AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT and Ryzen 5 3600XT Review: Small Gains, Big Price Tag

Ryzen XT underwhelms

AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT, AMD Ryzen 7 3800XT and AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT
(Image: © Tom's Hardware)

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The TLDR

The charts above provide the geometric mean of several of our application tests (listed in the chart title) that are representative of broader trends in lightly- and multi-threaded applications. Notably, these charts don't include the workstation-class application tests on the following page. You'll see more meaningful performance improvements there. 

We included all of our standard application testing below. Given the small performance deltas between the XT- and X-series, aside from identifying notable outliers, we won't provide too much commentary in the individual results - some of them even fall within the margin of error. 

Rendering on AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT

We don't see much of a gain for the Ryzen 9 3900XT in the threaded Cinebench workload, but that's expected because the all-core load triggers the socket power limits. However, removing those limits via the PBO feature also yields similar performance to the Ryzen 9 3900X. The Ryzen 7 3800XT gains a mere 1% over the X-series model, while the Ryzen 5 3600XT gains nearly 4%. 

The XT-series' also notches gains in the single-core test, with the 3900XT, 3800XT, and 3600XT improving by 2%, 3%, and 5%, respectively, though the first two aren't quite as impressive given the benchmark's margin of error. 

A similar tale plays out through the rest of the rendering tests, with the Ryzen 5 3600XT posting the most substantial gains. Meanwhile, the 3900XT and 3800XT eke out small but measurable and repeatable gains.

Encoding on AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT

The single-threaded LAME and FLAC encoding tests respond well to per-core performance, which benefits Intel's chips. AMD has shortened the gap between it and the Intel competition in these tests, but the overall performance hierarchy remains unchanged. 

The threaded HandBrake x264 and x265 tests show the same general trend - some slight gains for the Ryzen 9 3900XT and 3800XT, though it's noteworthy that the 3800XT passes the 10700K in the x264 render test. 

Web Browsing on AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT

Single-threaded performance reigns supreme in most web browsers. The Ryzen 7 3800XT and Ryzen 5 3600XT take impressive steps forward over the X-series models, but improvements are more muted with the Ryzen 9 3900XT, even falling within the margin of error in a few tests.  

Office and Productivity on AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT

Clock rates benefit the majority of the GIMP image processing and Microsoft Office tests, both of which benefit from the faster clock rates that come with the Ryzen XT series. 

Compression and AVX on AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT

The 7zip and Zlib compression/decompression benchmarks rely heavily upon threading and work directly from system memory, thus avoiding the traditional storage bottleneck in these types of tasks. As we've come to expect, the Ryzen processors dominate in 7zip compression tasks, but the performance hierarchy is largely unchanged.  

Overall we don't see any big changes in these benchmarks, either, though we had more luck the Adobe suite on the following page. 

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Paul Alcorn
Managing Editor: News and Emerging Tech

Paul Alcorn is the Managing Editor: News and Emerging Tech for Tom's Hardware US. He also writes news and reviews on CPUs, storage, and enterprise hardware.

  • sparrow2
    price on 3800XT is wrong in 2. table (339 not 399)
    Reply
  • Myrmidonas
    Indifferent CPUs of the decade?
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    AMD micro-binning the hell out of Zen 2.
    Reply
  • jimmysmitty
    InvalidError said:
    AMD micro-binning the hell out of Zen 2.

    I find it interesting yet expected. Both do this when they can. It also makes sense to remove the cooler, although Intel got hell for it, with a CPU thats designed for higher performance. Most people who build a system with top end CPUs tend to buy a third party cooler anyways and it just becomes more waste.
    Reply
  • King_V
    (sarcasm)

    AMD has been listening to the Intel fanboys on the forums. Higher clocks are all that matter. Included coolers are always stupid, because nobody will use them.

    So, AMD offered just such an option. Ergo, having catered to what the Intel fanboys wanted, I obviously expect to see them snapping up Ryzen XT processers en-masse

    (/sarcasm)
    Reply
  • NightHawkRMX
    I don't think I will be buying Ryzen XT anytime soon.
    Reply
  • Carlos Enrique
    Man, these CPU's are a waste of time (and money).
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    jimmysmitty said:
    It also makes sense to remove the cooler, although Intel got hell for it, with a CPU thats designed for higher performance.
    Part of that "hell" is for charging more despite removing the stock HSF which is in itself already an intrinsic value loss. If I'm going to get negative value for my money from ditching the stock HSF, I'll take the stock HSF even if I have no plan to actually use it.
    Reply
  • jimmysmitty
    InvalidError said:
    Part of that "hell" is for charging more despite removing the stock HSF which is in itself already an intrinsic value loss. If I'm going to get negative value for my money from ditching the stock HSF, I'll take the stock HSF even if I have no plan to actually use it.

    They did the same thing here though.

    But still the mass majority would throw the HSF away creating waste. Not worth it IMO.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    jimmysmitty said:
    But still the mass majority would throw the HSF away creating waste. Not worth it IMO.
    You can flip the Prism on eBay for ~$35.
    Reply