Zen 2 Review Summary

VIC-20 said:
Fair enough. 3200. Still more expensive and will add to the price, attributing a the price gap between platforms quite small. Which is my point.

Prebuilt systems with equivalent performing AMD Zen 2 CPUs will be priced the same as Intel. Which is the vast majority of how computers are sold. My team is installing deploys about 300 PCs each year. If we choose AMD next year, they won't be any cheaper.
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You do realize you dont have to run 3200 memory and the AMD chip will still perform just fine. On the OEM side you will get some better features or more cores for the same dollar amount.
 
VIC-20 said:
Fair enough. 3200. Still more expensive and will add to the price, attributing to the price gap between platforms being quite small. Which is my point.

Prebuilt systems with equivalent performing AMD Zen 2 CPUs will be priced the same as Intel. Which is the vast majority of how computers are sold. My team replaces about 300 PCs each year. If we choose AMD next year, they won't be any cheaper.
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For gaming purposes the cost is a wash for the most part, probably even cheaper on Intel if you're going x570. But to get the multi-threaded performance of Zen 2, you need to go HEDT for Intel.

So pure gaming: Intel
If you want to do anything else CPU intensive besides or including gaming: AMD
 
Nightfire said:
It looks like even a cheap B-350 can somewhat handle the 12 core part.
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-9-3900x-tested-on-cheap-b350-motherboard/

TPU recommends the 3700x at most for the cheaper boards, especially when water cooling as there is no airflow on the VRM.

Still, that makes for a great upgrade for those that are running previous gen parts with 4 and 6 cores.
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People don’t really seem to be talking about it much but I think it’s really impressive how little power that 12 core uses. Given how bad the VRMs were on early Ryzen boards it is outstanding that the 3900x can run on them.
 
RamonGTP said:
For gaming purposes the cost is a wash for the most part, probably even cheaper on Intel if you're going x570. But to get the multi-threaded performance of Zen 2, you need to go HEDT for Intel.

So pure gaming: Intel
If you want to do anything else CPU intensive besides or including gaming: AMD
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If you are gaming B450 for now if you're doing the broke $100 1700/2600 1080p no frames thing and look at what B550 has to offer instead of spending smart $ on a better GPU.

Unless you are doing insane production value content, and play games while you are waiting for your sign-offs to proceed X570 mid tier+ put a ryzen2+Mobo within 9900k combo territory.
 
HockeyJon said:
Everyone rips us off in Canada. In Ontario, adjusting for the exchange rate, I’m seeing the 3700x for $20-$30 more than MSRP right now. I can buy it in Michigan, tax and exchange rate included, for almost the same as the list price here in Ontario, not including our 13% sales tax. Getting ripped off is more Canadian than a beaver swimming in maple syrup.
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For the kind of combo prices you quoted it seems like driving to Michigan would be worth it, just like how people in the US will drive to the next state over on major purchases to avoid sales tax.
 
Something I'd like to see, but it may take a while since the reviewers were all only sampled the 3700x/3900x: is the 3800x worth the extra cost over the 3700x, and ditto for the 3600x versus the 3600? You get higher TDP, but how does that affect the boost clocks in everyday scenarios? When I see the game I play most often only pulls ~30W on my 3600X, I wonder if a 3600 would be just as good. (This question, I guess, probably only affects manual OCs, since the boost clocks are already so close between both versions of each chip.)
 
1_rick said:
For the kind of combo prices you quoted it seems like driving to Michigan would be worth it, just like how people in the US will drive to the next state over on major purchases to avoid sales tax.
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Yep. I have a business trip there in a couple of weeks. Let’s all cross our fingers that they have stock!

Anyone in the Detroit area have recommendations about where I should shop?
 
1_rick said:
Something I'd like to see, but it may take a while since the reviewers were all only sampled the 3700x/3900x: is the 3800x worth the extra cost over the 3700x, and ditto for the 3600x versus the 3600? You get higher TDP, but how does that affect the boost clocks in everyday scenarios? When I see the game I play most often only pulls ~30W on my 3600X, I wonder if a 3600 would be just as good. (This question, I guess, probably only affects manual OCs, since the boost clocks are already so close between both versions of each chip.)
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Based on what we’ve seen so far, I’m going to place my bets on “no”. I have a feeling the moderate increase in clockspeed and performance won’t justify the added monetary cost, at least in the case of the 3700x vs 3890x, for most use cases. Remains to be seen though, just my gut instinct. The 3700x looks like it was priced to aggressively take share, and I suspect it will do just that.
 
