Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Core i9-9900K: 36 Game Benchmark

[Julio Franco]

A battle that needs no further introduction, we're pitting the new Ryzen 9 3900X head to head against the Core i9-9900K in 36 games. There's loads of results to go over and this article is solely focused on PC gaming performance.

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/review/1877-core-i9-9900k-vs-ryzen-9-3900x/

 

[Udelh579]

Nope, it's still Intel for games.

 

[Lounds]

The difference between overclocking the 9900k and stock was so minimal, seems like a lot of wasted energy overclocking it.

I think if someone is a pro gamer that's streaming the 3900X will be a better buy?

For the average PC gamer the 3600 seems the best bang for buck currently.

 

[max0x7ba]

Gaming benchmarks on 2560x1440 would be most interesting.

I couldn't care less about 1080p gaming because this is not what people buy a top CPU with a top GPU for.

 

[Puiu]

I'm still leaning towards an 3600 (or 2600x at 140$), but the delta between the 3900x and the 9900k is much smaller than I expected. I was expecting the difference to grow at around 7-9% when the 9900k was pushed to 5GHz, not to shrink at 5%.

I knew AMD improved the cs:go results a lot, but they are actually winning which is weird to say the least Is source a cache hungry engine?

 

[yeeeeman]

As I said many times now, people who still say Intel is a better option now are nitpicking. You are getting close to same gaming performance, but with much more oomph on content creation and other general purpose apps with AMD. You also get the chance to upgrade, without a motherboard change to Zen 3 and maybe Zen 4.

 

[penn919]

Gaming benchmarks on 2560x1440 would be most interesting.

I couldn't care less about 1080p gaming because this is not what people buy a top CPU with a top GPU for.

Agreed. People forget that CPU "Gaming" benchmarks are optimized specifically for the purpose of comparing cpu capabilities. I pity all the poor souls who opted for i5s and i7s thinking they'll get "superior" performance when in reality they'll only get equivalent or even worse performance because either they'll game at 1440p+ or use a mid-range card...or both. Hell, I've seen the zen 2 R5s actually outperform the current i5s in most modern titles despite the benchmark conditions. People are sacrificing cores for nothing.

 

[Danny101]

While I support AMD and their efforts, they are barely competing on 7nm when Intel is still on 12nm. When Intel moves to 10nm, the IPC gap will again widen with Intel maintaining it's lead. AMD needs to go back to the drawing board on IPC. On the bright side, AMD does have a good handle on the multi-processor performance. If game developers were able to better write for multi-processor usage, then it may be all mute and won't matter who you go with.

 

[RageofThunder3]

3900x only 5% behind 9900k in gaming including that extremely unfriendly sc2 results? Considering it obliterate 9900k in any cpu benchmarks with much better future proof, hell yeah I can comfatably recommend this to friends all day.

 

[amstech]

So a $475 8/16 chip is 6% faster overall then a $500 12/24 chip.
Pretty sad, and a pretty unfair review IMO, but I guess if talking price, then yes.

Most importantly, 5.0GHz is not a good comparison, that's the stock Turbo on a 9900K and nearly on a 9700K (4.9GHz stock Turbo)... 8700K's (4.7GHz stock turbo) and 9700K's are hitting 5.2GHz and 5.3GHz pretty consistently.
A review on Youtube shows as pretty noticeable-significant difference in FPS of an 8700K at 4.7GHz and an 8700K @ 5.2GHz, and that chip is already 10-20% faster then a 3700X in stock form when talking games.
Again, would have loved to seen how the 9900X did in all this, even though its silly Intel priced, and even that's still a 10/20 chip.

Nope, it's still Intel for games.

Yup.
The 8/8, 6/12 and 8/16 Intel still handles the 8/16 AMD by a lot in games, and even more so when overclocked, and 5.0GHz is not an overclock, that's the stock Turbo on a 9900K. Don't think the 9900K at 5.2GHz would be much of an improvement as its already 5.0GHz in stock form with the Turbo, but a 9700K going from the stock 4.9GHz to 5.3Ghz would be a little more noticeable for sure, on top of it already being the best $350 gaming CPU.

 

[QuantumPhysics]

"In our day-one review we found the Ryzen 9 3900X to be 8% slower on average across the 9 games we tested. By adding another 27 games to the mix, things haven't changed much and surprisingly this played in AMD's favor to an extent.

When it comes to value, these new results don’t change much either. If you ignore the bundled box cooler, the 3900X is a little more costly per frame than the 9900K."

#1 I'm not interested in experimenting with my CPU or GPU or RAM. I'm not overclocking ANYTHING despite the fact my desktops and laptops came with overclocking software which makes overclocking a snap - and the fact I have a liquid cooled CPU (stock) and a liquid cooled GPU (2080ti FTW3 hybrid).

