AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review. Ryzen 3950x where to buy

The high airflow setup adds a pair of intake fans to the top of the case, you’ll usually setup them as exhaust fans, but for this test we wanted to blow cool air over the plate VRM heatsinks for maximum cooling efficiency, so we believe this is the best-case scenario.

Best Motherboards for Ryzen 9 3950X

Have you been looking for the best motherboard for the Ryzen 9 3950x? Well, congratulations first.

Have you been looking for the best motherboard for the Ryzen 9 3950x? Well first congratulations on finally deciding to buy the Ryzen 9 3950x. Trust me, this is the best decision you could ever make. Now, the next key step is finding a motherboard for your Ryzen CPU. And you don’t have to worry about that because you are in good hands. As there are many options here on this platform, we are only talking about quality.

In this list, among all the options, you will find the best ones in terms of quality. Motherboards that pass testing successfully from time to time are quality boards. When you invest in the Ryzen 9 3950x, there’s no compromise on motherboard quality. Second, ultimately quality is what counts as quality. You may be considering a high-quality option that doesn’t fit well with the Ryzen 9 3950x because of its features.

The powers of the motherboard cannot be emphasized enough. It is enough to consider that the processor is the entire human body, and the motherboard is its heart. Understand? To land on a high-quality option, you’ll need to sail across the ocean of motherboards. But the good news is that I made a swim part for you and was able to make it ashore with a list of the best motherboards for the Ryzen 9 3950x. Now all you need to do is sit back and enjoy this article.

Shopping Tips for Ryzen 9 3950X Motherboard

GPU Support: Whether you want to use GPU on your PC or not, the best motherboard for the Ryzen 9 3950X should support the latest GPU. Because you may always need to connect a graphics card to your computer. While sometimes the CPU doesn’t come with integrated graphics, you’ll need to purchase a separate graphics card and connect it to the MOBO. This allows you to see the display on the monitor in fascinating, high-quality colors.

SATA Ports: SATA ports or slots are types of memory slots that allow you to connect various drives, such as SSD or HDD, to your MOBO. If you don’t have Nvme support, a suitable motherboard will ensure that it is SATA 6 gigabyte SATA 3.0.

RAID: Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) is a collection of programs that organize different hard drives into “arrays”. This is the case with the speed of access to data from hard drives. Several motherboards do not have this feature, so make sure your MOBO has a RAID controller.

PCI slots: These slots are used to make connections between the motherboard and expansion cards. You can connect multiple expansion cards if you have multiple PCI slots / ports. However, the player must have at least one full speed PCIe × 16 slot.

Installation: Some motherboards are difficult to install. However, the motherboard now comes with an integrated I / O shield. This integrated panel saves your time and simplifies the installation process. If you decide to use a hob that does not have a panel mounted, make sure the manual contains enough detail.

september 19, 2019 update: AMD is still silent about the 3950X launch, rumors have surfaced, but nothing specific yet. We keep our eyes open with sellers all over the world, so check back.

Improving on Near-Perfection

When we reviewed the Ryzen 9 3900X in July, with the launch of the then new AMD Zen 2 processors, we tried to find a lot of bugs in what was essentially one of the most cost-effective gaming and content processors we’ve seen so far. While this processor was marginally inferior to Intel Core’s competition in single-core tasks and a score slightly below excellent in gaming tests at 1080p, apart from these marginal complaints it represented the Ryzen 9 3900X (and the entire Ryzen 3000 line) a return to prime for a company that over the last ten she lived in the shadow of Intel for years.

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Similar Products

AMD Ryzen 9 3900X

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Intel Core i7-7740X

The Ryzen 9 3950X is more of what we loved, with a little extra serving on top. Where the Ryzen 9 3900X “only” has 12 cores and supports up to 24 simultaneous processing threads, the Ryzen 9 3950X kills up to 16 cores and 32 possible threads. Another difference: while the Ryzen 9 3900X has a base clock of 3.8 GHz and a boost clock of 4.6 GHz (as the maximum for a single core), the Ryzen 9 3950X lowers the base clock to 3.5 GHz, but the boost clock is ticking slightly up, up to 4.7 GHz.

