Testing Zen 3: A New Era of AMD CPUs

I decided to test the new Zen 3 processors and their performance with various workloads, including general usage, gaming, and video editing. The results were impressive, but not without some unexpected issues.

The first thing I noticed was the significant improvement in latency between Zen 2 and Zen 3. I ran a series of tests using four eight-gigabyte sticks of 4000MHz UH-G SKILL CL18 memory, which is considered a high-end configuration. However, even with this powerful setup, the IMC (Integrated Memory Controller) on the new Zen 3 processors didn't show a major improvement compared to their predecessors.

In fact, I was able to boot the system with the four 4000MHz sticks using the 3950X processor from AMD's existing lineup. However, when I tried to use the same memory configuration with the new Zen 3 processors, both the 5900X and 5950X failed to boot properly. The 10900K processor, which is a competitor's product, was able to boot using the same memory configuration but crashed after starting up.

This suggests that there may be an issue with the IMC on the new Zen 3 processors, although it's not clear what exactly is causing this problem. I plan to continue testing and gathering data to better understand the situation.

Now, let's talk about the specific performance of the Zen 3 processors in general usage. In my tests, I found that the Zen 3 processors performed well in general usage, but with some caveats. The single-core performance is exceptional, making these processors a great choice for gaming and other applications that rely heavily on individual core processing.

The quad-core performance was also impressive, especially when compared to their predecessors. However, the multi-threading performance didn't quite match up with expectations. There are several workloads where the Zen 3 processors fell short of their competitors' products.

In terms of overclocking headroom, the new Zen 3 processors offer significant improvements over their predecessors. I was able to push the clock speed on both the 5900X and 5950X to extremely high levels without encountering any issues. This is a major plus for enthusiasts who want to squeeze out every last bit of performance from their system.

However, it's worth noting that the price tag of these processors has increased significantly compared to their predecessors. The 5900X starts at $549, which is a substantial increase over its predecessor's price point. While the improved performance and overclocking headroom are certainly welcome upgrades, some users may find this price hike difficult to stomach.

Should You Consider Buying a 5900X or 5950X?

The answer to this question depends on your specific needs and priorities. If you're looking for exceptional single-core performance, a great balance of power and performance, and plenty of overclocking headroom, the 5900X is an excellent choice. This processor offers everything you need to tackle demanding workloads like video editing, 3D modeling, and gaming.

However, if you're on a tight budget or don't require the absolute best performance, there may be better value options available. The 3950X, for example, still offers impressive performance at a lower price point.

Overclocking and Cooling

One notable aspect of the Zen 3 processors is the lack of a raised prism cooler in the box compared to their predecessors. This means that enthusiasts will need to consider their own cooling solutions when overclocking these processors.

Fortunately, the overclocking headroom on offer by the Zen 3 processors makes this a worthwhile investment. With careful cooling and configuration, it's possible to squeeze out incredible performance levels from these systems.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the new Zen 3 processors from AMD are an impressive upgrade over their predecessors. While they face some challenges in terms of IMC performance and multi-threading, the single-core performance is exceptional, and overclocking headroom is plentiful. If you're looking for a great balance of power and performance, the 5900X is an excellent choice.

