AMD Ryzen 9 3900X And Ryzen 7 3700X Review: Zen 2 Impresses

Name: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Sunday, July 07, 2019, 09:00 AM EDT

For our next series of tests, we moved on to some game-related metrics with 3DMark, specifically the physics benchmark that's part of the Fire Strike test, along with a couple of actual games. For the 3DMark Physics test, we simply create a custom 3DMark run consisting solely of the physics test, which is CPU dependent, and report the results...

Gaming: 3DMark Physics

Taking the GPU out of the Equation

I know we're started to sound repetitive at this point, but the Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 7 3700X put up some strong numbers in the 3DMark Physics tests a well. The Ryzen 9 3900X jumped into the pole position ahead of every other processor and the Ryzen 7 3700X easily dispatched the Core i9-9900K.

High Resolution Gaming And Graphics Tests

1080P and 4K Gaming With GeForce GTX 1080

We also ran some high-resolution game and graphics tests on our test rigs 3DMark, Middle Earth: Shadow Of War and Rise Of The Tomb Raider. We used 3DMark's Fire Strike Extreme preset, and both of the games were run in two different configurations -- either 1080p with Medium details, or 4K with High/Very High details. The lower resolution tests are more CPU bound, while the higher resolution tests are more GPU bound.

In our "low-res" 1080p game tests, the Core i9-9900K retains its title as arguably the fastest gaming CPU available, though Tomb Raider can leverage some additional CPU resources, which result in a Core i9-9980XE win. Still, the Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 7 3700X finish near the top of the charts, well ahead of AMD's previous-generation processors.

Cranking the resolution up to 4K and increasing in-game image quality shifts the bottleneck to the GPU, and as such, things level out completely. For all intents and purposes, all of the platforms we tested tied in the 4K gaming tests. Alleviate the GPU bottleneck, however, and the spread would look more like the 1080p results.

3DMark Fire Strike jibes with our high resolution game tests. Although there are some minor differences here and there, all of the platforms are tightly grouped, with the Core i9-9900K technically pulling off a first place finish.

Tags: AMD, CPU, processor, (nasdaq:amd), zen 2, x570, ryzen 3000, 3rd-gen-ryzen

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com