Finally, while the Ryzen 9 3900X has a total L2 / L3 cache allocation of 70MB, the Ryzen 9 3950X has 72MB L2 / L3 cache (8MB L2 and 64MB L3). In addition, both processors have the same TDP: 105 watts each, which is the same as the weird duck of the Ryzen 3000 series, the Ryzen 7 3800X.

The Blue Elephant in the Room

The Ryzen 9 3950X is an interesting layout as it overlaps the number of cores and threads with the meat and potato model in the second generation Ryzen Threadripper line, Threadripper 2950X. The new core is counting on third-generation Threadrippers due later this month to reflect this. But even more interesting is how Intel’s desktop processor lineup compares.

Since there is no Intel Ryzen 9 3950X counterpart that can compare exactly the number of cores and threads, the closest analogy we can make to the Intel processors we’ve tested is Intel’s 18-core Core i9-9980XE Extreme Edition.

Also included are the specifications of the 12-core Intel Core i9-9920X processor, which is the most suitable chip in the Ryzen 9 3950X with a different size in terms of number of cores.

As seen above, the Intel Core i9-9980XE doesn’t compete directly: it has two more cores and four more threads, and at the time of writing this article costs around 400-250 more than the Ryzen 9 3950X. But as you’ll see shortly in the benchmarking section below, that doesn’t stop the Ryzen 9 3950X from completely beating the CPU, which is 166% more expensive than it. (Rumor has it that Intel could significantly lower the price of this generation of “Skylake-X” chips, and the chip giant has confirmed that it will be bringing its 10th-generation X Core X series processors to the market at significantly discounted prices.)

That said, the upcoming 18-core Intel Core i9-10980XE processor, replacing the Core i9-9980XE, will still be worth considering, especially as the expected processor price will be “only” $ 250 higher than the Ryzen 9 3950X while featuring two additional cores and four additional threads. Rumor has it that the NDA for this processor is due on November 25, so we can’t share any comparative data yet, but let’s know that for these two tech titans it will be a very interesting couple of months over the next few product cycles in the high-end desktop market. (HEDT.

How has Intel Core i9-9980XE coped with the best non-Threadripper Ryzens so far? To find out, let’s move on to our tests.

All pre-binned variants of the Ryzen 9 3950X are expected to be available tomorrow. You will be lucky to get one as the amount of these chips will be very low. The rest of the AMD Ryzen 3000 family also has pre-binned samples available for a while, and bin statistics can be seen here.

Performance

The Ryzen 3900X was the flagship chip of the third generation Ryzen (that is, before the 3900XT). The 3950X overcomes both. These are both extremely efficient, high-end processors. These are possibly HEDT chips, despite their focus on the more popular sector and their specifications reflect this. Each was also found faster than Intel’s most powerful HEDT processors.

Processor	Cores	Threads	L3 cache	Base clock	Boost clock (single core)	TDP
AMD Ryzen 3900X	12	24	64 MB	3.8 GHz	4.6 GHz	105w
AMD Ryzen 3950X	16	32	64 MB	3.5 GHz	4.7 GHz	105w

The biggest differences between the two processors are the number of cores and threads. With an additional four cores and eight threads, the Ryzen 3950X is a more powerful multi-thread processor. However, finding jobs that can use so many cores and threads is another matter. Unless you do heavy video editing or video transcoding, it is unlikely that you will really benefit from these extra threads. They would definitely be hanging around in games.

Indeed, the 3900X is arguably an overkill for gaming only, but if you’re gaming and streaming at the same time, both are excellent. Surprisingly, considering the additional cores, the 3950X is also slightly faster than the 3900X in games, but only slightly.

Benchmarks put 3950X a few frames ahead of 3900X at 1080p. However, as the resolution increases, the gap becomes smaller. At 1440p and above, you won’t notice the difference in games between 3950X and 3900X. Your GPU becomes a bottleneck at higher resolutions, so you’re effectively wasting money with the 3950X if you focus mostly on gaming.