I expect my CPU and GPU perform flawlessly out of the box.

#2 I expected as much: AMD is slightly better for productivity and Intel rules gaming - along with Nvidia.

 

[RageofThunder3]

For 3900x there's literally no difference between it and 9900k for 4k gaming, which people buying this cpu should pair with a 2080ti and run games on. I can't imagine how people like *uantomPhysics, *44HzGaming, *ogiGaming can whine on this...

 

[jgraham11]

Nice review Steve!

This is the same story that we see with every other Intel processor up to this point. With light workloads, the Intel CPU is faster to respond which translates into more FPS at low visual settings (1080p). Once that workload increases, as with the Intel 7700k vs 1800X, once the CPU demand increases, the processing power of these new AMD chips outperform Intel's. Moving forward, where do you think games are going? Of course they're going to better utilize more cores, which would make it better to have more cores in the future.

Here's a good example of that: Just looking at the 1% lows; if you compare the ones shown, sorry don't have all your data of the games tested but not highlighted, its less than 5%, if you drop StarCraft2 (there's a reason why they don't test with it) AMD Ryzen 3900X is faster.

 

[jgraham11]

Nope, it's still Intel for games.

Unless you game and do anything else on your PC, the AMD chip would be better now and into the future. FYI, look at 7700k vs 1800X, 1800X now destroys the Intel chip but when it was released, the Intel chip was regarded as a superior gaming chip. That same thing is going to happen to the 9900k, it'll just take some time for developers to properly thread their workload.

 

[Lastguytom]

Please do the test correctly, you are using 3200 speed memory for the AMD and give the INTEL 3600 SPPED. Give me a break use the Asus Strix motherboards they make boards for both CPU, use the same speed memory too. It already known that the Ryzen 3000 series CPU is memory sensitive the faster the memory the better it works, sure the 9900k has the better clock speed and all core boost. If you guys are so call tech geniuses then compare apple to apples and price to price please. Please stop acting like salesmen for Intel or AMD. I hate these type of articles that are not honest.

 

[Puiu]

So a $475 8/16 chip is 6% faster overall then a $500 12/24 chip.
Pretty sad, and a pretty unfair review IMO, but I guess if talking price, then yes.

Most importantly, 5.0GHz is not a good comparison, that's the stock Turbo on a 9900K and nearly on a 9700K (4.9GHz stock Turbo)... 8700K's (4.7GHz stock turbo) and 9700K's are hitting 5.2GHz and 5.3GHz pretty consistently.
A review on Youtube shows as pretty noticeable-significant difference in FPS of an 8700K at 4.7GHz and an 8700K @ 5.2GHz, and that chip is already 10-20% faster then a 3700X in stock form when talking games.
Again, would have loved to seen how the 9900X did in all this, even though its silly Intel priced, and even that's still a 10/20 chip.

Nope, it's still Intel for games.

Yup.
The 8/8, 6/12 and 8/16 Intel still handles the 8/16 AMD by a lot in games, and even more so when overclocked, and 5.0GHz is not an overclock, that's the stock Turbo on a 9900K. Don't think the 9900K at 5.2GHz would be much of an improvement as its already 5.0GHz in stock form with the Turbo, but a 9700K going from the stock 4.9GHz to 5.3Ghz would be a little more noticeable for sure, on top of it already being the best $350 gaming CPU.

The 9700K will remain the top dog for gaming till 2020 (albeit by a small margin). It's such a shame that Intel artificially locks features like HT. If it had HT the multithreaded results would not be if favour of the 3700x by such a large margin.

But let's be honest here, you are looking at a blazing fast 12 core CPU at 500$. It has 50% more cores than the 9900K for just 5-6% less gaming performance. The value proposition here is insane compared to anything Intel is offering.

 

[CodeCreator]

While I support AMD and their efforts, they are barely competing on 7nm when Intel is still on 12nm. When Intel moves to 10nm, the IPC gap will again widen with Intel maintaining it's lead. AMD needs to go back to the drawing board on IPC. On the bright side, AMD does have a good handle on the multi-processor performance. If game developers were able to better write for multi-processor usage, then it may be all mute and won't matter who you go with.

You're forgetting the fact that AMD already has a higher IPC, it's the clock speed and latency that's lagging behind. IPC and single-threaded performance are not the same thing.

By the time Intel releases Sunny Cove, Zen 3 on 7nm EUV won't be too far from launch.

 

[CodeCreator]

AMD is slightly better for productivity

You got to be kidding.

 

[Vulcanproject]

It's just those clocks. Another 200-300MHz would fix all this for Ryzen.

