Processors

I got this processor to replace my i5-9400F because I wanted to handle multitasking, resource-heavy scenarios and video production work and so far it's just absolutely demolished any task I've thrown at it, at base clock speed without so much as turning on AMD's automatic overclocking. I've played games and recorded them at Twitch-compatible bitrates (x264 encoding up to 8,000kbps CBR) with a camera and leap motion doing face and hand tracking at the same time and it laughs at the workload. I've played games recording 1080p and 1440p video at CRF14 (variable bit rate ranging from 30 thousand to over 50 thousand kbps) on x264 fast, or 1080/30fps console footage at the same CRF on x264 slow (i.e. CPU not running a game) and it still manages without any dropped frames. When using davinci resolve, using a 'smart' (automated) render cache is all I need for an almost entirely lag-free preview, no proxies / optimised media necessary. On the i5, rendering a 1080p video would take more time than the length of the video. The 3900 - assuming I largely leave the computer alone for the length of the render or just use it for light browsing - manages to render 1440p video at the 'best' preset (will vary depending on your source media) in faster than real time. For productivity and general gaming, it's an amazing processor. The only scenarios I've managed to scratch maxing it out - again, at base clock - are running CPU-heavy games, with face and hand tracking and two instances of CPU encoding at presets slower than necessary - unrealistic, intentional stress-test scenarios exclusively made to test its limits. At €250 cheaper than the 3950X, it's honestly a great price per performance ratio for multitaskers. The only other situation I find worth noting are a small handful of older games which were built intended to run on later hardware with much higher clock speeds that never came; like Guild Wars 2 and Planetside 2. Crysis would be another famous example of a game being built this way, where AMD's general aim of lower single core clock speed and higher core count starts to cause some issues, but these games will *always* cause issues for people without a full engine re-write. In these instances, fast RAM gives a significant upgrade in frame count. My cooler setup is 2 fans in, 2 fans out, one fan either side of a coolermaster hyper 212, Arctic MX-4 thermal paste. Idle, the processor sits around 40C. During games, it can kick up to high fifties, sixties. Under high, multitasking workloads with simultaneious gaming and intense encoding in OBS, or rendering in Resolve, it can move into the high seventies. Stress-test scenarios bring it up to 82C peaks.

As of this time (Nov-2020) get the Ryzen 5000 series instead for the gaming lead and productivity lead over intel. Quite simply this CPU is perfect for both gaming and prodcutivity. I use this to play games with my 2080ti with no bottleneck and have no problem maintaining high framerate whilst recording footage. Having those 12 cores for rendering is simply fantastic, it will take me about 14 minutes to render out a 4k 10 minute video in Premiere which is brilliant. If you are doing literally nothing but gaming then go with Intel as it can be at most a 10% increase in gaming performance with the 10900k over this 3900x but simply for this price having the 3900x is so much better value for your money because of those 4 extra cores. I totally recommend undervolting this CPU, I managed to lower my max temps by about 20 degrees just by doing so (down to 1.18v) and still mantain a 4.3ghz all core clock (look for a tutorial if you don't know how, it's fairly simple) i also recommend that you go out and buy at least 3200mhz RAM as Ryzen LOVES fast memory and you can see decent percentages in performance gain just from a RAM upgrade, plus RAM prices have decreased quite a bit. Overall i absolutely love this CPU and cannot recommend this enough to anyone looking for an upgrade. (Get Ryzen 5000 as of Nov-2020)

