Cranking it up to 105W
AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series has landed, upping the ante with Intel in its high-stakes game for desktop PC market dominance with a well-rounded lineup of new chips that push mainstream platforms to higher core counts and more raw compute than we’ve ever seen. As a result, Intel’s commanding presence in the enthusiast space is threatened in a way we haven’t seen in over a decade.
We began with a look at the last week and came away impressed, but our review left us feeling like something was missing.
That something is the Ryzen 7 3800X. AMD cranks the TDP dial up to 105W on this 8-core 16-thread chip, making it the high-performance counterpart to the 65W Ryzen 7 3700X, which is basically the same 7nm chip built with the Zen 2 microarchitecture, but with a lower TDP rating. That chip came away from our first look at the Ryzen 3000 series with an Editor’s Choice award, going toe-to-toe with Intel’s Core i7-9700K, so it’s fair to say we have high hopes for the higher-performance model. AMD still hasn’t sampled the chip to the press, so we bought one at retail to put it under the microscope.
The Ryzen 7 3800X slots in beneath the Ryzen 9 3900X, which comes with two 7nm compute die tied together with a 12nm I/O die to yield a 12-core 24-thread part. AMD has worked wonders to reduce the impact of this sort of multi-chip arrangement, but it’s fair to assume that the Ryzen 7 3800X’s single-compute-die design, paired with a higher TDP rating that facilitates more aggressive boost clocks, could actually rival the 3900X in some applications – games included.
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| Row 0 — Cell 0 | SEP (USD) | Cores / Threads | TDP (Watts) | Base / Boost Frequency (GHz) | L3 Cache (MB) | PCIe 4.0 Lanes |
| Ryzen 9 3950X | $749 | 16 / 32 | 105W | 3.5 / 4.7 | 64 | 24 |
| Ryzen 9 3900X | $499 | 12 / 24 | 105W | 3.8 / 4.6 | 64 | 24 |
| Ryzen 7 3800X | $399 | 8 / 16 | 105W | 3.9 / 4.5 | 32 | 24 |
| Ryzen 7 3700X | $329 | 8 / 16 | 65W | 3.6 / 4.4 | 32 | 24 |
| Ryzen 5 3600X | $249 | 6 / 12 | 95W | 3.8 / 4.4 | 32 | 24 |
| Ryzen 5 3600 | $199 | 6 / 12 | 65W | 3.6 / 4.2 | 32 | 24 |
And that’s exactly what we’ve found. The Ryzen 7 3800X takes the basic ingredients of the Zen 2 microarchitecture, which brings an average of 15% more instructions per cycle (IPC) throughput, and 7nm process and melds them into a high-performance chip that is impressive across our test suite, especially when we factor in the competitive pricing, PCIe 4.0 interface, backward compatibility with most AM4 socket motherboards, unlocked overclocking features, and bundled cooler.
But we’ve also found that, after simple push-button overclocking, the Ryzen 7 3700X offers similar performance to the 3800X, even when it is also overclocked. But for $70 less. The Ryzen 7 3800X is an impressive chip and offers a better mixture of performance than Intel’s Core i7-9700K, no doubt, but in this case, value seekers might opt for its less expensive sibling.