RamonGTP said:
For gaming purposes the cost is a wash for the most part, probably even cheaper on Intel if you're going x570. But to get the multi-threaded performance of Zen 2, you need to go HEDT for Intel.

So pure gaming: Intel
If you want to do anything else CPU intensive besides or including gaming: AMD
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Suddenly millions of people are all about programs and CPU intensive programs, rendering, encoding and such :)
I will enlighten you, if you use Blender to do your rendering do it on GPU and if you do encoding do can probably do it on your encoding on GPU (including iGPU). It is faster and hella lot cheaper than bothering 12+ core CPU's with that.
Programs used to test CPU are rarely used by normal people, especially I doubt this crowd really care for all that except just because Ryzen is faster here.

Most popular "programs" use case for people is Chrome but suddenly everyone care for programs....

I do not defend Intel but let's not be ridiculous here.
 
XoR_ said:
Suddenly millions of people are all about programs and CPU intensive programs, rendering, encoding and such :)
I will enlighten you, if you use Blender to do your rendering do it on GPU and if you do encoding do can probably do it on your encoding on GPU (including iGPU). It is faster and hella lot cheaper than bothering 12+ core CPU's with that.
Programs used to test CPU are rarely used by normal people, especially I doubt this crowd really care for all that except just because Ryzen is faster here.

Most popular "programs" use case for people is Chrome but suddenly everyone care for programs....

I do not defend Intel but let's not be ridiculous here.
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You keep using the word "suddenly" I don't think it means what you think it means.

Allow me to return the enlightenment. At 1440p the game performance between the two is virtually the same. When I'm doing my video editing, doing color grading, adding HDR and exporting my videos using H.264, even with hardware acceleration it uses tons of CPU resources and takes forever. If you want to take advantage of H265 that would add tons more time to the encoding process. AMD has Intel absolutely destroyed here. This isn't a use case for everyone, but it is for me as is 1440p gaming.

As to your last line, there are 254 posts on this thread once I submit this and post 253 is by far the most ridiculous.
 
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Lepardi said:
I wonder if Zen 3 will have AVX512
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Don't really care. Many of the workloads AVX512 proposes to solve are better done on GPUs anyway. For certain very specific niche users, this has some utility, but I'd be very surprised if anyone in here gave a damn.
 
XoR_ said:
Suddenly millions of people are all about programs and CPU intensive programs, rendering, encoding and such :)
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zOMG people have jobs?

I will enlighten you, if you use Blender to do your rendering do it on GPU and if you do encoding do can probably do it on your encoding on GPU (including iGPU). It is faster and hella lot cheaper than bothering 12+ core CPU's with that.
Programs used to test CPU are rarely used by normal people, especially I doubt this crowd really care for all that except just because Ryzen is faster here.
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iGPU encoding sacrifices quality. 3d rendering with your GPU carries limitations as well. Take Blender - if you use your GPU, the scene must fit entirely in GPU memory, or else the render will fail and you must use your CPU (and the RAM available to it) instead. There are texturing limitations as well, which would take to looooong to explain. Suffice it to say, professionals either have boatloads of GPUs and/or rendering farms (which may use GPUs or CPUs), or use their CPU for high quality rendering.

Most popular "programs" use case for people is Chrome but suddenly everyone care for programs....
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Yeah? What about developers and compiling code? What about multitrack audio editing? Video editing? Streaming? And these are only the multithreaded tasks I care about. I'm sure there are many more I don't deal with on a daily basis, but someone else does.

I do not defend Intel but let's not be ridiculous here.
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Yes you do. I don't see how this is difficult to understand. If I can cut my render times by ~50%, and only lose 5fps in Witcher 3 at low resolutions I don't even play at, that's a good deal! Especially for the same or less money.
 
@RamonGTP & DuronBurgerMan
I merely suggest most people who talk about programs performance do so because it is convenient to do so.

And obviously until Intel does not do radical price drop for their processors there will be no reason to recommend them... and I doubt anyone will. I certainly will not.
 
XoR_ said:
@RamonGTP & DuronBurgerMan
I merely suggest most people who talk about programs performance do so because it is convenient to do so.

