I have built many PCs in the past (AMD and Intel) but not one for quite some years. I have settled on an AMD system. Motherboard: Asus TUF Gaming X570-Plus (wifi) Memory: Adata XPG Spectrix D60G 3600 SSD: Sabrent 1Tb Rocket (I haven't chosen graphiocs card yet, but probs something like Zotax GeForce RTX 2060 Super Mini) I 'was' going to get an AMD3700X. But I was offered a special deal, to instead have the new AMD 3900 for just £71 more. (NB. this is the 3900 and NOT the 3900X - very similar, but lower TDP and lower frequencies) Is it worth the extra? More cores, but lower frequencies compared to the 3700X? I use my PC for mixed purposes (some games: Red Dead 2, F1, GTA, CoD etc...) plus work activities (mainly databases etc..) Am guessing that the 3700x might be better at games, and 3900 at work activities. Is this right? Any thoughts/advice? Cheers, Don
Yes it is worth the extra IMO. I would, however, check if it has PBO. Otherwise you will lose clock speed vs the X. If it has PBO (which may even be a board feature, my TUF non WIFI has it) then it will boost higher (well, you can make it). It's probably just a lower BIN 3900x tbh. One they deemed was worth leaving as a 12 core. I know I will probably get heckled for suggesting it, but 8 cores now is optimal. 6 cores is entry level. With the way things are going that could change pretty quickly, and besides it seems you want the rig for more than gaming or you'd be getting a much higher end GPU. But, is it worth it for £71 more? eff yeah. Because it's waaaaaay cheaper than buying another CPU in a year or two from now. Do it once, etc.
Yes, I was surprised to see the 3900 (non X) but it appears to have been released 'quietly' in late 2019 - directed only at the OEM market - so shouldn't really be sold to consumers. Am assuming it IS, here, because it is in a CPU+m/b bundle (Asus TUF X570 Plus wifi + AMD 3900 for £540) https://www.anandtech.com/show/14961/amd-brings-ryzen-9-3900-and-ryzen-5-3500x-to-life https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/new...-3700-ryzen-5-3500-amd-3000-series,40040.html There is also a new AMD 3900 PRO which is apparently for the business market, though haven't worked out the difference between the non-X, PRO and X versions..... I'm not sure about PBO, but the specs for the 3900 are 3.1GHz base frequency, and boost frequency of 4.3GHz. (Versus 3.6GHz to 4.4GHz for the 3700X)
That is single core boost, remember. Without PBO you'll not get that on all cores. In fact, with PBO I get that on all cores on my 3950x. So you may find it only clocks to 3.1 on all cores. Which makes it tough. Obviously I don't have tons of info on the CPU, but if it was made for OEMs then likely it was made to run on crap boards with crap VRM and could be a bit of a dog's dinner. Without reviews it's kinda like peeing in the wind. https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/reviews/amd-ryzen-9-3900-review-eco-mode May help. Obviously Googling it was useless, as it just bought up a million Youtube reviews of the 3900x, but that does at least have some info.
BTW apparently the non pro version does support overclocking, and thus should support PBO. In which case it should be very fast, though will pee on the 65w TDP lol. The chip did exhibit some odd behavior when we flipped into the auto-overclocked PBO mode. The overclocked 3900 consumes the same amount of power that it does at stock during our synthetic AVX and non-AVA AIDA64 stress tests, but we see the expected increase in overclocked power consumption when we switch over to actual workloads. That could be an oddity with AMD's power control algorithms, but it certainly is interesting
frankly outside of professional work (IE super high res graphics, cad, simulation, and math) cores doesn't seem to matter that much today ... will they tomorrow sure but right now MOAR COARZ = not that much more work for day to day and gaming use if your building a 10 year system yea get as many as you can