Finally got my hands on 3900X and it's great! Initially ordered on July 11, but when my order missed delivery date 11 days later, I got Ryzen 3 3200G to make sure the rest of my new build is working. BTW, 3200G is a beast of a CPU for the price! It's CPU performance is solid and iGPU performance is very impressive. It's hard to tell the difference between 3200G and 3900X in day to day use actually. Even in gaming, there's not a big difference, (though I do play at Quad-HD and 4K on RTX 2070, so games are mostly GPU bound). Anyway, I ended up cancelling my 3900X in September and re-ordered again from Amazon US when they became available a week ago. It's probably for the best, because I get 4.2GHz all core boost and single core boost of 4.65GHz (on stock BIOS settings), now that AMD has learned from all of the complaints about boost clocks and released the ABBA AGESA, and perhaps started binning 3900Xs a little better to save face. Multi-core performance is very impressive, I've tried compiling Rust projects and compressing large number of files with 7-zip. Now here, it's a night and day difference compared to my macbook pro and Ryzen 3200G. The CPU temp goes to 75C after a few minutes at full load (Blender Classroom rendering), with NH-D15S as a cooler. I used Noctua's thermal paste that came with the cooler, pressed the heatsink against the CPU, removed to check thermal paste covered the whole heat spreader, then screwed the heatsink on. If that helps, I'm using Aorus Elite x570 board, Micron's Ballistix DDR4 3200 RAM CL16 (4 sticks) and Samsung 970 EVO NVMe M.2 SSD. So there you go, I guess, this is 2 reviews in one. Looks like you can't go wrong with AMD's new CPUs. Buy with confidence!

This thing is a beast all round whether it's gaming, multi-tasking or doing anything that is CPU intensive. I've thrown everything at it and it churns everything incredibly easily, the only thing that would hold me back is my other components. I don't think I've ever had a CPU like this before, INTEL CPU's have honestly never felt like this at all. I can have multiple screens with multiple applications open which helps do my work much faster and much more efficiently. Gaming is also a huge blast and I'm seeing top performance that is on par with INTEL's top gaming CPU's. Now the stock fan you get with it is quite good as it will keep the temps at around 30 to 50 degrees Celsius but it will get loud when running many things at once hence why I don't use a stock cooler and I bought my own AIO CPU cooler and I recommend that for everyone looking to buy this. It's a 100% recommendation from me and I honestly don't think I will have to change CPU's for probably the next 10 years.

My first time going with AMD again for over 14 years as I usually stick with Intel. AMD is way ahead of the game and after reading various independent reviews they recommended AMD over Intel. Very pleased with the CPU. Incredibly fast and for the price it’s brilliant compared to Intel. Easy to install but AMD chips do run hotter so best to invest in a really good airflow cooler or water cooling to get the best from this chip. As you can see in my photo I went with a recommended air cooler from another customer off here and it’s massive!!! I didn’t install the cooler which came with the CPU. The new airflow heatsink does an incredible job in keeping the CPU under 50’C for most of the time. If you are debating whether or not to go with Intel or AMD I would seriously recommend AMD.

Bought this to replace my 2700X that i originally put into my PC build - lovely upgrade and at a decent price. Of course there are now more recent CPUs on the market that everyone is buying - but newer is not always better. I can run Cyberpunk 2077 with this in my build at high / ultra as well as stream twitch with numerous web pages open. It is solid - works great and with thermal paste applied it does not get much hotter than the 2700X before - maybe 3 or 4 degrees C. Arrived fast in the correct box with the CPU cooling fan (i do not use this as i have water cooling Corsair). Easy to fit as well. I do recommend you look up changing the CPU and make sure you are happy ion the correct method and what else is required before you swap parts however. This CPU will still pull its weight for years to come - and will no doubt be the best trade off value for money too.

I looooove the CPU. its fantastic really. The stock cooler does the job, but I wanted a quiet rig. It is by no means quiet. Will be replacing the stock cooler very soon with a noctua cooler.

Purchased in 2020 as an upgrade from i7-3770k, used equally for video encoding and gaming The Good: - Great performance for gaming and video encoding - Very reliable The Bad: - draws ~1.4v at idle and consequently runs hot. This may be more due to the motherboard though - the included heatsink was adequate but not great, I got noticable throttling on long video encodes. Replacing the stock cooler with a Noctua NH-D15 improved my all-core speed by ~250MHz Overall I'm very happy with this CPU