AMD Ryzen 9 3900X vs Core i9 9900K review

By now, the verdict is in: the $329 Ryzen 7 3700X is an excellent CPU that competes well against the $385 Intel Core i7 9700K in gaming and blows it out of the water in multi-threaded content creation tasks like video rendering or streaming. That's helped the 3700X become the most popular processor at one German retailer and lead to AMD outselling Intel in reports from Korea and Japan. But how does the Ryzen 9 3900X fare? We've tested it against Intel's top dog, the Core i9 9900K, to see which company claims the overall PC gaming crown.

First of all, let's discuss what we're dealing with. The Ryzen 9 3900X is a fully-enabled Zen 2 design, meaning it includes 12 cores and 24 threads spread across its two chiplets. That's four more cores and eight more threads than the Ryzen 7 3700X, so we expect to see significantly better performance in tasks like video rendering which are easy to break up and perform in parallel. The flagship chip also features a slightly higher single-core boost frequency than its mid-tier counterpart, which should translate into better single-threaded performance too.

Compared to past Zen and Zen+ designs, this is a whole different beast. I/O is shifted to its own die using a mature 12nm process, while each of the CPU chiplets uses a novel 7nm process that allows for greater performance than past generations while using less power (and therefore producing less heat). This architectural shift is accompanied by a series of small but still significant changes: the size of the L3 cache has doubled to ameliorate latency issues, a more efficient branch predictor is used and AVX instructions are finally handled properly.

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