Office, Web Browser, and Productivity
Web Browser
The Krakken suite evaluates JavaScript performance using several workloads, including audio, imaging, and cryptography. Like most browser-based benchmarks, single-threaded performance reigns supreme.
Browsers tend to be impacted more by the recent security mitigations than other types of applications, so Intel has taken a haircut in these benchmarks of fully-patched systems.
AMD's improved IPC comes into play as the processors post surprisingly good results that we wouldn't have expected with prior-gen models. The tuned Ryzen 7 3800X beats its more expensive counterpart the 3900X in several of these tests, but we see the impact of the 3700X's PBO+AOC configuration hamper its performance in lightly threaded tests. The same applies to the 3800X in some benchmarks even though we aren't engaging the AutoOC feature, meaning there appears to be some work left on the firmware side. Meanwhile, both processors provide great performance in stock trim. The 3800X notches complete victories over the -9700K in Krakken and Speedometer 2, but the -9700K takes the win in WebXPRT 3.
Microsoft Office
Microsoft's office suite makes its debut in our test suite via PCMark 10's new application test. This benchmark tests with real Microsoft Office applications, and we can see that the Ryzen 3000 series processors are very competitive in Excel, the Edge browser, and Word.
Core i7-9700K benefits massively from its overclock in some tests, but in stock form, it often trails the Ryzen 7 3800X. That trend is evident in the overall score.
Productivity
The application start-up metric measures load time snappiness in word processors, GIMP, and Web browsers under warm- and cold-start conditions. Other platform-level considerations affect this test as well, including the storage subsystem. The 3000-series processors occupy the middle of the ranks, but it will be interesting to revisit this benchmark with a PCIe 4.0 SSD in the future.
Our video conferencing suite measures performance in single- and multi-user applications that utilize the Windows Media Foundation for playback and encoding. It also performs facial detection to model real-world usage.
The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries using the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized, which plays well to Ryzen's multi-threaded heft. It takes a hefty overclock to boost the -9700K into contention with the 3800X. Again we can see some of the 3700X's performance sapped by the PBO+AOC configuration.
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