AMD Ryzen 9 3900X: Reddit's Productivity King With a Gaming Asterisk

You got a GOOD chip.

If they are the same price and you have a compatible board you are dumb not getting the 5900x. 5900x is purely and objectively better than 3900x in every way.

The 3900X is truly an awesome CPU that can do it all, with amazing productivity and strong gaming performance. I was tossing between 3700X and 3900X but all the stores here ran out of 3900X without a solid ETA.

Thermal density. 7nm node is denser than 14nm, Zen 2 packs more cores and more transistors into a smaller amount of space than original Zen — hence hotter temperatures. Additionally, with the offset IO chip, there is now even less area than before for heat to be distributed across the core die(s).

Either the 3900x is a bum chip or it is significantly held back by bad bios. This chip has the most to gain from the bios fix, as it is only scoring as good as the 3600 in gaming because it is probably running at similar clocks. If there truly is a major bios issue and the chips can hit 4.6, it will probably be neck and neck with the 9700k. If not then this is definitely not a good value for gaming, as a 3600/3700x perform the same for hundreds cheaper.

3700x that got sold on the 65W TDP. I am happy as well, can't go wrong either way.

Why does it consume less power but run way hotter?

I was expecting to read a post by a business owner who was now more productive thanks to his new 12-core processor and thus the CPU was literally worth every penny because he was now saving time, making more money, and perhaps having better work-life balance.

7nm is ridiculously efficient. Also, unpopular opinion but 1st and 2nd gen weren't that efficient. Sure they draw less power than Intel counterparts but that's often compared to when the Intel CPU is overclocked.

I went from an FX8350 to a 3900X. It was incredible haha. Originally I was supposed to get a 3700X but that wasn't in stock while the 3900 was. Grabbed that instead and never looked back. The new cpu has given my R9 380 a new lease in life with up to 15-20 more FPS on my games at maximum settings. So my FX8350 was bottlenecking my R9 380.

I just got a 5900X installed two days ago. It's amazing. The jump from six to twelve cores is night and day. I can never go back. Everything feels so smooth and runs so much better.

It's unfortunate that AMD marketed the 3900x as a 9900k killer in games. It absolutely wipes the floor with the 9900k in so much, just not gaming. Obviously it's no slouch though.

You can go even further and overclock each 3 core CCX individually like in Der8auer's video. He managed to get on 1.35V: 4.5GHz on CCX1, 4.45GHz CCX2, 4.35GHz CCX3, 4.35GHz CCX4.

So, the key to a successful overclock with the 3900x is to overclock the CCXs/CCDs individually. That sounds pretty cool.

Watching my latest video project render in less than a third of the time than my 1700x was magical.

I just upgraded from 3900x to 5700x3d. On cs2 my fps doubled, on pubg my fps doubled and on other games I gained like 30-40%. 3900x is fine, if you get it cheap, but for gaming, 3D series is just best value.

The 3900x was never a good gaming CPU, its great for productivity ect but not gaming. As mentioned by everyone else get a 5700/5800X3D if you want gaming performance. There was a pretty big jump in performance from 3000 to 5000 series for games and single CCD (4-8 cores) is more consistent.

Dont get a Ryzen 3000 unless its dirt cheap compared to 5000. They are ok for lower end GPUs in budget builds but Ryzen 5000 (X3D preferred) is just better by a good margin.

I got the 3900x last week in the UK. I get mixed results at stock levels on cb r20. Sometimes it's 7100 sometimes it's 7348. Happy with the chip tho. Max single core boost goes to 4.55ghz on two cores for a brief moment so I think mine maybe a decent chip too.

Idk, I'm using the wraith prism stock cooler and mine boosts to 4.65 all the time. Silicon lottery?

5900x is purely and objectively better than 3900x. The only possible reason to get a 3900x is if it works out considerably cheaper because you had a compatible mobo for the 3900 but would need to buy one for the 5900.

Yup, it seems that way since it has a higher and a lower performing CCDs. This setup maximizes performance but really the 3950X is going to be even more interesting.

Honestly this may be the reason PBO seems broken at the moment. Maybe its trying to boost all cores but since one CCD can't push past a certain limit it downclocks the other.

Yes it is still good for gaming. It's done me fairly well for the last couple years, no complaints, I game 1080/144fps. I pair it with 2080ti, and it's a solid monster. No water cool at stock voltage and clock speeds. It maxes out at 65C.

The 5900X is the same speed as the 3950X and much faster than the 3900X. 15-20%, depending on the use case.

