it's very hard to do i've settled on five gigahertz even on all of my tests because it's a reasonable temperature with a reasonable cooling requirement and it's really only 100 megahertz boost over the 4.9 all core turbo of both chips but that's not the point the point that i want to draw your attention to is the fact that the i9 10 850 k is not 529 in fact for a week during the game tober sale on newegg it was available for 455. that's pretty interesting because that kind of price drop can move these graphs by quite a bit of course it still has a pretty hefty cooling requirement if you add in the price of a 360 millimeter liquid cooler versus say a 70 tower cooler on the ryzen 9 that kind of eliminates the price differ i get that we'll have to see how much cooling the ryzen 9 5900 actually requires but keep in mind that they're comparing msrp to msrp here and that's not really a fair comparison in some regards the i7 to ryzen 7 comparison is more fair take a look at this the i7 10 700k is listed at 409 this has certainly been cheaper but it has not been dramatically cheaper it's been 379 389 a bunch any cheaper than that is a really odd sale so we're only looking at a very minor discount it doesn't require as much cooling as the i9 does but it still requires a fairly decent cooler to get five gigahertz out of it and then we come to oh boy have i got something to say here this deserves a video on of itself the i5 10 600k versus the ryzen 5 5600x for 300 each it is 20 20. if you are spending 300 on a 6 core 12 fred chip that is 4 plus gigahertz for premium performance 2017 called and would like their i7 8700k back last but certainly not least is the ryzen 9 5950x 16 cores 32 threads and holy smokes 4.9 gigahertz up to max boost speed translation 4.6 may be all core unless you overclock it but depending on the power of delivery and depending on the motherboard you have and depending on the cooling you have maybe you can overclock it can you manually overclock it to five gigahertz i am willing to bet no but i am prepared to be surprised we will try i will put a decent large cooler on it and find out because if you can get 16 cores and 32 threads at 5 gigahertz even if you have to throw a 360 millimeter liquid cooler on it that'll be mighty impressive and for content creators this may very well make threadripper or cascade lake x unnecessary unless you need the quad channel ram and the pci express lanes for something else but from a raw performance point of view i've used a number of threadrippers and this may very well provide a reason to skip those this time around the only downside price amd provides a content creation performance and a gaming performance chart between the 3950x and the 5950x and you could pause the video if you want to see it but moving on now they compare the i9 10 900k with the ryzen 9 5900x for what it's worth consider the fact that the i-9 10 850 k which is what we should be talking about has been around 450 at times over the course of the past month and this is an 800 cpu from amd what are they showing and comparing i don't know moving on unlike with zen 2 all the cpus are launching at the same time available november 5th for 799 perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of this entire launch no new motherboards that is right the x570 and the b550 are it when it comes to the am4 platform the zen 3 chips are the last of am4 and the 500 series motherboards are the last of the motherboards there will be bios updates but no new chipset the 600 series the x 670 and the b650 will be zen 4 and am5 in about a year it is worth noting that if you have a 500 series board with a bios of igesa 1.0.8.0 or newer you can post and boot right now to a zen 3. at launch users should upgrade to a bios with a gisa 1.1.0.0 yes those are ridiculously long for the best experience so there have been motherboards available for some time now that came out of the box ready to run for these most if not every single b550 board out of the box should support zen 3 without a problem early x570s will not however a large number of x570s come with bios flashback where you can update the bios using a usb thumb drive with a specifically named bios file put into a very specific usb port press a button and it updates the bios for you and of course if you're upgrading from an older cpu then you should upgrade your bios before you upgrade your cpu because otherwise it doesn't work the other way around it is important to note that amd has backtracked on their original comments from earlier in the year the original guidance that amd offered was nose n3 on 300 or 400 series chipsets they have reversed that that announcement's not really new and they will be supporting zen 3 on select 400 series boards it's up to the motherboard manufacturer as to whether or not the motherboard manufacturer wants to update them it is also important to note that the 400 series will not support zen 3 at launch selective beta bios updates will become available around a month after launch give or take a little bit it's going to certainly depend upon how responsive and how quick each of the motherboard manufacturers is and those early bios updates will support it in the sense that they will boot and run it does not mean and i hope everybody is listening very clearly because if you have a 400 series motherboard you should listen to me it does not mean that you will get the max turbo it does not mean that you will get the max power efficiency it does not mean that you will get the max performance it means it will boot and it will run but there's a lot of internal things in the bios that control the turbo boost and the power consumption and the responsiveness and how the cpu operates with the chipset in short they have to do some optimization work to clean it up my guess if i was a motherboard manufacturer is that i would make my most popular selling motherboards and my most expensive motherboards compatible first and i would optimize those the most and my oem boards and my cheap motherboards i would do last and i would honestly optimize them the least a good example if you are a seuss you would take your asus rug strix for example and you would make sure that works as soon as possible those are very expensive motherboards they're very nice and you want to make sure that your customers are happy on the other hand there are some very cheap 79 and 89 dash a b 450 motherboards with very little vrm cooling and very few features that were sold really cheap there in a lot of oem systems and those will probably get obeyed by dos update and they will probably get very little optimization because those aren't the kinds of customers who are likely to install a ryzen 9 5900x in their 79 motherboard nor should you that's kind of silly but you might be tempted to install a ryzen 530 a ryzen 5 5600x i'll have to get used to these numbers and i don't know that i'd be jumping up and down to do that either here's my advice until we know more wait until at least a month post launch if you have a 400 series motherboard before you consider buying any of these things we need to see where the chips lay when it comes to bios updates you might want to wait until sometime in 2021 let them release two or three rounds of 400 series chipset bios updates before you go out and change your bios and change your motherboard unless you take a perfectly good working system and turn it into a non-working system that's likely to happen at least once i had that happen to me on more than one system taking 300 series chipsets and putting zen 2 on them i eventually sorted every one of them out and got them all working but i had more than one premium x370 motherboard brick in the process one from asus one from gigabyte both over two hundred dollars neither of one which should have but thankfully they both had bios flashback and that saved it because otherwise that was not going