The differences relate to CPU-intensive tasks such as video transcoding and 3D modeling. In Blender, the 3950X surpasses the 3900X by almost 30%. However, the 3950X does not work for all applications. There is little difference between it and the 3900X in Adobe Premiere Pro, and their multi-thread compression performance is identical.

3900X offers far more bang for your buck, but …

If we look at these two chips only in the microcosm of this head-to-head encounter, we can make two final statements. The 3950X is the better of the two chips, but the 3900X represents much greater value for money. When it comes to the dollar-value-to-performance ratio, the comparison isn’t too big. The 3950X gives you a few extra frames per second when gaming and cuts the time it takes to complete certain productivity tasks by 10% to 30%, depending on how multi-threaded your application is.

If you’re a purely gamer, chances are you haven’t heard of any of these chips. The 3700X and 3800X models are remarkably similar to both new options, but they don’t compare to the 3900X and 3950X price point. For the best value for money, you can’t go wrong with the 3900x, which is comparable to other options while still being affordable. However, we did find one major drawback: if your software uses up to 24 threads, it’s very likely it will do the same with 32 threads.

While this is not a guarantee, the chances are high. Finding the right multi-threaded chip will cut your computer’s rendering time down by a few seconds, so the investment of 3950x is worth it.

However, if you have a little extra money to play with, we recommend you go wild on the Theadripper 3000 CPU. This chip transfers multi-threaded power to a completely different playing field with 128 threads and 64 cores.

The MSI Tomahawk was impressive, hitting just 66 degrees Celsius, and while that may be the optimal setup, you can expect this board to run anywhere between 66 and 87 degrees, depending on setup and ambient temperature.

AMD Ryzen 3950X Launch: Europe

• Switzerland – Digitec.ch | Steg.ch/de
• France – Amazon |
• Spain – Amazon |
• Italy – Amazon |
• Germany – Amazon | Mindfactory
• Denmark – Elgiganten
• Sweden – Elgiganten

• Turkish seller – QP.com.tr
• Salesman in Mumbai – Prime ABGB
• Retailer in Pakistan – Eitimad
• Salesman in Bangladesh – Skyland
• Vietnam – TinhocDaiViet

Motherboards for AMD Ryzen 9 3950X

If you’ve been lucky enough to get your hands on one of the impressive AMD Ryzen 9 3950X processors, you’ll likely need an equally powerful motherboard. For this reason, we have created a few pages that will make your life much easier when deciding which motherboard to choose.

If someone wants to ask other countries to research and add seller links, let us know in the comments section below.

After a lot of tinkering (and a few crashes due to an issue with AMD’s OverDrive software loading the stacked drivers), I was able to get the Ryzen 9 3950X to a stable 4.1 GHz overclock on all cores, with a maximum clock speed of 5.2 GHz for a single core.

Ryzen 9 3950X gaming performance

Considering the price issue, one thing is clear: this is not a gaming processor for advanced gamers who are looking for an affordable processor. So, the only game that can go beyond the limits of 8-core processors is none other than the real-time strategy Ashes of the Singularity developed by Oxide Games and Stardock Entertainment. The game was created with high load and ultra-high performance of processors in mind.

Unfortunately, the 3950X did not live up to our expectations as it provided the same TDP as the Ryzen 9 3900X. This may be due to AGESA updates that have degraded its performance. In our tests, we used an RTX 2080 TI graphics card instead of the RTX 2060 for better results and better CPU performance at 1080p ultra. The reason we checked this with a lower display than 1440p or 4k is because the display is a matter of graphics cards, not processors.

Overall, the 3950X’s gaming performance is good. If you were using a five-year CPU and now plan to move to the updated version, the performance would be powerful and excellent in every way. However, the problem still exists for advanced users who already have updated gaming gadgets and are tech-savvy. Compared to its competitor i9-9900K, the 3950X is nearly 10 percent slower, with competition favoring the i9-9900K.