A 3900X under load will put a lot of stress on a motherboard's electrical subsystem. When I started putting them in my systems, I experienced some pretty bad instability with the B450 boards I had been running 1600s and 2700s on. Even if you get it working, the VRMs are going to be heavily taxed.

The rendering and encoding tests really put a smile on my face with the 3900X.

I like my CPU but unfortunately PBO will not boost past 4.25 Ghz and the best CCX I have can only overclock up to 4.4 Ghz and 4.3 Ghz for the others. Just wondering where my fucking 4.6 Ghz is and there is no excuse since I have an awesome custom water loop.

I have a i7 4790k I upgraded to the 3900X and had a GTX 1080. I have 0 plans on upgrading at least minimum for the next 5 years. I can play at 4K 60 frames per second I'm perfectly fine with that.

I have given up on the score comparisons by now. AMD drives the processors so much against their limit that you basically have the silicon lottery with stock defaults. My question is did I get the gains I wanted, is there a bottleneck somewhere?

it's crazy how much amd's $499 cpu improved in 2 years

Nothing Wrong with The ryzen9 3900x For Gaming. I've been using it For a Very Long Time Now & I have it Set To 4.2 from it's base of 3.6. I'm using an rtx 3060 & that was From the COVID Outbreak so it Cost over £800. I've had No Issues running games at Ultra High. No Stutters or Ripping & No overheating. Can't Fault it esp. for the Price.

This is exactly my setup as well and it's been a solid monster for years and years and years. Can't beat the workload performance as well for anything extra like VM's and certain rendering stuff that uses CPU, holy crap it just absolutely destroys it with that core count. I'll easily be rocking my 3900x and my Overclocked RTX 3060 for quite a while longer.

I been running the Ryzen 3900X since its release period. I run it at base clock 3.80 GHz with 48 GB of ram and the beefy RTX 4090. Without any performance drop what so ever, all games run at high ultra speeds if i care to choose that route, with full 60 fps to 100+ fps when playing games or using any high video rendering tool. So far my PC is a Beast in 2025 still.

I've been using it since spring 2020. In regular tasks and games the utilisation never goes past 50%. I feel like it could handle an rtx 5080. But on my part it's passed 5 years, the motherboard is also getting old, I use my 9 years old pc case, 5 years old SSD. For me it served its purpose.

I'm using a 3900x on a B450 and I have zero issues. I was able to overclock to 4.4ghz with a Noctua NH-U12a no problem. Cinebench R20 runs maxing out the cpu at 3900 on all 12 cores got it hitting 75-76C, but never any higher. Super stable, idle between 33-38 depending on temps in my room.

h.264->h.265 1920x1080 with audio, 5min encode: preset Fast: avg ~80fps, preset Medium: avg ~58fps, preset Slow: avg ~24fps. These are not exact benchmark numbers and just a quick test on one of my files.

Just tried transcoding a big 1080p 30fps video file in H265 CQ20 (Handbrake) using 10c/20t. Average encoding FPS: plain H265: 80fps, 10 and 12 bit H265: 60fps, H264: 150fps. 3900X OCd to 4.5/4.4/4.35/4.35 / RAM 3733 CL16. Max: 76c (short peaks) / Average: 71c.

Seems like what AMD has always been. Productivity monster while being behind Intel in pure gaming performance. For the price and where it's at its obviously a better value but if Intel slashes prices by 15% as rumoured, then it's a different discussion.

Seems like my chip is just crap. Can't even get 4.35ghz on the first CCD with the 2nd CCD running at 4.2ghz. I am kinda pissed.

3900x is relatively quick even for an older CPU, so is very unlikely to be the bottleneck on frame rates at any HD resolution except maybe a 4090/4080 playing a low impact game like CS:Go or Rainbow Six Siege at 1080p.

A potent 12-core, 24-thread processor, the Ryzen 9 3900X excels at productivity, content creation, and multitasking. It is based on AMD's effective 7nm Zen 2 architecture and offers powerful performance for demanding tasks like 3D rendering and video editing. Although its somewhat lower single-core performance when compared to newer CPUs makes it less than ideal for pure gaming, it still manages modern games effectively, particularly when multitasking.

I have one. It's a solid CPU, but to be right honest it's excessive in comparison to the same-gen 8 core options in almost all cases, and the cases where it isn't make a great argument for going for the 5000 series. If you can get it cheap, go for it, but I'll bet you can get like a 3700x for quite a bit cheaper, and the cost difference will be a lot bigger than the performance difference.