to be a pretty day it sounds great to upgrade your cpu it really does it works sometimes it works right out of the box i have had it work first try without a problem i have done a lot of upgrades on a lot of different boards i upgraded my capture machine for example has an msi b450 tomahawk not the max the first version and that's what this chip is currently installed in because it's not on the box and i updated the bios put the chip in and it worked simple as that we had an msi x470 gaming plus that went from a 1700x to a 3700x update the bios put the chip in worked first try without complaint although i would point out those were 400 series boards going to zen 2 not 300 series boards a relentless pace of innovation ryzen 5000 series delivers what gamers want across all the metrics amd is the market leader at least according to amd slide i know i'm shocked insert homeowner mccullen culkin face but they might be right this is an impressive list i have to say kudos two gold stars to amd dr lisa and her team have done amazing things in the past four years and all i can say is thank you amd as a bit of a tease amd put a shot here of one of the upcoming 6000 series of radeon graphics cards and provided three little benchmarks at 4k which makes sense if this is in fact what it's supposed to be then if this is going to be comparable to an rtx 3080 these numbers look impressive it's uh just a bit of a tease until the actual launch comes on october 28th and when it does i promise you we will cover it well that concludes all the amd slides here's the short version the ryzen 9 5900x looks amazing and i'm very excited the 50 price increase over the ryzen 9 3900x at least in terms of launch prices yeah it sucks but i understand the lack of a cooler sucks even more although i don't like the cooler that the 3900x came with because it's loud in my opinion it does cool effectively but it's hot and it's loud and so we've always replaced them with aftermarket cooling the bigger issue is street prices if a 3900x is under 400. you might actually want a 3900x and then let me expand that further if you have a 300 or 400 series motherboard you may have to go with zen 2 if you want an upgrade because if you have a 300 series then zen 3 isn't even an option and probably never will be unless something changes but probably not and if you have a 400 series chipset who knows when proper stable support actually comes so if you have a ryzen 5 1600 if you have a ryzen 7 1700 and you've been waiting to upgrade you've been thinking zen 3's coming i bought the first generation ryzen i will wait for the last generation of ryzen on am4 and then i'll i'll make the biggest upgrade and then i'll keep that for a few years well if you have a 300 series motherboard guess what you're not doing that so what you might want to do is you might want to wait for the holidays and you might want to watch for sale prices on zen 2 because if you can pick up a ryzen 5 3600 for 150 a ryzen 7 3700x for 250 maybe less and if you can pick up a ryzen 9 3900x too many different numbers for 350 or less those may be good prices for you to go ahead and upgrade your 300 series board and just accept i'm just not getting zen 3 and that's the way it is and then you can use those cpus for another two or three years and then am5 will be out ddr5 will be out pci express gen 5 will be out and all new chips and all new stuff on the five nanometer production process and then you can consider upgrading again in a couple of years the 5800x oh boy um hi amd guy uh i apologize profusely if this upsets you in any regard uh the the 3800x is not priced right in my opinion because 450 is too much for that there is only a 100 price difference between a 5800x and a 5900x and the fact that that is basically a 20 price difference a little bit off but it's about a 20 price difference but it's a 50 core difference and a 50 performance difference assuming a perfectly multi-threaded workload why would you spend 450 on an eight core chip when 550 buys a 12 court chip now your response might be well i don't do workloads that require 12 core chips fair enough you might not but you probably will in the next three plus years the world is going that direction the new game consoles have eight core 16 threads and two cpus think of them as a non x version of a 3700 so the 299 dollar xbox series s has a 3.5 gigahertz eight core 16 thread zen two and you're going to spend 450 on an eight core 16 thread zen three that's 25 30 faster even if it's 50 percent faster yeah um i'm really struggling with that one if it were 50 less i'd feel differently at 399 i'd like it more and then we've got the ryzen 5 5600x which for 300 yeah um 249 would have been a better price on that one and then we have the ryzen 9 59 50 x which 800 doesn't bother me to be honest the the 3950x the 16 core chip was 749 street is currently 700 i would not spend 700 on a 39 50 x right now i don't even know if i'd spend 600 i'd have to really think about it if you're at that level if you have a need for 16 core chip which just pure gamers don't right now they will eventually but not within the next couple of years that's really reaching it's nice if you have the money you know go for it but the the thing is if you've got the kind of need that requires a ish hundred dollar processor 750 and 800 are the same number effectively you're putting them in a 250 dollar motherboard you're putting 64 or 128 gigs of ram you have multiple terabytes of storage you have a really nice video card you have a nice case and a power supply because if you're buying a 16 core chip you run a youtube video and do 4k 60 frames per second video uploads i mean it doesn't really have any use beyond content creation software development etc and so 50 one way or another is not going to change the outcome all things considered i've benchmarked and tested the 3950x it's amazing i'm sure the 5950x will be amazing we'll test it but yeah as you go down on the product stack i'm bothered by the prices a bit more i'm not bothered by the lack of new motherboards the 500 series motherboards are great the features are great the capabilities are great they are a dramatic improvement over the 300 and 400 series boards i like them so that's awesome and as far as what you should do i'm gonna save upgrade analysis for a future video because everything else it you start getting into speculation at some point i've already done tons of speculation in this video i'll give you one thought if you have a zen 2 you don't need a zen 3. if you have a zen 1 you might but your motherboard might prevent you if you have an older chip these things are going to be awesome the only question then becomes do you buy a full-priced zen 3 at or near launch or do you buy a discounted zen 2 or do you wait for the first quarter of 2021 when intel will be launching the 11th generation rocket lake cpus which will install an existing 400 series intel motherboards and for the first time in six years they are finally introducing something besides a skylake core many people don't realize this but 6th 7th 8th 9th and 10th generation intel desktop cpus are all the same core they have more cores they've improved the clock speed they've made minor iterative improvements to them over the years but the truth of the matter is a four gigahertz i7 6700k and a four gigahertz any tenth generation chip quarter core clock to clock is more or less the same cpu they've obviously gone to 10 cores they've also gone to 5.3 gigahertz but they haven't changed the course rocket lake or 11th gen coming next year willow co of course the first ipc improvement from intel in quite so at least on the desktop they've the past year or two has had that in the laptop side and there is a legit improvement there of course there's 12th gen alder lake and 4th quarter 2021 which is a really fast iterative launch that's a topic for a future