Ryzen 9 3950X Apps Performance

One thing should be made clear that the purchase of the Ryzen 9 3950X of this expensive CPU for purely gaming purposes is a waste of money. You can buy a decent Ryzen 6 3600 at a very lower price and get similar performance. While it handles games significantly efficiently, it actually works best with the higher performance loads of threads and cores.

In terms of multithreading, it is 30 percent faster than the previous version and this is probably due to AES performance. The processor can withstand heavy loads during cryptography, video encoding, 3D rendering and other similar tasks.

Compared to Intel’s advanced processors, the 3950X is much better in terms of multi-threaded performance. On average, the 3950X’s performance is 40% higher than the 9900KS and 9900K.

The processor is also the leading processor in the PCMark test. At the moment, Intel is lagging behind in the CPU race with AMD. But its Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition processor turns out to be a much better option albeit at a higher price and consuming more power than the 3950X. The reason is that while the Skylake-X architecture is impressive in terms of performance, it is somewhat costly and energy inefficient.

Brand: Gigabyte | Chipset: AMD X570 | Socket: AM4 | Form factor: Mini ITX | Memory: 64 GB DDR4 | Memory speed: 5100 MHz

AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Silicon Lottery Pre-Binned CPU Statistics:

3950X all core frequencies	Vrdzeń	VR Vout	LLC setting	Percent capable
4.00 GHz	1.287V	1.162V	Lowest	100%
4.05 GHz	1.300V	1.175V	Lowest	92%
4.10 GHz	1.312V	1.187V	Lowest	56%
4.15 GHz	1.325V	1.200V	Lowest	19%

Processor name	Ryzen 5 3500	Ryzen 5 3500X	Ryzen 5 3600	Ryzen 5 3600X	Ryzen 7 3700X	Ryzen 7 3800X	Ryzen 9 3900X	Ryzen 9 3950X
Cores / threads	6/6	6/6	6/12	6/12	8/16	8/16	12/24	16/32
Base clock	3.6 GHz	3.6 GHz	3.6 GHz	3.8 GHz	3.6 GHz	3.9 GHz	3.8 GHz	3.5 GHz
The boost timer	4.1 GHz	4.1 GHz	4.2 GHz	4.4 GHz	4.4 GHz	4.5 GHz	4.6 GHz	4.7 GHz
Cache (L2 + L3)	16 MB	32 MB	35 MB	35 MB	36 MB	36 MB	70 MB	72 MB
PCIe lines (4th generation processor + PCH)	40	40	40	40	40	40	40	40
TDP	65W	65W	65W	95W	65W	105W	105W	105W
Price	$ 149	$ 179	$ 199	$ 249	$ 329	$ 399	$ 499	$ 749

Voltages are clearly below the safe limit of 1.4V and each specification has been defined by the vendor. The most interesting thing here is that Silicon Lottery also sells a pre-bent variant of the FCLK Ryzen 9 3950X with FCLK 1900 MHz and IMC DDR4-3800.

This is more interesting from a bin point of view considering that memory and Infinity Fabric performance should help you more than all-core overclocking is better done on CCX than on all cores. Regardless, given that these chips have better overclocking stability in the all-core scenario, their CCX overclocking should also be better than standard chips. You still pay $ 1,300 for this chip, which is $ 550 more than a standard chip, so it is possible, but most importantly, you can expect a nice gold chip in your hand.

All pre-binned variants of the Ryzen 9 3950X are expected to be available tomorrow. You will be lucky to get one as the amount of these chips will be very low. The rest of the AMD Ryzen 3000 family also has pre-binned samples available for a while, and bin statistics can be seen here.

This time, however, we won’t be testing without direct airflow. That would take too much from these boards under $ 150, but since we’re testing with the optimal ambient temperature of 21 degrees, we’re going to include a low airflow configuration along with a high airflow configuration. All tests take place inside the Corsair Crystal 570X.

Ryzen 9 / B450 VRM Temperature Test

The low airflow configuration includes a pair of intake fans mounted on the front of the case on the 240mm AIO. Then we have a single 120mm exhaust fan on the back of the case, fairly standard setup.