And obviously until Intel does not do radical price drop for their processors there will be no reason to recommend them... and I doubt anyone will. I certainly will not.
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I dunno, mang. I don't have numbers on how many PC gamers have jobs and/or hobbies in development, design, video/media, "content creation" (I hate this term, but everybody likes to use it), etc... I suspect the percentage is high-ish, but neither you nor I have that information.
 
Here is an interesting summary on Reddit.

gaw2WDj.png


Plenty of variation above, and a game like SOTR (-9% above) has a 20% delta between reviewers results as well. BFV has plenty of variation in reviews as well.
 
I'm astounded that my local Microcenter has ten plus of the 3900X available, while the other Microcentr two hours down the road is completely sold out of the 3900x.

On the other hand, the 3700X really hits the price/perf sweet spot, and is sold-out at both locations!

High-end PC building is not as popular at one location vs the other, obviously! And I am in that camp!

This was a hard launch!
 
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DuronBurgerMan said:
I dunno, mang. I don't have numbers on how many PC gamers have jobs and/or hobbies in development, design, video/media, "content creation" (I hate this term, but everybody likes to use it), etc... I suspect the percentage is high-ish, but neither you nor I have that information.
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I use an i7-920 d0 for my "job" and a tweaked ryzen 1700 for gaming at home. Guess my priorities are mixed up :) We have maybe 5,000 computers in our environment... most are Core i3 desktops or i5 laptops. an I7-920 i custom built for a department 6-7 years ago was just scrapped out so i scooped it up. sure beats my old 2.3ghz i5 laptop
 
Some very favorable impressions here, about streaming with 3700x and 3900x Vs. 9900k. I would expect the 3900x. But even the 3700x seems to have quite an advantage on the 9900k.
 
chameleoneel said:
Some very favorable impressions here, about streaming with 3700x and 3900x Vs. 9900k. I would expect the 3900x. But even the 3700x seems to have quite an advantage on the 9900k.
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I'm not all that surprised. Even with the same core and thread counts AMD seems to have an advantage in some content creation and productivity applications.
 
XoR_ said:
@RamonGTP & DuronBurgerMan
I merely suggest most people who talk about programs performance do so because it is convenient to do so.

And obviously until Intel does not do radical price drop for their processors there will be no reason to recommend them... and I doubt anyone will. I certainly will not.
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My last AMD processor was an Athlon X2, I've been on Intel platforms since the Q6600 was top dog. It's not a convenience or the fanboy in me talking. I've never had a "dedicated" gaming PC. It's always been used for other tasks. Without substantially increasing my cost by going Intel HEDT, Ryzen 2 is a very clear winner for me. I'm equally brand agnostic when it comes to GPUs. I have two machines with AMD GPU's (RX480/Vega56) and two with nVidia (1060/1080Ti)
 
Meeho said:
And 99.99% of gamers are GPU limited, so the small advantage Intel still has is moot.
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I love that AMD is a lowcost solution for you guys that have limited funds. Same with their video cards. I'm glad budget oriented PC users have those options.

There is nothing wrong with being 2nd best in game .. nothing at all. AMD should be proud to be in this position.

However ....

Intel is far from a moot? You're kidding right?

I've not seen ONE benchmark where AMD has ever beat Intel ... not one. Maybe matched in a few titles.
 
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SixFootDuo said:
I love that AMD is a lowcost solution for you guys that have limited funds. Same with their video cards. I'm glad budget oriented PC users have those options.

There is nothing wrong with being 2nd best in game .. nothing at all. AMD should be proud to be in this position.

However ....

Intel is far from a moot? You're kidding right?

I've not seen ONE benchmark where AMD has ever beat Intel ... not one. Maybe matched in a few titles.
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In most productivity apps AMD crushes Intel. Gaming at 1440p and up its pretty much a wash. Even at 1080p the average difference between the 3900x and 9900k falls just outside margin of error.
 
chameleoneel said:
Some very favorable impressions here, about streaming with 3700x and 3900x Vs. 9900k. I would expect the 3900x. But even the 3700x seems to have quite an advantage on the 9900k.
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I like the Tom's jab he made.
Below are thr screens for easier viewing. Blue is 9900k and red is the 3700x. From what I understand, both the 9900k and 3700x were smooth fo the viewer when not set at medium but the 3700x was better for the streamer. Not really sure, he confused the crap out of me.
Screenshot_20190709-180327_YouTube.jpg
Screenshot_20190709-180652_YouTube.jpg
Screenshot_20190709-180932_YouTube.jpg
 
SixFootDuo said:
I love that AMD is a lowcost solution for you guys that have limited funds. Same with their video cards. I'm glad budget oriented PC users have those options.

