AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Hits 4.3 GHz On All 16 Cores With Water Cooling

[harlan4096]

AMD's 16-core 32-thread Ryzen 9 3950X may have hit a small snag on its way to market, but the enthusiast world is eagerly awaiting the arrival of a new record-setting core count for the mainstream desktop. And according to Gigabyte, overclockers may have even more reason to be excited than "just" a generous helping of cores and threads.

Gigabyte has released a Ryzen 9 3950X overclocking guide where the motherboard manufacturer was able to push its sample to an impressive 4.3 GHz on all 16 cores while using a beefy liquid cooling solution, and at a mere ~1.4V.

*Ryzen 9 3950X benchmarks from Gigabyte, other results from Tom's Hardware labs

Gigabyte paired its Ryzen 9 3950X with the brand's own X570 Aorus Master motherboard, Aorus 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4-3200 memory kit and EKWB's EK-KIT P360 liquid cooling kit. The motherboard manufacturer used Cinebench R15 to evaluate the 16-core chip's stock and overclocked performance, which allows us to compare those results to ours.

At stock, the Ryzen 9 3950X scored 3,932 points in Cinebench R15, which is 92.4% faster than a stock Core i9-9900K and 81% faster than the Core i9-9900K overclocked to 5 GHz on all cores (which would be similar to a stock Core i9-9900KS). For now, the Core i9 series from Intel stands as its most powerful competing chip on a mainstream platform, and that isn't likely to change soon.

At stock settings, AMD's upcoming flagship also delivers up to 25.5% more performance than the existing Ryzen 9 3900X. As you can see above, the results are even more impressive once Gigabyte pushed the chip to 4.3 GHz.

The fact that the Ryzen 9 3950X could hit 4.3 GHz on all its cores is a great achievement, especially when Ryzen 3000-series processors are famous for not having much manual overclocking headroom. For comparison, our Ryzen 9 3900X sample, which has four fewer cores, maxes out at 4.1 GHz. That implies that AMD is setting aside the absolute best 7nm dies for its 16-core, 32-thread chip, especially given that Gigabyte hit a Prime95-stable (one hour run) 4.3 GHz with only 1.4 vCore. Gigabyte's Ryzen 9 3950X sample could even hit a devastating 4.4 GHz, but the company insinuated that it was only stable enough to pass a Cinebench R15 run.
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