The high airflow setup adds a pair of intake fans to the top of the case, you’ll usually setup them as exhaust fans, but for this test we wanted to blow cool air over the plate VRM heatsinks for maximum cooling efficiency, so we believe this is the best-case scenario.

All motherboards used the latest BIOS and all run AGESA version 1.0.0.4. The Ryzen 9 3950X has been left in stock so it should be a bit less demanding than the 3900X. Now let’s move on to the results.

First, let’s run some benchmarks to see how each motherboard performs on the Ryzen 9 3950X using a low airflow setup. Note that the Asus ROG Strix B450-F Gaming overloaded the 3950X which resulted in a slight increase in performance, but of course it also increased the VRM temperature, so we set a negative offset of 0.150V which made the Asus motherboard more in line with the voltages observed from the Motherboard gigabyte and MSI.

Unfortunately this lowered performance and here we see a 6% drop in the Cinebench R20 multi-core score compared to the Tomahawk and Aorus Pro. MSI and Gigabyte motherboards managed to hit the performance seen on the Aorus Xtreme for $ 700, so it was nice to see it.

We see quite similar performance trends when we look at single core performance, although we only use one core, low voltage still degrades performance with the B450-F Gaming.

Contrary to what we just saw on the Cinebench, the Asus board actually performed slightly better with lower voltages in this long Blender test due to the lower VRM temperatures. Basically, the lower voltage helped reduce CPU throttling, and we’ll look at that in a moment. In terms of performance, we can see that the Tomahawk and Aorus Pro have been able to fit the Aorus Xtreme, so that’s another good sign for these budget boards.

Here you can see how poorly the Asus Strix B450-F Gaming is configured using the latest BIOS. The board increased the total system consumption from 3950X to 266 watts, almost 20% more power than a Tomahawk using the same processor.

In fact, MSI Tomahawk and Gigabyte Aorus Pro have cut power consumption by almost 10% compared to the high-end X570 Aorus Xtreme motherboard.

Here is a look at VRM temperature results for low airflow configuration, above we show operating temperature and resulting performance side by side, lower is better for both.

MSI Tomahawk performed well on Blender, taking 1,819 seconds to complete the test, which puts it on par with the best X570 motherboards. The VRM also peaked at just 87 degrees, which is unique for a board that costs ~ $ 120.

The Gigabyte B450 Aorus Pro WiFi surprised with the second-best result, although it was 10 degrees warmer than the Tomahawk, and while that does make it a bit seared, it’s safe working temperature, and the board avoided the 3950X throttling.

Closing Thoughts

The MSI B450 Tomahawk proves once again why it’s the most cost effective and versatile B450 motherboard. Although we used a newer version of Max for this test, the performance is identical to the original one, you just get better BIOS support with the newer version, which unfortunately is still not commercially available in the US.

For those looking to buy a B450 motherboard today for use with something like the Ryzen 5 3600 or the Ryzen 7 3700X, we still strongly recommend buying the MSI B450 Tomahawk or Pro Carbon. The Pro Carbon is a bit expensive at around $ 140, for the money you might as well look at the X570 motherboard. We strongly advise you to skip the stock MSI X570 motherboards as they are terrible, in the same class as the Asus B450-F Gaming.

Conversely, we actually recommend the Asus X570 series. For example, the TUF Gaming X570-Plus is an excellent board for $ 165. For more detailed information on the best motherboards, check out our 5 Best X570 Motherboards and Favorite B450 Motherboards for a good rundown.

Those of you who followed our advice and purchased the MSI B450 Tomahawk for your build, good news, you’re ready. When the prices of these 3900X and 3950X processors start to plunge, you’ll be ready for a major CPU upgrade without having to change anything.

One final note, we will say that the Gigabyte B450 Aorus Pro WiFi surprised us in this test. The last time we ran a similar test with the initial F1 BIOS using the Ryzen 7 2700X, it was a disaster. But Gigabyte seems to have done a good job fine-tuning the board, and while it’s still not impressive, even the 3950X can now be used with it, so great to see it.