video like this video if you like it share it with your friends if you love it remember to subscribe to the channel with the big huge red button directly below questions comments thoughts feedback suggestions you know where the comment section is type away i am dying to hear your feedback on this one and then there's links in the video description below which i will link to what i can obviously this m3 stuff doesn't exist but i can link to the zen 2 and as stuff goes on sale if you found this video helpful useful informative and interesting those are affiliate links to amazon newegg and ebay they support the channel at no extra cost to you if you click them before you buy something even if it's a jar of peanut butter believe it or not it does help we get paid a commission on it and it helps us do all this cool stuff including this sponsor free video which took me a while to do because i did not script it i just got here with the laptop and all the notes and started talking my apologies for the length of it but what can i say i'm trying to get this up within 24 hours of the announcement and so this is the quickest way i could think to do it thank you all so much for watching i will see all of you next time youhello and welcome to tech deals zen 3 is here we have an official launch date november 5th we have official product names they are the 5000 series of cpus we have prices ranging from 300 to 800 and many more details this is an unscripted video so if it's long i apologize but i've got my handy laptop here i have amd's press tech i'm gonna go through them one at a time and i'm going to talk to you today about the specific details of these cpus give you my initial thoughts and recommendations on what you might want to focus on because all four cpus being announced are not equal and that of course we will take a look at them when they launch on november 5th we have benchmarks provided by amd but there are no third-party benchmarks at the moment so we have to go off of what amd provides which of course is going to be a best case scenario that's what all manufacturers do but i'll give my thoughts read a little bit between the lines because i've spent a lot of time with the existing ryzen cpus and hopefully by the end of this we will have all learned something in march of 2017 amd launched the ryzen 7 series of cpus and changed the pc landscape dramatically prior to that date four core cpus were normal and had been for more than 10 years now amd is not a new company by any stretch in fact they go back to the very early days of the pc world my first amd cpu personally was an amd k5 back in the mid 90's then they had the k6 then the athlon and of course many more beyond that while i don't have boxes to some of those early cpus because why would i i do have a variety of earlier cpus here some of which are better than others and for a while there it was questionable as to whether or not amd was going to survive because while there was a time an amd fx series cpu was a good budget option it certainly never really held a candle to intel although with eight threads at an early date it actually has not aged too poorly but man the frame times can be terrible in cases moving on from the past because we're not here to talk about the past we're here to talk about the future and the future is zen 3. now ryzen 1 was amazing in 2017 it had its flaws but the fact of the matter is it was reasonably good enough with 8 cores and 16 threads for 329 and that value proposition less money than an i7 7700k which had four cores eight threads it was such an interesting value proposition that a lot of the early teething issues could be if not completely overlooked at least understood and accepted that the first six months were going to be a bit rough and to be completely blunt they were but i built a ryzen 7 1700 i used a ryzen 7 1700 for my channel and so i had a chance to witness the improvement throughout 2017 as bios updates came ram support improved etc windows got updated software got updated i used adobe premiere pro for our video editing it got improved and through the course of 2017 the experience progressively got better as amd just hammered away at it and made things shall we say nicer less fussy and more dependable the following year they released zen plus which you know was the ryzen 2000 series cpus ryzen 7 2700x was the peak there they didn't bother making a 2800x 329 they dropped the idea of trying to sell 500 eight core chips which really didn't make any sense with the 1800x and i'm pleased to report it was a solid improvement in several ways first a 1700 x has a 3.5 gigahertz all-core turbo whereas a 2700x has a 4.2 gigahertz all-core turbo that's a fairly solid 700 megahertz jump but more importantly while the ipc didn't improve the instructions per clock cycle didn't improve tremendously they did improve the quarter core latency and they did improve overall system responsiveness using a 1700x and using a 2700x the difference in raw compute like running cinebench running blender renders running adobe premiere pro rendering video output is not substantially faster but using the windows desktop opening programs opening chrome browsing websites waiting for youtube to start playing youtube videos start playing the 2700x is snappier and more responsive and so they made some really nice improvements kept it competitive kept the clock speed up and then of course intel woke up and went hey maybe we should provide the consumers with more than four cores which they did in the 8700k and then the 9900k for 500. and introduce the i9 branding but they did and i did a launch review of the i9 9900k and compared it to the then best 2700x and in that video i said the 2700x provides compelling value but if you want the best it's still intel and for the 200 price difference between the two at the time i said you know the 2700x makes a lot of sense but honestly the i9 still crushes it if you're a premium user now that was true then but it's not true now fast forward to today and lo and behold at least according to amd amd now makes the fastest gaming cpu in the world now that has not been individual independently tested or verified but it's a bold claim they claim that the new ryzen 9 5900x beats the i9 10 900k at 1080p gaming with a really good video card which i hope you're not doing but it does and that's fine because intel tests the same way too they love testing 1080p to show their high frame rates and so if that's true challenge to intel we'll have to see what rocket lake looked like next year now the most impressive number i'm going to show you the slides here in a second the most impressive number that just left out at the screen to me and said whoa look at this was far cry new dawn if you've watched my benchmarks at all in the past year i've said over and over and over when i've test benched a far cry new dawn across amd and intel this is a game that favors intel chips and so if you want to make intel look good run far cry because it just runs really well on intel processors and it does maybe until now so we'll have to i promise you i will test that as soon as i get a hold of the cpus hopefully it launched but we'll see uh then definitely that will be in the test because if it closes the gap there that'll tell me right up front that it's going to close the gap almost everywhere else this is exciting taking a a rewind just for a second i said 2700x versus i9 you'll see in front of me i have some newer boxes or at least these two are i looked and looked and could not find my 3700 xbox that's actually a 2700x but whatever just pretend it's a 3700x box because these certainly are third gem zen 2 closed 90 of the gap with intel they didn't match it in general in gaming an i9 10 900k and frankly an i9 9900k is still faster in gaming than a ryzen 9 3900x but not by much uh 10 give or take it's close in a blind test without the