There is nothing wrong with being 2nd best in game .. nothing at all. AMD should be proud to be in this position.

However ....

Intel is far from a moot? You're kidding right?

I've not seen ONE benchmark where AMD has ever beat Intel ... not one. Maybe matched in a few titles.
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Oh wow look a condescending post from you, what a shock. You know for some of us older folks that have jobs and such we need to do work on our computer as well, not just play fortnite all day. Best part is that AMD cpu games almost as well as that 9900K and then tears it doors off at the productivity and since I can get 12 cores for that price of a 9900K I can even do work and game at the same time without hurting my gaming experience. Always nice to be encrypting and playing some Battletech, seems like more fun then waiting to do one or the other. I also assume since you have a 2080Ti you must game at 4K where your cpu gives you 0 advantage over the lowly Ryzen chip as your quite gpu limited.
 
VIC-20 said:
Fair enough. 3200. Still more expensive and will add to the price, attributing to the price gap between platforms being quite small. Which is my point.

Prebuilt systems with equivalent performing AMD Zen 2 CPUs will be priced the same as Intel. Which is the vast majority of how computers are sold. My team replaces about 300 PCs each year. If we choose AMD next year, they won't be any cheaper.
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Goddamit now I'm starting to get annoyed.

n=1 said:
Not really: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-zen-2-memory-performance-scaling-benchmark/

Going from 2400 to 3600, 13/15 applications TPU tested see 1-7% improvement, the only two exceptions are:

Machine Learning/AI: 14%
File Compression: 10%

Likewise for gaming, the only two games that showed >5% improvement at 1080p are:

Far Cry 5: 12.5%
Sekiro: 11%

I mean yes sure if your workflow hits the above a majority of the time, then yes you should invest in better ram. Otherwise even a basic 2400 kit will afford 95% of the performance 95% of the time.
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DuronBurgerMan said:
I dunno, mang. I don't have numbers on how many PC gamers have jobs and/or hobbies in development, design, video/media, "content creation" (I hate this term, but everybody likes to use it), etc... I suspect the percentage is high-ish, but neither you nor I have that information.
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Meh forget "real jerbs". I spend ~10% of my time ripping DVDs (legally owned you mofos :LOL:) and that is the poster child for MOAR COARZ = more gooder.
 
I get that, but it's like the third time he's posted that, and that's after I've quoted myself twice already.
 
Amazing release by AMD. Neck-to-neck with Intel at regular gaming settings, gap closed considerably for high refresh/fps gamers, monster of a CPU for pretty much anything. (y)
 
Chaos Machine said:
Or wait a couple weeks for when Intel has to start cutting prices to stay competitive.
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Intel have production shortages because all their 14nm++++++++ fabs are running full with server/HEDT stuff.
They might not even see point in cutting prices and if even they do I really really doubt those price cuts will be in any way significant or meaningful for someone who already considers Intel for this >5GHz overclocking... I would say price drop for 9900K will be 50 bucks at most to stop people from waiting.
 
legcramp said:
Amazing release by AMD. Neck-to-neck with Intel at regular gaming settings, gap closed considerably for high refresh/fps gamers, monster of a CPU for pretty much anything. (y)
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Actually this is how this was supposed to look like
This is what we had during Athlon and Athlon XP era, cheaper, almost as fast if not faster than cheaper Pentium 3/4 models
In Athlon 64 and Athlon X2 era AMD was actually faster in pretty much most everything
Even in Phenom 2 era AMD was pretty much neck to neck with Intel for the most part and when you took value into consideration it was better choice

For past 10 years Intel had faster product. Now it is is the AMD prime time all over again. And it is good, maybe now laws of the free market will push progress a little bit faster.
If not for Zen we would probably be getting 6c/12t CPU's next year or whenever Intel decide 10nm is ready for release...
 
I hopped on the Athlon 64 train when it first came out.. hopefully it happens again.
 
sover said:
Reminds me of that intel thing, where most of the aftermarket motherboards by default don't constrain the 9900K to its TDP spec, but every reviewer seems to bench that way, anyhow.
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In the Intel case, some BIOS enabled MCE by default, but you could disable it in the BIOS and get back the CPU working within spec. In this case, some BIOS are providing false state information to the CPU, and the CPU puts itself outside of spec.
 
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