AMD Ryzen 9 3900X

VERDICT A record 12 cores imbues the Ryzen 9 3900X with unrivalled multitasking prowess. It’s hard to overclock, but you won’t need to

- James Archer

YOU CAN NEVER have too many CPU cores, or at least that’s what AMD is suggesting with the Ryzen 9 3900X. As the very first Ryzen 9 CPU, it goes even further than the premium Ryzen 7 line-up by including 12 physical cores and 24 threads, an obscene amount for what is ostensibly a mainstream processor.

Yes, despite the price and the specs, this is intended as simply the next step forward for the Ryzen family, without teetering over into the enthusiast space occupied by Threadripper. It’s for gaming and content creation alike, with a view to being better at both than the Ryzen 7 3700X – which, as we’ve seen from the Chillblast Fusion Axion (page 22) and CCL Paladin (page 23), is already a highly multitalented CPU.

SILICONE TALLY

Like the Ryzen 7 3700X and the rest of the 3rd-gen Ryzens, the Ryzen 9 3900X uses a 7nm manufacturing process. This just means that the CPU’s transistors are smaller than they would be on a 10nm or 14nm chip, and are therefore more power-efficient: increasing, in theory, the number of calculations it can perform with each cycle. Speaking of which, clock speeds are high for a chip with so many cores: 3.8GHz at base speeds, with a maximum single-core boost speed of 4.6GHz.

The latter isn’t quite as fast as the 5GHz achieved by the closest Intel equivalent, the Core i9-9900K (