benchmarks running without the frame rate numbers running if you're not looking at a chart going hmm look at this graph look at that oh that bar is four frames per second faster it wins okay you're never gonna tell four frames per second in the real world that's just ridiculous of course if you're playing at 4k your graphics card is usually the bottleneck but a lot of people like to point to those graphs and say c c it's faster but if the difference is not substantial if you're not looking at you know 20 percent difference when you turn the graphs off you turn the numbers and the msi after burner off and you just play the game do you know what you're really going to notice more than anything else is the game responsive is it smooth is there any input lag and are the frames delivered consistently and one thing the ryzen 9 does really well actually more than the ryzen 7 even though it doesn't show up in benchmark charts is smooth frame times and part of that is due to the cores and part of that is due to the on-chip 70 megabyte cache which dwarfs the ryzen 7 and dwarfs intel's on-chip cache really helps if memory latency is an issue or large data sets are moving and i really do like the ryzen 9 for a premium gaming experience but that was a year ago actually a year and a half ago when amd launched zenit2 and now they're launching zen three so that's a bit of a history lesson and now we have to look forward to see what this accomplishes now i'm gonna go full screen here i'm gonna show you the slides we're gonna talk through i know that was a long intro i said this was unscripted uh that was a long intro but i wanted to talk a little bit about where amd came from what they did in 2017 and beyond and i have to honestly tell you i'm excited because we've got a real race right now between intel and amd and the only winner of this race is you and us because frankly we love making content on this stuff but the truth is whether you buy a ryzen 9 or an i9 or a ryzen 7 or an i7 or a ryzen 5 or an i5 the fact that both companies are rapidly iterating and rapidly coming out with content and improving year after year rather than 10 improvements for 10 years intel uh the fact that they're doing that means that you get improving products at a rapid rate and just frankly all of us as consumers are the winner even intel who's kind of had their butt handed to them in the past year by amd here's the funny thing a lot of people keep saying intel is dead intel's making record profits there is nothing like competition to kick a company in the butt and say hey be better and they have been they've been iterating they've dropped prices they've improved their products and they're making more money today than they did three years ago when they were sitting on their butts so everybody wins even intel here we are with our first slide amd where gaming begins i have to say that's a really pretty picture it's almost like a smiley face and it just demonstrates the chiplet design that amd is using the fact that they can customize their products up and down the product stack and not have to use the unified die actually gives them a lot of options and cost competitiveness compared to shall we say teen blue this next slide is simply meant to demonstrate the fact that third generation of ryzen otherwise known as ryzen 3000 was a step above the normal progress of improvement that has occurred over the past x number of years a little bit of a dig at intel here but the truth of the matter is first to second gen ryzen was not a huge leap going from a 1700 1700x to a 2700x it was nice it was a small improvement but it wasn't going to blow your skirt up but the truth is a 3700x was a noticeable improvement if you switch from a 1700x to a 3700x you don't need benchmarks to tell the difference windows runs faster updates run faster everything on your computer is just more very responsive my wife has used all of those she's got a 2700x on her streaming machine she used to have a 3700x at home we downgraded her to a 3600x because we needed a chip and she now has a 3900x at the office and uh you can take her 3 900 x if you can dodge the frying pan she'll throw at you because frankly the the improvement is dramatic and noticeable it doesn't show up in benchmark charts very well if you look at benchmark numbers you think what's the big deal use them and then you'll understand delivering as promised 14 and 12 nanometers in zen and zen plus and then seven nanometers in july of 2019 and now in the fourth quarter of 2020 we've got a refreshed seven nanometer in the form of zen three for what it's worth there's another company you may have heard of that's been on 14 nanometers since 2015. i can't seem to quite think of the name of the maybe some of you can help me out in the comment section below but i do believe we're up to 14 nanometer plus plus plus plus i might need two hands for this you'll have to help me anyway um the fact that they've done this and the fact that they have delivered on iterations every year for a company with the resources of amd i gotta give them two gold stars because that's pretty impressive here you can see the zen journey they've kind of grouped zen and zen plus here together but i personally think that while those really are sort of the same chip with some refreshes and updates they almost deserve their own story because there is a difference between them and there are different levels and models of chips but moving on from that you have zen two and one thing i want to draw your attention to is this is the move to the chiplet design this is the move to seven nanometer and this is the move to 16 megabytes of l3 cache per complex that increase in cache count really helps make up for the quarter core latencies the ccx complex latencies the latencies of the chiplets and connecting to an io die it is not as efficient as intel's design let's be completely blunt there's a reason why the ryzen 9 3900x needs a 70 megabyte on chip cache it is masking the inefficiencies in the design a rhizome 3900x for those of you curious is actually four three core chips glued together it has infinity fabric going this way and this way and this way and this way and this way and all of that combined with all of those cores going to the i o die which then has to go to the memory bus intel's ring bus on their chip is simply superior however it has a limit to scaling you cannot just scale to 20 cores on their ring bus design because then the difference in core latency between the cores becomes a problem that's a topic for another video this is an ingenious design because using the infinity fabric design there's really no theoretical limit there is but there's no reasonable limit to the course that they can go to they haven't after all released a zen 2 64 core threadripper and a epic otherwise known as rome their server cpus with 128 cores under a single integrated heat spreader now that's a lot of chiplets and a lot of complexity but the fact that that works is impressive it it truly is so credit to amd's engineers moving on to zen 3 the boost speeds are improved we have an ipc or instructions per clock cycle uplift there is a new core layout we're going to talk about this more in a second this is a big deal folks that right there is probably the single biggest deal of zen 3 and then a new cache topology we've improved that as well it's seven nanometers just like zen two here you can see a very rough overview of the zen 3 core architecture wider faster and even more efficient well actually that's probably all very true the 8 core complex you can see right in the middle of the screen is the big highlight all of the existing ryzen cpus today used four core ccx complexes so everything was derived off of base four core design they have now changed that to a base eight core design what does that mean well that means that a ryzen 7 3700x is two four core chips glued