64 x 2.9GHz vs 18 x 3GHz
This situation improved with the second-generation Ryzen chips and is showing further narrowing with generation three.Many other tasks, especially common ones like playing older games or browsing the web, are heavily influenced by other factors, including a chip's clock speed or the size of its cache, or other hardware such as your video card. Our expert industry analysis and practical solutions help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.As with most things in life, money is perhaps the most important point of distinction whether you're upgrading, building from scratch, or buying pre-built. For example, on the recent AAA title Far Cry 5, the Ryzen 9 3900X scored 18 frames per second (fps) lower than the Core i9-9900K did, a difference of about 13 percent. We saw smaller deficits on older games like Bioshock Infinite and Hitman: Absolution. 16 x 3.5GHz vs 8 x 3.6GHz And because they're priced identically, neither has a clear advantage here.When it comes to encoding a 12-minute 4K video to 1080p using the open-source Handbrake app, the difference between the Core i9-9900K and the Ryzen 9 3900X is no small difference, either...Here's a peek at the results we saw with the Ryzen 9 3900X versus the Core i9-9900K (as well as two other chips in their class) with a host of games on the RTX 2080 Ti and a synthetic benchmark...The speed differences are small but significant, although you can't strictly compare them one to one. Many of the comparisons also apply if you're looking at buying a pre-built system with a Ryzen 9 3900X or Core i9-9900K, however.With more cores and support for more addressable threads, higher memory speeds, and a larger cache, this CPU has an advantage on paper, and indeed is the best choice if you can leverage those extra cores for no extra money.PCMag, PCMag.com and PC Magazine are among the federally registered trademarks of Ziff Davis, LLC and may not be used by third parties without explicit permission.
That's a perfectly natural outcome, since the Ryzen 9 has more of them.
(Again, that's 12 cores/24 threads for the Ryzen 9, versus eight cores/16 threads for the Core i9.) We want to find out if the AMD with its 16 cores is better than the Intel with only 10 cores or not.
The Core i9-9900K has lower peak official memory-speed support (2,666MHz) and a much smaller 16MB of L3 cache. Based on 2,302 user benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen TR 2920X and the Intel Core i9-9920X, we rank them both on effective speed and value for money against the best 1,215 CPUs.
With their $500 list prices, both of these CPUs are expensive in absolute terms. It … Both can be overclocked.Still, the differences we found in our testing are an important reminder that specs alone don't tell the whole story when you're comparing two CPUs for gaming or content creation.The same relative performance is borne out in our POV-Ray test, another CPU-burner that has both single-core and multicore aspects...On our Cinebench R15 test, which includes both single-core and multi-core workflows, the Ryzen 9 far outpaces the Core i9 when it's using all of its cores and threads. It features 16 MB of cache, a 95W TDP and Intel UHD 630 graphics. The Ryzen 9 3900X works with most AM4-socket motherboards (older ones, only after a BIOS upgrade), but you'll need a new-generation one based on the AMD X570 chipset one to unlock all of its features, including PCI Express 4.0 support.
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So the Ryzen 9 3900X can handle 24 instruction threads, while the Core i9-9900K can handle 16. When the software in question is maximizing the use of cores and threads, the Ryzen 9 generally will prevail.While a comparison of specs suggests that the Ryzen 9 3900X comes out on top in a bunch of seminal areas, real-world performance doesn't always reflect this.Both chips have multithreading support, which means that each core can handle two instruction threads from software simultaneously. Why is AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X better than Intel Core i9-9900K? Again, if your software of choice is optimized to parcel out tasks to as many processing threads as it can, more is better here.Once again, the Core i9 prevails on the single-core task but falls a bit behind on the multicore one (though by a bit less time, proportionally, than on Handbrake and Cinebench).You may need to factor in the price of a new motherboard and cooler to support these chips, however. AMD Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Intel Core i9-9900K: Which High-End CPU to Buy? The Ryzen 9 3900X has 12 cores to the Core i9-9900K's eight, so it gains the upper hand right from the beginning, at least as far as raw specs are concerned.
PCMag Digital GroupHere, at least on pure specs, the Ryzen 9 3900X wins hands down.