AMD need to see if they can go through a few steppings with TSMC and squeeze some more speed.

 

[trparky]

When even 7Zip performs better on Intel, AMD can't take the productivity crown. If you need raw performance you have no choice but Intel. I really hate saying that since I really did wish that AMD would have been able to hand Intel their heads on a silver platter but nope, Intel is still where the performance is.

 

[Puiu]

It's just those clocks. Another 200-300MHz would fix all this for Ryzen.

AMD need to see if they can go through a few steppings with TSMC and squeeze some more speed.

That won't happen this year. We'll prolly get those higher clocks with 7nm+ and Zen 3.

When even 7Zip performs better on Intel, AMD can't take the productivity crown. If you need raw performance you have no choice but Intel. I really hate saying that since I really did wish that AMD would have been able to hand Intel their heads on a silver platter but nope, Intel is still where the performance is.

AMD is much much faster in 7Zip compared to Intel. The 3700x is 15% faster than the 9900k and the 3900x is 50%.
It's Winrar where the 9900K is still a bit faster (by about 2-3%), but the 3700x is much faster than the 9700k (by about 50%).

 

[dirtyferret]

Steve, please perform the exact same test but this time using two Ryzen 3900x CPUs and no Intel CPUs. This will allow us not having to read the AMD fan boys incessant crying that their $500 desktop flagship CPU is 8-6% slower in gaming then Intel's $500 desktop flagship CPU. Perhaps you can even give the Ryzen a "red" ribbon award or something.

 

[MrCris]

Hello and thanks for the work you are doing.
Just something I would like to see in these comparison charts is the power consumption... I really believe that AMD is the winner in the short and long term in overall productivity and performance + budget + compatibility, and for sure the red team has a lot more coming.

A high percentage of ppl can just afford at most a 1060,1070, or 2060 graphics card for gaming, as you said, the FPS and game play will be the same, both CPU's will squeeze the max out of those video cards.

Also it would not surprise me if a combination of the new AMD CPU+GPU will leave INTEL+NVIDIA far behind in gaming performance.

Other point to consider is that most of the games can't handle multy cores but in the future, not far from now, that will change.

Intel will still, like you said, be a winner for the ones that use the PC just for gaming, not even streaming, and have the budget for it to waste.

As of me, I haven't had a AMD computer since Athlon 500mhz but as AMD is now, it will be the first choice when I'm ready to build my new rig.

-MrCris-

 

[jbc029]

So a $475 8/16 chip is 6% faster overall then a $500 12/24 chip.
Pretty sad, and a pretty unfair review IMO, but I guess if talking price, then yes.

Most importantly, 5.0GHz is not a good comparison, that's the stock Turbo on a 9900K and nearly on a 9700K (4.9GHz stock Turbo)... 8700K's (4.7GHz stock turbo) and 9700K's are hitting 5.2GHz and 5.3GHz pretty consistently.
A review on Youtube shows as pretty noticeable-significant difference in FPS of an 8700K at 4.7GHz and an 8700K @ 5.2GHz, and that chip is already 10-20% faster then a 3700X in stock form when talking games.
Again, would have loved to seen how the 9900X did in all this, even though its silly Intel priced, and even that's still a 10/20 chip.

Nope, it's still Intel for games.

Yup.
The 8/8, 6/12 and 8/16 Intel still handles the 8/16 AMD by a lot in games, and even more so when overclocked, and 5.0GHz is not an overclock, that's the stock Turbo on a 9900K. Don't think the 9900K at 5.2GHz would be much of an improvement as its already 5.0GHz in stock form with the Turbo, but a 9700K going from the stock 4.9GHz to 5.3Ghz would be a little more noticeable for sure, on top of it already being the best $350 gaming CPU.

No. 5.0 GHz *all core* is not stock 9900k. 4.7 GHz is the stock all core boost, and even then it wont hold that for more than a few minutes of sustained load before it drops back to 4.5 or so.

And if you want to pick at msrp lists, go ahead and knock a few frames off the 3900x for using the prism so it cam truly be $499, and *all* of the frames from the 9900k, so it can be $475.

 

[ReapingRose115]

At 1080p, it makes sense Intel tends to give AMD a bit of a hard time. High Refresh Rate gaming, you'd want the best performance you can get.
Though at higher resolutions, the performance gap tends to shrink. I think the 3900X is a great Processor for those who need an all around performer, even streaming and production are strong points to have this over the i9. Some people are willing to sacrifice the performance for value in other areas.
Though if the i9 had better pricing, it'd be far more attractive as a gaming processor, but overall, either way you go, you're still getting great performance. Pick your poison, both are strong.