together a ryzen 7 5800x yes we're skipping the 4000 a 5800x is a single eight core complex with no alternative internal infinity fabric this will improve quarter core latency responsiveness memory bandwidth this will just make the chip run better it also means that a ryzen 9 5900x is no longer four three core chips glued together with a ridiculously complicated infinity fabric layout what it means is that it is two six core chips glued together with a single cross infinity fabric and then links to the i o die now it's still two eight core chiplets but they've had two cores disabled uh certainly for binning and die purposes to find the best ones available because the very best ones become the ryzen 9 5950x which is 800 we'll get to that in a minute this improvement this change means that all of these chips should be faster more responsive and is probably one of the reasons why amd can claim to have the fastest gaming cpu in the world this graph right here is a ridiculously simplified graph that simply says across 25 workloads there is a mean of a 19 instruction per clock cycle uplift i think ipc is a topic that gets tossed around a term that gets mentioned a lot but maybe some of you don't understand exactly what ipc means instructions per clock cycle simply means how much work can be done each time the cpu flips its transistors on and off now billions of cycles per second is a lot think of a light switch you go over to a light switch and go okay turn on turn off turn on turn off now let's do that four billion times per second that's impressive now let's do that across billions of light switches billions of times how these things even work is just truly remarkable effectively ipc means this a ryzen 9 3900x at 4 gigahertz will do less work than a ryzen 9 5900x at 4 gigahertz let's be clear about that point at the same clock speed the new zen 3 chips do more productive work think of this you're out in a field with a shovel and you've got a shovel and you can scoop dirt and every time you scoop dirt you move a certain amount of dirt now there's two factors that affect how much dirt you can move how fast you can move the shovel and how big the scoop on the shovel is clock speed is the speed with which you can shovel the dirt ipc is how big the shovel is if you can make the shovel 19 larger then you can move 19 percent more dirt without improving your speed now if you can improve your speed and the size of the shovel well now you see we're going with this because the boost speeds on zen 3 are higher than zen 2 and the shovel was made bigger this graph shows the change in ccx layout in zen 2 we've got two four core chips essentially glued together with the cache in the center in zen three we have eight cores in a single module with a combined 32 megabytes of level three cache and then of course all the stuff at the bottom this is a very important point in zen 2 four cores can access 16 megs of cash if they want to access the other 16 megs of cash they have to go through infinity fabric there's a latency penalty in doing so it reduces the amount of cash available to each individual core without a latency penalty across the infinity fabric on zen 3 cores now have direct access to 32 gigabytes of cash without any latency penalty that is going to make a difference not across every application every game every program but it is going to make a difference and it's part of the reason of the ipc uplift in zen3 leadership power efficiency i honestly have to say this one's a bit of a dig towards intel because intel has preached their efficiency gains and their low power chips and laptops and ultrabooks and zen books for a number of years and the fact that amd is currently winning this battle is uh shall we say rather interesting i do want to call your attention to the fact that the largest gain was the move from first generation ryzen otherwise known as zen to zen two we had a 2x improvement in performance per watt going to zen 3 it's still an improvement but it's not the same big leap forward now this is understandable from zen to zen 2 we went from 14 nanometers to seven but on z3 we're still at seven nanometers so what were you expecting having the power cost that's not how any of this works but we should see a nice power reduction for the same performance when zen 4 comes on five nanometer this right here has to burn a little bit over on team blue now let me just preface this right up front by saying i like the i9 10 900k i mean it i know it uses a lot of power and it's not the cheapest thing in the world but the truth of the matter is having spent a reasonable amount of time since may of 2020 using the thing it's fast it's incredibly responsive you open programs you open a web browser you launch a game you run updaters windows update virus scan you've got music in the background you're playing a youtube video it is very responsive i love ryzen but the truth of the matter is the i9 10 900k is a touch faster and is a touch more responsive than the ryzen 9 3900x not by a lot i can tell the difference going back and forth between them because i literally have both machines sitting next to each other and i can walk over to one and do something and walk to the other and do something and i can kind of go hmm you know and i could so when you're looking at it that closely you can kind of sort of start to pick out what each one does well you can almost over pick out what they do well because if you're just using one the differences become free if i was to be honest they're minor the truth is you'd be happy with either one however the fact that amd is now claiming 2.8 times power efficiency per watt over the i9 10900 k with the ryzen 950 900x that's a lot and yes the i9 10900k uses stupid levels of power so advantage amd introducing the ryzen 9 5900 x 12 course 24 threads up to 4.8 gigahertz boost 70 megabytes of level 2 and 3 cache that's the same as the 3900x and a 105 watt tdp that is also the same as the 3900x it is a faster max boost here's what we don't know what we don't know is what is the typical all-core boost what does it really do when you're playing games what does it really do when you run a ryzen 9 3900x in the real world runs at 4.2 gigahertz plus or minus 50 megahertz under most circumstances in most normal workloads if you put it under a full artificially simulated avx 512 workload then yes it does slow down a bit runs about 4.0 gigahertz unless you manually boost it in the bios these are minor differences so it certainly doesn't run at the speed that is printed on the box now what's interesting is the same is true of the lower level chips a ryzen 7 3700x and a ryzen 5 x also run at 4.2 gigahertz out of the box plus or minus 50 megahertz and they also slow down to 4 gigahertz even when put under a full avx workload the 3600 nx chip is 200 megahertz slower and the xt chips the 3800 xt and 3900 xt are one to 200 megahertz faster all of these are pretty minor differences to be truthful they look nice in benchmarks but they're pretty minor all things considered with these new chips with the 5900x now it's marked as having a max 4.8 gigahertz turbo it is not going to run at that speed out of the box what will it run at my gut tells me 4.5 but i do not know that for sure that's just what i would expect it to do based upon prior experience maybe it'll do 4.6 maybe it'll be 4.4 either way it will be faster than the 3900x in both clock speed and ipc here we have 10 games tested between a ryzen 9 3900x and a ryzen 9 5900x right at 1080p okay i'm sure these numbers are all accurate for whatever scenario they tested how many of you are buying a 500 cpu to play league of legends at 1080p raise your hand if that is you okay the two chuckleheads in the back can put their hand down that's silly nobody is doing that so while it's interesting who cares furthermore i would make the same argument for f1 2019 cs go and