Hardware

Expanding upon all the testing we performed in our day-one 3rd-gen Ryzen coverage, today we'll be running a clock-for-clock comparison benchmark. IPC can be a good indicator of a processor's architecture efficiency, so we're pitting the new Ryzen 3900X and 3700X against Intel's Core i9-9900K.

When we reviewed 3rd-gen Ryzen we deliberately used the included box coolers for the majority of the testing, it's included in the price after all. Following up to that testing, today we're going to compare how the Ryzen 9 3900X performs using the Wraith Prism RGB stock cooler against a big 360mm all-in-one liquid cooler from DeepCool.

Today we're taking a deeper look into one of the new features that shipped with AMD's latest Navi GPUs: Radeon Image Sharpening. In short, RIS is a post-processing sharpening feature for games that AMD says carries nearly no performance penalty. How does it compare to GeForce's DLSS?

Surely you've read our 3rd-gen Ryzen review by now. While testing the new CPUs we posed the question, how well will these processors work on a really affordable B350 motherboard? The test subject for this experiment is the Asrock AB350M Pro4, the best 'ultra cheap' B350 motherboard we recommended back in 2017 coming in at just $75.

The successor to our favorite best value CPU, the Ryzen 5 3600 is AMD's new $200 6-core, 12-thread processor. The chip clocks between 3.6 GHz and 4.2 GHz, features a 32MB L3 cache and a 65 watt TDP. Included in the package is the Wraith Stealth cooler and a MSRP that matches the price the R5 2600 launched at.

AMD's brand new Navi 7nm GPUs are significantly smaller than previous Vega 56 and 64 parts, packing fewer transistors on a much smaller package, so we expect them to be efficient. The Radeon RX 5700 and XT GPUs have also been purposely built for gaming and are set to compete directly against GeForce RTX Super cards.

It's finally time to review AMD's new 3rd-gen Ryzen processors. The Ryzen 9 3900X is a 12-core, 24-thread processor with a massive 64MB L3 cache. It costs $500, placing it in direct competition with the Core i9-9900K. Then the Ryzen 7 3700X costs $330 and AMD suggests it's taking on the more expensive 9700K.