AMD Ryzen 9 3950X vs Intel Core i9-9900K: The Battle for Mainstream Supremacy

[harlan4096]

Intel and AMD's finest mainstream chips go toe-to-toe in a seven-round faceoff.

For years, Intel's flagships were the only solution if you wanted the most powerful processor that money could buy. AMD, while it always offered good value at the low end, simply could not compete on the high end. That is until the red team turned the tide with its Zen architecture that underpins the company’s Ryzen and Threadripper CPUs.

AMD flipped the processor world on its head two years ago, and it continues to disrupt the industry. Recently, the company launched the Ryzen 9 3950X, which is the first mainstream processor to offer 16 cores for clobbering multi-threaded workloads on a mainstream platform.

The 3950X is more expensive than Intel's rival eight-core Core i9-9900K, but that's expected. Intel does have its Core i9-9900KS on offer, but that limited-edition chip won't be available after the holidays (according to Intel). Even with the $250 price disparity between the two chips, both of these processors represent the best each company has to offer on a mainstream platform.

As such, today, we'll put the Core i9-9900K and the Ryzen 9 3950X to the test to see which processor reigns supreme on the company's mainstream platforms.

Features

AMD’s Ryzen 9 3950X is the pinnacle of the company’s mainstream processor lineup. It’s built on the Zen 2 microarchitecture, which uses the Infinity Fabric interconnect to combine multiple chiplets to form high core-count CPUs. Zen 2 also supports the PCIe 4.0 specification, which doubles the available bandwidth for PCIe devices such as NVMe drives and graphics cards.

The Ryzen 9 3950X features two 7nm eight-core chiplets, just like the Ryzen 9 3900X. However, unlike the 3900X, this processor comes out of the factory with every core enabled. Amazingly, AMD didn’t have to lower the peak clock speeds, and it didn’t increase the 105W TDP rating. The 16-core 3950X comes out of the box with a 3.5 GHz base clock and a 4.7 GHz boost clock, although, as we recently discovered, the boost frequency isn’t necessarily consistent across all cores,

The Ryzen 9 3950X also includes 64MB of L3 cache, which is twice as much cache memory as the previous-gen Ryzen chips, and four times as much cache memory as Intel’s desktop chips.

Speaking of memory, Zen 2 processors officially support dual-channel DDR4-3200, and the Ryzen 9 3950X is no exception.

The features that the Ryzen 9 3950X brings to the table really haven’t been seen at this price point before. As we wrote in our review of the processor; “to say this chip blurs the lines between the mainstream desktop and HEDT is an understatement: In reality, it brings HEDT-class performance to the friendlier pricing of mainstream motherboards, placing it in a class of its own.“

Intel’s Core i9-9900K doesn’t move the HEDT needle closer to the mainstream in the same way that AMD’s Ryzen 9 processors do, but it is still a compelling option for certain functions because of its sheer clock speed. Intel is taking a brute-force approach to staying relevant in the enthusiast PC market. The company is struggling to shrink its designs to smaller process nodes, with several delays to its planned 10nm desktop processors preventing Intel from following AMD’s lead in terms of core counts. As such, the current CPU lineup is built on Intel’s 14nm++ process.

The Core i9-9900K is an 8-core, 16-thread processor that operates at a maximum frequency of 5 GHz. The 9900K offers a base clock of 3.6 GHz, can boost to 5 GHz on up to two cores, and up to 4.7 GHz on all eight cores. And unlike AMD’s processors, the core frequency does not waver between cores: all cores on the chip can reach the 5.0 GHz threshold.

The 9900K is rated at a 95W TDP and also includes solder TIM (sTIM), to facilitate heat dissipation.

Like the rest of Intel’s 9000-series processors, the Core i9-9900K features support for dual-channel DDR4-2666 memory. It also offers built-in UHD 630 graphics so you don’t need a discrete graphics card to build a system with this CPU, though it is noteworthy that you'll need a discrete graphics card for even mid-range gaming. The i9 processors also include 16MB of L3 cache memory.

Winner: AMD. When it comes to features, AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series outclasses Intel’s 9th Gen Core series with a variety of modern features. The smaller 7nm process allows AMD to pack more cores and more cache memory into a single socket, and the new PCIe 4.0 standard gives you far more bandwidth for modern accessories and SSDs.
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