honestly just in general in most circumstances i said earlier the far cry new dawn result impressed me the most and the truth of the matter is it does a 22 performance improvement okay it's at 1080p but we're testing cpus here that brings it pretty close to intel now i suspect an i9 10 900k is still going to beat amd here in the real world outside of their tests but you never know well i promise you we will test that cinebench r20 is one of amd's favorite benchmarks why it favors amd cpus i would use it too if i was wanting to show off how wonderful my cpus are that being said credit is due where credit is due the fact of the matter is 631 is an amazing single core score on a ryzen 9 5900 x and given that that's a fairly simple easy repeatable straightforward cpu benchmark i'm going to call this one as accurate i'm sure that if you want to do blender rendering you found your cpus here you can see the ryzen 9 5900x compared to the i9 10 900k and again 1080p resolution which is absurd for 500r cpus none of you should be doing that but well it's certainly an impressive looking chart it'll be interesting to see what it looks like in 1440p with a different graphics card selection and different detail settings it is a very bold claim to say the ryzen 9 5900x is the world's best gaming cpu one of intel's great claims to fame for some time has been we make the fastest gaming cpu in the world yes i'm channeling my inner jeremy clarkston but the fact of the matter is amd is now claiming they make the fastest one in the world we'll all find out on november 5th we finally come to the prices and your eyes do not deceive you we have a price increase yes the ryzen 5 5600x is now 299. the 3600x was 249 at launch this is a 50 price increase in fact we have a 50 price increase across the board the ryzen 7 5800x is 449 as compared to the ryzen 7 3800x which was 399 at launch anybody notice there's no 5700x maybe we'll get one in the future after launch perhaps they're figuring they don't need to right now with a limited number of dies and supplies they want to sell the best ones available for the highest price don't blame them amd could definitely use some profits but there is a fairly large price gap between 300 and 450 which i'm sure will be filled at some point in the future but there is no 5700 or 5700 x coming at launch if you want zen 3 and 8 cores it's not going to be cheap and then on the very top of this particular slide we have the ryzen 9 5900x which is 549 a 50 increase over the 499 launch price of the ryzen 9 3900 3900x but it's also a fairly substantial price increase over the street price of the 3900x now as i'm recording this video the street price of the 3900x is 429 that's what it is on amazon that's what it is on newegg at least on the day of the announcement however over the past couple of weeks and months it has been less we've done live streams all throughout the summer of 2020 and it's been available for between 389 and 409 at either amazon or newegg at various points throughout the summer so i'm just going to call its street price or street value roughly 400 putting a 400 value on it we have a hundred and fifty dollar price difference between the real world price of the 3900x and the launch msrp of a 5900x which it certainly will cost at launch it'll go down at some point i'm sure it'll hit 499 at some point after launch they usually do but is it worth a hundred and fifty dollars more well we'll find out on november uh fifth because we definitely will test that because one of the questions everybody's going to say is well should i go ahead and get zen 3 or should i buy zen 2 and is the savings you know is the performance worth the extra cost or should i save the money and get something less expensive then we also have black friday coming up now this isn't really part of the launch announcement and this will age poorly when we're past black friday but i do want to toss out a thought black friday last year we had amazing deals on amd cpus in 2019 and 2018 and 2017 black friday brought amazing amd cpu deals will we see zen 2 cpus discounted heavily then i actually don't think we will come back and leave a comment after black friday and you could tell me whether i was right or wrong but i actually don't think we're going to see those level of discounts they don't have to because zen 2 is very competitive it's very close to intel they're very good cpus we'll see some discounts but i don't think we're going to see 199.37 x i don't think we're gonna see a 299 3900x they just have no need to sell them that cheap if we can get like a 349.3900x or a 249.30 those would be pretty compelling compared to these launch prices we'll do dollar cost per frame per second charts and testing and we will take a look at that in detail when we have uh real street pricing and availability of both zen 2 and zen 3 when they launch the other thing i want to bring your attention to on these cpus is only the ryzen 5 comes with a boxed cooler the ryzen 7 and ryzen 9 do not amd has come to the realization that people who buy 500 r cpus put aftermarket cooling on them and the wraith prism rgb as nice as it is simply isn't really all that competitive on these new high power cpus so you'll have to factor in the price of an add-on cooler in addition to the cpu performance per dollar is an interesting metric i've done it in a variety of videos in the past dollar cost per frame per second and so on i wish we had the true raw numbers here rather than just graphs with no baselines or percentages because these don't really tell you anything there's no hard data to do any analysis i would draw your attention to the bottom of the screen they're showing 549 for the ryzen 9 5900x and 529 for the i9 10 900k well here's the thing the i9 10900k is virtually impossible to find it has been out of stock all summer long and really it's been replaced by the i9 10 850k what is the difference between the 10 900k and 10 850k nothing nothing you'll care about the only difference is the thermal velocity boost is 5.2 gigahertz on a 10 850 k and 5.3 gigahertz on a 10 900k i have both i've shown them to you in previous live streams in the real world there's no difference between the chips there's no difference between the overclocking unless you have ridiculous monster cooling expensive motherboards and you really just pour stupid levels of money to get another one or 200 megahertz out of it the truth of the matter is they both run up five gigahertz really well they'll run at 5.1 if you push it a bit 5.2 takes everything they've got and 5.3 5.3 is ridiculous it just you just run into a temperature voltage wall that is like running into a brick wall and it's very hard to do i've settled on five gigahertz even on all of my tests because it's a reasonable temperature with a reasonable cooling requirement and it's really only 100 megahertz boost over the 4.9 all core turbo of both chips but that's not the point the point that i want to draw your attention to is the fact that the i9 10 850 k is not 529 in fact for a week during the game tober sale on newegg it was available for 455. that's pretty interesting because that kind of price drop can move these graphs by quite a bit of course it still has a pretty hefty cooling requirement if you add in the price of a 360 millimeter liquid cooler versus say a 70 tower cooler on the ryzen 9 that kind of eliminates the price differ i get that we'll have to see how much cooling the ryzen 9 5900 actually requires but keep in mind that they're comparing msrp to msrp here and that's not really a fair comparison in some regards the i7 to ryzen 7 comparison is more fair take a look at this the i7 10 700k is listed at 409 this has certainly been cheaper but it has not been dramatically cheaper it's been 379 389 a bunch any cheaper than that is a really odd sale so we're only looking at a very minor discount it doesn't require