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AMD Ryzen 9 3900 Review: a Taste of Eco Mode
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Our Verdict

The Ryzen 9 3900 offers incredible performance-per-watt within a friendlier 65W TDP envelope, which equates to less power consumption and lighter cooling requirements.
Quote:For

Low power consumption
Less thermal output
PCIe 4.0 interface
Overclocking support

Against

Only available in pre-built systems

We recently took the then-unannounced Ryzen 9 3900 on a record-breaking overclocking spin with liquid nitrogen, but now we have the elusive chip here in our labs for standard performance testing.

AMD's 12-core 24-thread Ryzen 9 3900 takes the goodness of the impressive Ryzen 9 3900X and shrinks it down from a 105W TDP envelope to 65W. AMD accomplished this feat by trimming the base and boost frequencies, thus squeezing the lion's share of performance from AMD's current flagship Ryzen 9 3900X into desktop PCs with smaller form factors that focus on power efficiency.

With AMD's inaugural Ryzen lineup, the X-branded models served as the faster and more expensive models in the product stack, while less expensive "non-X" models featured the same physical design as the X-branded models but had lower performance at stock settings. That trade-off came with a hefty discount, and enthusiasts soon learned that overclocking unleashed nearly the same performance from non-X chips as the X models. That was a win in the value department, and non-X models quickly became the go-to chip for enthusiasts on a budget.

With the Ryzen 9 3900X, AMD dashed the hopes of enthusiasts and didn't release a non-X version. It turns out there is a non-X model, but it is headed to OEM and system integrator (SI) builds, meaning you'll have to buy the chip in pre-built systems.

However, the Ryzen 9 3900 also gives us a taste of what to expect from AMD's new Eco-Mode feature, which allows you to downshift AMD processors into lower TDP envelopes with a single click in the BIOS or Ryzen Master software.

Ryzen 9 3900 Specifications and Availability

AMD designed the Ryzen 9 3900 to offer most of the 12-core, 24-threaded horsepower of the impressive Ryzen 9 3900X, but within a much lower 65W TDP range than its 105W sibling.

The 3900's reduced power consumption manifests as a lower 3.1 GHz base clock than the 3900X's 3.8 GHz base frequency. AMD also pared back the boost clock from 4.6 GHz to 4.3 GHz.

AMD tunes its "X" models to the very edge of the frequency/voltage curve to extract the utmost performance from TSMC's 7nm node, some of which we see with the chips' relatively lackluster overclockability. The Ryzen 3000 series processors aren't known for their overclocking headroom, but that's because AMD pushes the 7nm process near its limits for its retail silicon.

The company has even employed an innovative new binning technique paired with smart engineering to extract the last few percentage points of performance from each core. However, that tuning is designed to satisfy the enthusiast market's need for speed, and there is a diminishing point of power efficiency returns as AMD climbs the voltage/frequency curve. It's a simple concept: High-performance chips exchange higher power consumption, and thus thermal output, for higher performance. Dialing back the frequency reduces peak performance, but can offer much better power efficiency while retaining most of the performance.
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