AMD Ryzen 9 Matisse 3900X BOX (100-100000023BOX)

Long live the king!

The 3900X processor with 12 cores and 24 threads belongs to the advanced Ryzen 9 Matisse line, in which AMD has embodied its best practices. Besides the fact that this is one of the most powerful processors on the market, it is also attractive because it runs on a regular AM4 socket, like most other AMD chips. Recall that the record-breaking powerful AMD "stones" of the past generation belonged to the Threadripper family and worked with expensive and rare motherboards based on TR4 logic.

Old logic in a new way

Together with the new Zen 2 microarchitecture, AMD presented a new topology. Processors are no longer a monolithic crystal, but are assembled from several components. This allows the company to offer new powerful chips with 12 and 16 cores within the old Socket AM4 ecosystem. Each such chipset combines two CCX-complexes containing four cores and 16 MB of L3 cache. Given that the Ryzen 9 3900X is a twelve-core processor, it is constructed from three semiconductor crystals at once. All this, instead of using the Zen 2 architecture, allowed AMD to make the processor omnivorous and almost universally high-performance: it performs well under almost any kind of load. Detailed application testing has shown that AMD's new mainstream flagship is much faster than the slightly cheaper eight-core i9-9900K and, moreover, often outperforms even the 12-core Core i9-9920X, the official price of which is $1,200, but for which in stores from — for the deficit ask for much more.

Not for enthusiasts

Now for the disadvantages. AMD was in a hurry with the release of this processor and literally rewrote drivers, changed overclocking-power consumption ratios and updated firmware for socket AM4 literally on the go. All this resulted in a strange situation that, being an enthusiast processor, the 3900X began to behave strangely as soon as you climbed under the hood: either the arithmetic performance between cores changed, or it simply did not respond to changes in BIOS frequencies or voltage increases. As a result, it turned out that its stable frequencies are 4.7 – 4.8 GHz. Powerfully and stably, only memory overclocking is kept here. It turns out that out of the box the processor works like clockwork, just turn on XMP and you're good to go. For overclocking, you need to either wait for a stable firmware, or wait until the Ryzen 9 3950X goes on the market.