as much cooling as the i9 does but it still requires a fairly decent cooler to get five gigahertz out of it and then we come to oh boy have i got something to say here this deserves a video on of itself the i5 10 600k versus the ryzen 5 5600x for 300 each it is 20 20. if you are spending 300 on a 6 core 12 fred chip that is 4 plus gigahertz for premium performance 2017 called and would like their i7 8700k back last but certainly not least is the ryzen 9 5950x 16 cores 32 threads and holy smokes 4.9 gigahertz up to max boost speed translation 4.6 may be all core unless you overclock it but depending on the power of delivery and depending on the motherboard you have and depending on the cooling you have maybe you can overclock it can you manually overclock it to five gigahertz i am willing to bet no but i am prepared to be surprised we will try i will put a decent large cooler on it and find out because if you can get 16 cores and 32 threads at 5 gigahertz even if you have to throw a 360 millimeter liquid cooler on it that'll be mighty impressive and for content creators this may very well make threadripper or cascade lake x unnecessary unless you need the quad channel ram and the pci express lanes for something else but from a raw performance point of view i've used a number of threadrippers and this may very well provide a reason to skip those this time around the only downside price amd provides a content creation performance and a gaming performance chart between the 3950x and the 5950x and you could pause the video if you want to see it but moving on now they compare the i9 10 900k with the ryzen 9 5900x for what it's worth consider the fact that the i-9 10 850 k which is what we should be talking about has been around 450 at times over the course of the past month and this is an 800 cpu from amd what are they showing and comparing i don't know moving on unlike with zen 2 all the cpus are launching at the same time available november 5th for 799 perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of this entire launch no new motherboards that is right the x570 and the b550 are it when it comes to the am4 platform the zen 3 chips are the last of am4 and the 500 series motherboards are the last of the motherboards there will be bios updates but no new chipset the 600 series the x 670 and the b650 will be zen 4 and am5 in about a year it is worth noting that if you have a 500 series board with a bios of igesa 1.0.8.0 or newer you can post and boot right now to a zen 3. at launch users should upgrade to a bios with a gisa 1.1.0.0 yes those are ridiculously long for the best experience so there have been motherboards available for some time now that came out of the box ready to run for these most if not every single b550 board out of the box should support zen 3 without a problem early x570s will not however a large number of x570s come with bios flashback where you can update the bios using a usb thumb drive with a specifically named bios file put into a very specific usb port press a button and it updates the bios for you and of course if you're upgrading from an older cpu then you should upgrade your bios before you upgrade your cpu because otherwise it doesn't work the other way around it is important to note that amd has backtracked on their original comments from earlier in the year the original guidance that amd offered was nose n3 on 300 or 400 series chipsets they have reversed that that announcement's not really new and they will be supporting zen 3 on select 400 series boards it's up to the motherboard manufacturer as to whether or not the motherboard manufacturer wants to update them it is also important to note that the 400 series will not support zen 3 at launch selective beta bios updates will become available around a month after launch give or take a little bit it's going to certainly depend upon how responsive and how quick each of the motherboard manufacturers is and those early bios updates will support it in the sense that they will boot and run it does not mean and i hope everybody is listening very clearly because if you have a 400 series motherboard you should listen to me it does not mean that you will get the max turbo it does not mean that you will get the max power efficiency it does not mean that you will get the max performance it means it will boot and it will run but there's a lot of internal things in the bios that control the turbo boost and the power consumption and the responsiveness and how the cpu operates with the chipset in short they have to do some optimization work to clean it up my guess if i was a motherboard manufacturer is that i would make my most popular selling motherboards and my most expensive motherboards compatible first and i would optimize those the most and my oem boards and my cheap motherboards i would do last and i would honestly optimize them the least a good example if you are a seuss you would take your asus rug strix for example and you would make sure that works as soon as possible those are very expensive motherboards they're very nice and you want to make sure that your customers are happy on the other hand there are some very cheap 79 and 89 dash a b 450 motherboards with very little vrm cooling and very few features that were sold really cheap there in a lot of oem systems and those will probably get obeyed by dos update and they will probably get very little optimization because those aren't the kinds of customers who are likely to install a ryzen 9 5900x in their 79 motherboard nor should you that's kind of silly but you might be tempted to install a ryzen 530 a ryzen 5 5600x i'll have to get used to these numbers and i don't know that i'd be jumping up and down to do that either here's my advice until we know more wait until at least a month post launch if you have a 400 series motherboard before you consider buying any of these things we need to see where the chips lay when it comes to bios updates you might want to wait until sometime in 2021 let them release two or three rounds of 400 series chipset bios updates before you go out and change your bios and change your motherboard unless you take a perfectly good working system and turn it into a non-working system that's likely to happen at least once i had that happen to me on more than one system taking 300 series chipsets and putting zen 2 on them i eventually sorted every one of them out and got them all working but i had more than one premium x370 motherboard brick in the process one from asus one from gigabyte both over two hundred dollars neither of one which should have but thankfully they both had bios flashback and that saved it because otherwise that was not going to be a pretty day it sounds great to upgrade your cpu it really does it works sometimes it works right out of the box i have had it work first try without a problem i have done a lot of upgrades on a lot of different boards i upgraded my capture machine for example has an msi b450 tomahawk not the max the first version and that's what this chip is currently installed in because it's not on the box and i updated the bios put the chip in and it worked simple as that we had an msi x470 gaming plus that went from a 1700x to a 3700x update the bios put the chip in worked first try without complaint although i would point out those were 400 series boards going to zen 2 not 300 series boards a relentless pace of innovation ryzen 5000 series delivers what gamers want across all the metrics amd is the market leader at least according to amd slide i know i'm shocked insert homeowner mccullen culkin face but they might be right this is an impressive list i have to say kudos two gold stars to amd dr lisa and her team have done amazing things in the past four years and all i can say is thank you amd as a bit of a tease amd put a shot here of one of the upcoming 6000 series of radeon graphics cards and provided three