Geekbench 4 results for AMD's soon-to-be-released Ryzen 7 3800X processor have been unearthed, giving us some performance numbers to to compare against the Intel Core i9-9900K, with a grain of salt, of course.
A well-known tech hardware leaker known as TUM_APISAK on Twitter, spotted the benchmark numbers.
Both the Ryzen 7 3800X and i9-9900K are octa-core processors with 16 threads, making them natural rivals. However, that's where the similarities end. The Ryzen 7 3800X has a 3.8 GHz base clock speed and 4.5 GHz boost clock, while the i9-9900K runs with a 3.6 GHz base clock and 5 GHz boost clock. On paper, the i9-9900K should have the upperhand, but we know that's not always the case in the hardware world.
Intel Core i9-9900K vs. AMD Ryzen 7 3800X
| Row 0 - Cell 0 | Price (USD) | Cores / Threads | TDP | Base Clock | Boost Clock | Total Cache | PCIe Lanes | Memory Support |
| Core i9-9900K | $488 | 8 / 16 | 95W | 3.6 GHz | 5.0 GHz | 16MB | PCIe 3.0 x16 | DDR4-2666 |
| Ryzen 7 3800X | $399 | 8 / 16 | 105W | 3.9 GHz | 4.5 GHz | 32MB | PCIe 4.0 x24 | DDR4-3200 |
As always, performance leaks should be taken with a bit of salt. For starters, we don't know under what conditions the tests were performed, or if this is Engineering Sample (ES) silicon. Sometimes it's hard to find a comparable result where both test system's specifications match.
Photo Credits: Geekbench
One important aspect to note about the Ryzen 7 3800X result is that the test system was using DDR4-2133 memory. As third-generation Ryzen parts support DDR4-3200 memory out of the box, running slower memory will limit the chip's performance. With the aim of making this a fair fight, we set out to find a Geekbench 4 entry where the Core i9-9900K is paired with DDR4-2133 memory as well.
With both processors running with DDR4-2133 memory, it seems that AMD is catching up to Intel in single-core performance. Nevertheless, the Core i9-9900K is still around 1.09% faster here, according to the leaked numbers.
The multi-core results, on the other hand, are in AMD's favor. The Ryzen 7 3800X beats the Core i9-9900K by up to 4.95% in multi-core workloads.
The Core i9-9900K surpasses the Ryzen 7 3800X when it's combined with DDR4-2666 memory, Intel's official supported memory speed. The Core i9-9900K performs roughly 14.48% and 0.56% faster in the single-core and multi-core tests, respectively. Basically, what this tells us is that Geekbench 4 is sensitive to memory speeds, and the Ryzen 7 3800X's performance is gimped with DDR4-2133 memory.
It's too early to declare the Ryzen 7 3800X as the winner. We'll have to wait for our in-depth review of the Ryzen 7 3800X to properly judge its performance. Rest assured that we won't be using DDR4-2133 memory in our tests.
