Ryzen Release Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd...u-review/6

The Ryzen XT lineup arrives to do battle with Intel's Comet Lake, but while the new chips do provide measurable performance gains over their predecessors, you'll need to run very specific workloads to justify the increased costs associated with the cooler-less Ryzen 9 3900XT and Ryzen 7 3800XT. That's complicated by the fact that the existing X-series models already retail at great price points, giving AMD plenty of competition from within its own ranks.
...
If gaming is your primary focus, you'll be better served with less expensive Ryzen alternatives, like the Ryzen 7 3700X or the Ryzen 5 3600X that currently retail for $270 and $249, respectively. Those chips come with bundled coolers that can save you money on an aftermarket cooler, and they offer the lion's share of XT's performance at far lower price points. Intel's ~$275 Core i5-10600K is also a solid gaming option that currently leads our list of Best CPUs.

We run a broad spate of applications that span from the mundane to the professional. Still, we didn't record many outstanding performance gains that justify the 3900XT and 3800XT's pricing (or lack of bundled coolers) for most day-to-day desktop PC applications. The chips are measurably faster in some tests, but in many cases, the deltas are slight and fall close to the standard deviation of the benchmarks.

Our frequency measurements exposed strong potential with the 3900XT and 3800XT's single-threaded boost clocks, but real-world testing didn't register as much of a benefit. Motherboard and firmware differences can have an impact, but the X570 platform is fairly mature, and any big advances on the optimization front will likely benefit the X-series models, too.

We did see slightly improved performance with the auto-overclocking PBO feature, but gains remain small and AMD says we shouldn't expect higher frequencies from manual overclocking, either.

Performance in the Puget Sound Adobe benchmark suite was by far the highlight of our testing, and it's clear that XT's performance optimizations benefit those types of mid-threaded workloads. If you're already planning on buying an aftermarket cooler, the Ryzen 3900XT and 3800XT make a good fit for those types of applications. Time is money for professionals and semi-pro creators alike, and those users will benefit most from the advantages the XT series bring to the table.

Overall, the Ryzen XT series does provide another option for discerning shoppers that know their workload, particularly those that frequently use applications that benefit. Still, most will be better served with AMD X-series processors or Intel alternatives.