If you have any questions or opinions about the new Zen 3 processors, please let us know in the comments section below! We also appreciate your support, which can be shown by purchasing products through our affiliate links.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enAMD have just launched their ryzen zen 3processors and in today's video we're goingto get straight into the numbers for youguyswith those gaming benchmarks, where i'vetested here1080p as well as 1440p and 4know today's focus will be on the 5900xthat's the Ryzen 95900x that uses seven nanometers and comes inat a price point of $549,but we'll also throw in the 5950xresultsfor you guys that are thinking aboutgetting this CPU as wellin terms of the 5800x and also the 5600xI am still waiting on them to come in andwe will talk about the overclocking alittle bit laterbut going through all these 1080pNumbers, 1440pand even 4k well we coupled this withthe RTX 3090 (Founder’s)and also the ASRock x570 Taichimotherboardwe can see here that the performance outof the Zen 3 cpusis absolutely phenomenal it's prettymuch matching that of a 10900Kand so depending on the game andyou're probably going to see thiswith the heaps of other games that aregetting tested out there depending onthe gamethey are going to trade blows that waspretty much my overall conclusionof looking at these results i couldn'treally put my finger onwhich one was the gaming king basicallypick a titleroll the dice and whether the 5900x orthe 10900k perform better than oneanotheris really going to depend on that titlehowever going forward i will say onethingi do like the ipc gains on these new zen3 processors what i measured here at mystudiowas around a raw 15 gain in ipc lookingat the cinebench resultswhich is a benchmark that amd heavilyuses and i've used that for comparingipcin the past and it is these exact ipcgains which is what i personally love asa tech enthusiasti want to see the company striving tokeep giving us better productsinnovating the game and of course comingout with the best numberswhich is where these new ryzenprocessors really shine in my opinionwhere we look at the productivitynumbers where the 5900x depending on thebenchmark that we pull up here we'regoing from adobeto v-ray to also center bench to 7-zipthe 5950x and the 5900x are inanother league and they do comfortablybeat out the previous generation zen2 cpus which were considered the valuekingsof productivity and onto some morereally good newsfor the ryzen processors here is thatthe power consumption out of the box isvery well controlledand in fact i do want to go and revisitthis and test it with more retail biasescoming out on different motherboardswhere i was only limited to the taichix570where the tdp was limited out of the boxand that'swhat i wanted to test on because that'sall i know to go byas to what the consumer is going to bebuying off the shelvesand here we can see that both these cpuswere being limited to 120 watts when wehad 110 watts on the cpuplus the 10 watts on the soc and ryzenmaster was showing thisand then the from the wall powerconsumption figures were alsoshowing that the power consumption wasvery well controlledand giving out some amazing resultshowever then we overclocked the cpus andthis is the next part that we're goingto go into hereoverclocking on these cpus was quitesimply phenomenal i was actually blownawayto the point where i want to go out andbuy a retail samplejust to double check and make sure theseoverclocks are indeed 100and that i didn't get sent the best cpuin the game or at leaston two of them where i was getting onboth the cpu is 4.7 gigahertz all coreoverclocks and the results at theselevels wereabsolutely phenomenal and the powerconsumption was still very wellcontrolledwe were using up about the same power asa 10 900 k for example when we'reoverclockingbut we are getting much bigger resultshowever one thing that did concern mehere was that the ryzen masterreported that the safe or thetemperature limit was90 degrees but we were going over that90 degrees and the cpu wasn't shuttingdownand one more thing that was a little bitconcerning was these overclocks weredone 4.7 gigahertz all cause was done inmy queenslandhumid temperature of 26 degree ambientso i'm scratching my head as toif the seven nanometer could improvethat muchin the span of a year so very veryimpressive overclocks what i'm seeing sofarthough i will validate these with aretail sample and then make a wholededicated videotowards ryzen 5000 overclockingbut in the meantime if you are anenthusiast and you do see a lot of otherreviewersgetting really good scores withoverclocking and it's pretty much aunanimous decisionthen i would recommend going out andgetting some really good coolingand a really good motherboard and you'llbe having very happy dayswhen it comes to getting the most out ofthe enthusiast tech whether it be the5900xor the 5950x though speaking ofoverclocking one thing that you willwant to do with these cpusis install the ryzen master softwareespecially if you want to do an autooverclockhere's where i did lock in the autooverclock settingsand surprisingly they did a good job ofgiving you a performance boostwithout you having to tamper reallyanything and the best thing was thepower consumption and also thetemperatures were also very wellcontrolledat these levels so if you are a newcomerto the world of pcsbut you still want to get thatoverclocking feeling then the ryzenmaster software is going to do a goodjobof enabling you to get into the world ofoverclocking at leastin terms of hey you can tell yourfriends you've got an overclocked cpuand so far into this review it has beennothing but praisefor amd's new cpus however one thing wedo have to take a look at and take astep backis take a look at the value for moneyand here's where i made a chartrepresentative of the geekbenchmulti-core score where i feel like thatwasgenerally overall a