The Radeon RX 5500 XT is AMD's answer to Nvidia's recently released GeForce GTX 1650 Super. Codenamed Navi 14, we finally have the new budget-oriented Radeon on hand and to evaluate just how good the Radeon RX 5500 XT is, we have cards from MSI and Gigabyte to put to the test.
#ThrowBackThursday The PC business as we know it owes itself to an environment of enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and happenstance. The invention of the microprocessor, DRAM, and EPROM integrated circuits would help bring computing to the mainstream. This 5-part series explores the history of personal computing, from the invention of the transistor to modern day chips powering our connected devices.
Today we're comparing the Ryzen 9 3950X and Core i9-9900KS in a massive number of games, using one of G.Skill's most premium 16GB memory kits, the Trident Z Neo DDR4-3600 CL14. For those of you spending $600+ on a CPU, purchasing top end DDR4 memory doesn't seem like a stretch, so here's a head to head comparison between AMD and Intel processors using manually tuned timings.
Was it the Pentium 4, Core i7 Haswell, AMD FX Bulldozer or Ryzen 7?
The latest 32-core and 24-core high-end desktop CPUs from AMD have now landed. And yes, we've benchmarked the heck out of them. The Threadripper 3970X is a 32-core, 64-thread chip with a massive 128MB L3 cache, runs at 3.7 GHz and it's priced at $2,000 making it AMD's most expensive desktop CPU ever. If that's too rich, maybe the 3960X costs $1,400 for 24 cores and 48 threads.
Today we're taking a look at the new Athlon 3000G, AMD's most affordable Zen-based processor yet coming in at just $50. To be clear, this unfortunately isn't a Zen 2 processor. In order words, this is similar to the Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G, featuring Zen logic cores with an integrated Vega GPU.
As we anticipated when we reviewed AMD's new flagship 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X, rather than testing it on the very high-end Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme, we want to see how it does on budget AMD B450 boards. Maybe this combo doesn't make sense right now, but it will in the future as a potential upgrade for many AM4 owners.
The Ryzen 9 3950X looks to bridge the gap between mainstream and high-end desktop platforms and is the most expensive mainstream platform CPU we've seen in a long time. This puts AMD in the position to command a price premium for desktop computing. But is their new 16-core/32-thread monster worth the asking price?
Launched on PC a year after it debuted on consoles, Red Dead Redemption 2 is still a big release that deserves a detailed benchmark analysis, much like what we've done for other titles this year like Borderlands 3 where we compared over 60 GPUs, Metro Exodus, and most recently Fornite Chapter 2. Unfortunately those plans went out the window when we discovered how hard benchmarking this game was going to be.
We've got yet another big game benchmark for you, this time comparing the GeForce RTX 2060 Super to the Radeon RX 5700 XT. This is an apples to apples comparison of the two top $400 GPUs in the market for these holidays and beyond.