little benchmarks at 4k which makes sense if this is in fact what it's supposed to be then if this is going to be comparable to an rtx 3080 these numbers look impressive it's uh just a bit of a tease until the actual launch comes on october 28th and when it does i promise you we will cover it well that concludes all the amd slides here's the short version the ryzen 9 5900x looks amazing and i'm very excited the 50 price increase over the ryzen 9 3900x at least in terms of launch prices yeah it sucks but i understand the lack of a cooler sucks even more although i don't like the cooler that the 3900x came with because it's loud in my opinion it does cool effectively but it's hot and it's loud and so we've always replaced them with aftermarket cooling the bigger issue is street prices if a 3900x is under 400. you might actually want a 3900x and then let me expand that further if you have a 300 or 400 series motherboard you may have to go with zen 2 if you want an upgrade because if you have a 300 series then zen 3 isn't even an option and probably never will be unless something changes but probably not and if you have a 400 series chipset who knows when proper stable support actually comes so if you have a ryzen 5 1600 if you have a ryzen 7 1700 and you've been waiting to upgrade you've been thinking zen 3's coming i bought the first generation ryzen i will wait for the last generation of ryzen on am4 and then i'll i'll make the biggest upgrade and then i'll keep that for a few years well if you have a 300 series motherboard guess what you're not doing that so what you might want to do is you might want to wait for the holidays and you might want to watch for sale prices on zen 2 because if you can pick up a ryzen 5 3600 for 150 a ryzen 7 3700x for 250 maybe less and if you can pick up a ryzen 9 3900x too many different numbers for 350 or less those may be good prices for you to go ahead and upgrade your 300 series board and just accept i'm just not getting zen 3 and that's the way it is and then you can use those cpus for another two or three years and then am5 will be out ddr5 will be out pci express gen 5 will be out and all new chips and all new stuff on the five nanometer production process and then you can consider upgrading again in a couple of years the 5800x oh boy um hi amd guy uh i apologize profusely if this upsets you in any regard uh the the 3800x is not priced right in my opinion because 450 is too much for that there is only a 100 price difference between a 5800x and a 5900x and the fact that that is basically a 20 price difference a little bit off but it's about a 20 price difference but it's a 50 core difference and a 50 performance difference assuming a perfectly multi-threaded workload why would you spend 450 on an eight core chip when 550 buys a 12 court chip now your response might be well i don't do workloads that require 12 core chips fair enough you might not but you probably will in the next three plus years the world is going that direction the new game consoles have eight core 16 threads and two cpus think of them as a non x version of a 3700 so the 299 dollar xbox series s has a 3.5 gigahertz eight core 16 thread zen two and you're going to spend 450 on an eight core 16 thread zen three that's 25 30 faster even if it's 50 percent faster yeah um i'm really struggling with that one if it were 50 less i'd feel differently at 399 i'd like it more and then we've got the ryzen 5 5600x which for 300 yeah um 249 would have been a better price on that one and then we have the ryzen 9 59 50 x which 800 doesn't bother me to be honest the the 3950x the 16 core chip was 749 street is currently 700 i would not spend 700 on a 39 50 x right now i don't even know if i'd spend 600 i'd have to really think about it if you're at that level if you have a need for 16 core chip which just pure gamers don't right now they will eventually but not within the next couple of years that's really reaching it's nice if you have the money you know go for it but the the thing is if you've got the kind of need that requires a ish hundred dollar processor 750 and 800 are the same number effectively you're putting them in a 250 dollar motherboard you're putting 64 or 128 gigs of ram you have multiple terabytes of storage you have a really nice video card you have a nice case and a power supply because if you're buying a 16 core chip you run a youtube video and do 4k 60 frames per second video uploads i mean it doesn't really have any use beyond content creation software development etc and so 50 one way or another is not going to change the outcome all things considered i've benchmarked and tested the 3950x it's amazing i'm sure the 5950x will be amazing we'll test it but yeah as you go down on the product stack i'm bothered by the prices a bit more i'm not bothered by the lack of new motherboards the 500 series motherboards are great the features are great the capabilities are great they are a dramatic improvement over the 300 and 400 series boards i like them so that's awesome and as far as what you should do i'm gonna save upgrade analysis for a future video because everything else it you start getting into speculation at some point i've already done tons of speculation in this video i'll give you one thought if you have a zen 2 you don't need a zen 3. if you have a zen 1 you might but your motherboard might prevent you if you have an older chip these things are going to be awesome the only question then becomes do you buy a full-priced zen 3 at or near launch or do you buy a discounted zen 2 or do you wait for the first quarter of 2021 when intel will be launching the 11th generation rocket lake cpus which will install an existing 400 series intel motherboards and for the first time in six years they are finally introducing something besides a skylake core many people don't realize this but 6th 7th 8th 9th and 10th generation intel desktop cpus are all the same core they have more cores they've improved the clock speed they've made minor iterative improvements to them over the years but the truth of the matter is a four gigahertz i7 6700k and a four gigahertz any tenth generation chip quarter core clock to clock is more or less the same cpu they've obviously gone to 10 cores they've also gone to 5.3 gigahertz but they haven't changed the course rocket lake or 11th gen coming next year willow co of course the first ipc improvement from intel in quite so at least on the desktop they've the past year or two has had that in the laptop side and there is a legit improvement there of course there's 12th gen alder lake and 4th quarter 2021 which is a really fast iterative launch that's a topic for a future video like this video if you like it share it with your friends if you love it remember to subscribe to the channel with the big huge red button directly below questions comments thoughts feedback suggestions you know where the comment section is type away i am dying to hear your feedback on this one and then there's links in the video description below which i will link to what i can obviously this m3 stuff doesn't exist but i can link to the zen 2 and as stuff goes on sale if you found this video helpful useful informative and interesting those are affiliate links to amazon newegg and ebay they support the channel at no extra cost to you if you click them before you buy something even if it's a jar of peanut butter believe it or not it does help we get paid a commission on it and it helps us do all this cool stuff including this sponsor free video which took me a while to do because i did not script it i just got here with the laptop and all the notes and started talking my apologies for the length of it but what can i say i'm trying to get this up within 24 hours of the announcement and so this is the quickest way i could think to do it thank you all so much for watching i will see all of you next time you\n"