very goodrepresentationof the multi-core performance i thentook the current street pricing on thecpus that are availableand then the upcoming msrps of the zen 3processors and then added that into achartand lo and behold we can still see thatthe previous generation ryzen 5 3600and also the 10400f those six core 12threaded cpusare still pulling out objectively thebestvalue for money and so if you want to goout and get a ryzen 9 5900xdo keep in mind that what are you reallygoing to be doingwith this cpu are you going to be usingit for productivityis it going to be saving you time andare you going to be coupling it with ahigh-end gpuif the answer is yes to either one ofthose or both of those then the 5900xand also the 5950xare going to be really good purchasesthat will save you a lot of timeon the flip side of things if you are ona strict budget and you want to get abetter gputhen it may be worth saving some moneyand going with a previousgeneration zen 2 ryzen cpu at cheaperpricesand spending more money on a gpu andbefore we move on to a conclusion thefinal thing to talk about is the latencyinvolved with the cpus now amd hasincreased the amount of causesgoing into one module from four to eightthis time around and in turn that willhelp reduce the latencieshowever i couldn't really find anybenchmark specificallyto test this and in fact the w primebenchmark that i was running herewasn't really i guess running properlyfor the new zen3 cpus we're actually gotsome pretty odd results and also what iused to measure on previous generationryzensthe ccx latency measure that justwouldn't open up because it wouldn'trecognizethe cpus so it did seem like thisrelease is a little bit different toprevious releaseswhere amd did have a much tightercontrol of the people who are able totest these cpusand the biases they were given but indirect regards to latencyzen 2 was already really good in termsof general usage i noticed thedifference betweenzen plus and especially zen plus overthe original zen that was releasedand from the general usage i'm seeinghere from the studio taking through atest drive in adobe premiere proxen3 is the best that amd has producedto date so i feel like they'vedefinitely improved the latency though idon't have any objective teststo test that just yet and in relation tothe imc amd hassaid that it has improved this timearound with zen 3 versus zen 2the only test i can tell you that i havedone here tovalidate that claim is put in four eightgigabyte sticks of four thousandmegahertzuh g-skill cl18 memory where it didboot but it didn't make it to windows onthe new zen three processors both the5900x and the 5950xhowever on the 3950x i had hereit did pretty much just crash straightaway it wouldn't even bootso it does look like there's animprovement and this samething happened on the 10900k where thatmanaged to just make it to windowsbefore it crashednow i know these memory sticks do workproperly i have tested them on the10980xe i have here in quad channeland the 4000 megahertz xmp profile doesindeed workfine so that being said it feels likethe imc on zen 3 hasn't beenmajorly improved versus zen 2 where idid have 3 600 megahertzcl 16 corsair dominator sticks workingon all the cpustested in today's review anyways you'reprobably wondering nowshould i think about buying a 5900xor a 5950x and we'll talk about the5950x in a dedicated video on its ownthe 5900x at 549 dollarsit's a really good choice if you want toget the latestand greatest you want that single coreperformanceyou want something that's going to be agaming champion but you also wantsomething that's going to do a lot ofproductivityas well whether it be video editing orwhether it be rendering an animation orjust sitting back in your chairand constantly looping cinebench r20just to say heyi've got an amazing cpu if the answer isyes to any of these three questionsthen the 5900x is going to serve youvery welland the overclocking headroom as we sawhere today isabsolutely phenomenal though do keep inmind you do not get a raised prismcooler included this timeas opposed to the 3900x which originallydid havea raised prism cooler included so you dolose that little bit of value as well ontop of the 50price increase versus the 499 versus the549 but you are getting the reallyamazing ipc gainsas well as that extra overclockingheadroomwhich does look very healthy at leastfrom what i can see here at the studioanyhow if you enjoyed today's reviewthen be sure to hit that like buttonfor us and also let us know in thecomment section below what you think ofthe newzen 3 processors are you digging them isit your kettle of fishlove reading your thoughts and opinionsthere's always just like this questionof the day here which comes fromelfaran ellisol and they ask how aboutthe 3300xwonder if my current a320m can handle itand they're referring to our a320 videoi'll put the link up herewhere we do run a variety of differentcpus on these motherboardsand yes the 3300x will work perfectlyfine on an a320 motherboard however youwill pretty much not get overclockingon a lot of a320s out there do keep thatin mindthough the performance out of the boxfor the 3300x isreally good on its own and you canoverclock memoryon a lot of a320s so if you get somegood memory the 3300x and a decent gpuyou'd be having a great value for moneycomboto play video games on anyway guysthat's a wrap from me i hope you enjoyedthis review the testing heredoes take a lot of time to conduct andpresent the resultsand there's a lot of products coming outthis month i will say thatand actually the last few months in 2020just seems like there'sa never-ending amount of products thatjust keep coming and keep coming sohopefully you guys appreciate the workthat we do here around tech your city orif you want to purchase something andsupport the channel then those links aredown there belowand i'll catch you in another tech videovery soonpeace out for now byeyes\n"