If there is one main take-away from this review it would be that AMD has indeed created a mainstream processor line which no longer needs to rely upon more cores to compete with Intel. Instead AMD’s Ryzen 7 3800X can easily go toe to toe with Intel and their 8-core, mid 300-dollar range, Core i7-9700K. Throughout testing the Ryzen 7 3800X was neck and neck in the vast majority of tests. Sometimes beating the Intel offering, other times trailing Intel.
The only areas that Intel still has a decisive lead on AMD is in power consumption (as this is a 105watt TDP processor and Intel’s is a 95watt model), overclocking, and single core frequencies. AMD still has issues with pushing the performance envelope all that much, and 5GHz on a Ryzen 7 3800X will take a golden chip of epic proportions to pull off (and probably LN2 cooling). For the average buyer PBO+AutoOC is about as much as you can expect with most manual overclocking gains coming in the form of lowered heat (via less voltage) rather than higher clock rates. Intel on the other hand can easily hit 5.0Ghz on all cores and do it day in day out. Also, where the Intel is a more mature design, the low active core frequencies are higher than with AMD’s options.
Counteracting these limitations is a few key things. The first is buyers really do not care about the how’s and why’s. They just care about results. Since more and more applications are able to take advantage of 16 threads of performance and AMD’s clock rates are a lot closer to Intel than they once were, the increased clock rate of Intel’s offerings suddenly does not matter as much as it once did. No, there is not a doubling of performance via SMT, but it does boost performance and narrow this frequency gap via efficiency nicely. AMD’s offering is also not only less expensive but comes with numerous value-added features.
These features run the gamut from including a very decent stock cooler (instead of an empty box like Intel’s i7-9700K), to PCIe 4.0. The sum total is Intel’s offerings are in a desperate need of a price reduction if they hope to win back consumers who will be opting for this Ryzen processor. Until that happens, the AMD Ryzen 7 3800X easily wins our Excellence award for its great all-round performance. The AMD ecosystem is just more cost effective right now… and does so without many sacrifices. So while AMD still has yet to make a ‘perfect’ 8-core processor, the Ryzen 7 3800X is as close to being the perfect jack of all trades option as we have seen.
The Review
AMD Ryzen 7 3800x
The Ryzen 7 3800X proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that AMD is out innovating the R’n’D behemoth that is called Intel. In a rather short period of time AMD has gone from trailing, to parity, to actually leading Intel in the mainstream marketplace… all on a mere fraction of Intel’s budget.
