AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review

Re:AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review by linkgoron on Thursday November 14, 2019 @05:26PM (#21540177)

You could just buy a CPU for a third or fourth of the price if you want to just browse. You don't need a $750 16-core CPU. You can buy a $200 9600KF or a $240 3600x or something even cheaper. For anything multi-core the 3950X blows the 9900k out of the water, and for 1440p gaming the 3950x trades blows with the 9900k. If you want 1080p gaming, or web-browsing, this is not the CPU for you. That said, even for 1080p gaming and single-threaded benchmarks the 3950 is usually within a few percent of the 9900K.

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Re:AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review by seminatl on Thursday November 14, 2019 @05:36PM (#21540256)

Ok but if it’s “trading blows with” and “within a few percent of” a CPU costing half the money, why is it rational to prefer it?

I know why I want AMD parts and that is because of ECC memory support but this article doesn’t even mention it.

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Re:AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review by linkgoron on Thursday November 14, 2019 @05:52PM (#21540387)

First of all, the 9900k doesn't cost half the money. Second, you can also buy a 3900x if you want 12 threads with similar ST characteristics and pricing closer to the 9900k. There are other options.

If you want to game @ 1080p and do mostly single threaded work (without parallelism), this CPU is not for you. If do a lot of single-threaded jobs in parallel (for example, gaming + being a server or gaming and streaming) or anything multi-threaded, this CPU destroys the 9900k, while being just a bit weaker when doing just one or two single-threaded tasks.

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Re:AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review by seminatl on Thursday November 14, 2019 @05:59PM (#21540445)

Look I'm not arguing about which CPU is better. I'm arguing that taking the geometric mean of a bunch of completely unrelated benchmarks doesn't make any sense. There are clearly workloads in this very article where a cheaper part is better, sometimes even a cheaper AMD part.

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Re:AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review by linkgoron on Thursday November 14, 2019 @06:07PM (#21540513)

And the article states clearly: "[the Core i9-9900KS] does pull out ahead in a number of ST tests as well as in low resolution (CPU-bound) gaming."

Regarding the geomean, they clearly state that their benchmarks prioritize multi-core benchmarks: "This metric also puts the 3900X above the 9900KS, because despite the 5.0 GHz all-core on 8-cores, moving to 12-core and 16-core at almost the same performance per core gives more of an advantage in our test suite's MT-heavy workloads."

They're not hiding behind anything. Everything is clearly stated.

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