Ryzen 9 3900X/3950X vs. Core i9 10900K In 380+ Benchmarks

Following our initial Core i5 10600K and Core i9 10900K Linux benchmarks last week, here is a much larger comparison I have been working on since then in looking specifically at the Ryzen 9 3900X and 3950X against the Core i9 10900K. It's the largest to date with nearly 400 benchmarks being tested, most of them real-world test cases.

The past number of days I have been running this Core i9 10900K vs. Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Ryzen 9 3950X comparison with 381 benchmarks out of 138 distinct applications/workloads on both systems. With this round of benchmarking the Gigabyte Z490 AORUS MASTER and ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO were at play with 2 x 8GB DDR4-3600 Corsair memory, Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics. Benchmarking was run off Ubuntu 20.04 LTS while upgrading to the Linux 5.7 Git kernel for the very latest kernel bits. All other Ubuntu 20.04 packages were at their respective defaults.

The Core i9 10900K as a reminder is the Comet Lake 10 core / 20 thread part with a 3.7GHz base frequency and clock frequencies up to 5.3GHz via Turbo Boost. The i9-10900K has a 125 Watt TDP and 20MB cache. The Core i9 10900K is currently retailing for just under $500 USD.

The Ryzen 9 3900X as AMD's current closest competition to the i9-10900K has 12 cores / 24 threads, 3.8GHz base frequency, 4.6GHz boost clock, 64MB L3 cache, and 105 Watt TDP. At the moment the Ryzen 9 3900X can be found for about $420 USD.

The Ryzen 9 3950X meanwhile as AMD's highest-end desktop (non-Threadripper) processor has sixteen cores / 32 threads, a slightly lower base clock of 3.5GHz, a boost clock up to 4.7GHz, a 64MB L3 cache, and a 105 Watt TDP. This 16c/32t processor currently retails for about $710 USD.

All the distinct test profiles tested on these three latest-generation processors included:

- 7-Zip Compression
- ACES DGEMM
- AOBench
- AOM AV1
- ASKAP
- Aircrack-ng
- Algebraic Multi-Grid Benchmark
- Appleseed
- BLAKE2
- BRL-CAD
- Basemark GPU
- Basis Universal
- Blender
- Bork File Encrypter
- Botan
- Build2
- Bullet Physics Engine
- C-Blosc
- C-Ray
- CP2K Molecular Dynamics
- CacheBench
- Core-Latency
- Coremark
- Cpuminer-Opt
- Crypto++
- Cython benchmark
- DaCapo Benchmark
- DeepSpeech
- ET: Legacy
- Embree
- FFTW
- FFmpeg
- FLAC Audio Encoding
- Facebook RocksDB
- Fhourstones
- G'MIC
- GEGL
- GIMP
- GROMACS
- Git
- GnuPG
- Go Benchmarks
- GraphicsMagick
- Gzip Compression
- Hackbench
- Hierarchical INTegration
- High Performance Conjugate Gradient
- Himeno Benchmark
- IOR
- IPC_benchmark
- IndigoBench
- Intel Open Image Denoise
- Java Gradle Build
- Java SciMark
- John The Ripper
- LAME MP3 Encoding
- LULESH
- LeelaChessZero
- LibreOffice
- LuxCoreRender
- Minion
- Mlpack Benchmark
- Multichase Pointer Chaser
- N-Queens
- NAMD
- NAS Parallel Benchmarks
- NWChem
- NeatBench
- Nebular Empirical Analysis Tool
- Nettle
- Numenta Anomaly Benchmark
- Numpy Benchmark
- OSBench
- OpenSSL
- OpenVKL
- Optcarrot
- ParaView
- Parallel BZIP2 Compression
- Parboil
- Pennant
- Perl Benchmarks
- PlaidML
- Polyhedron Fortran Benchmarks
- Primesieve
- PyBench
- PyPerformance
- Radiance Benchmark
- RawTherapee
- Redis
- Renaissance
- Rodinia
- SQLite Speedtest
- Scikit-Learn
- Selenium
- Smallpt
- Sockperf
- Stockfish
- Stress-NG
- Swet
- Sysbench
- TSCP
- TTSIOD 3D Renderer
- Tachyon
- Tesseract
- Timed Apache Compilation
- Timed FFmpeg Compilation
- Timed GCC Compilation
- Timed GDB GNU Debugger Compilation
- Timed HMMer Search
- Timed ImageMagick Compilation
- Timed LLVM Compilation
- Timed Linux Kernel Compilation
- Timed MPlayer Compilation
- Timed MrBayes Analysis
- Timed PHP Compilation
- Tungsten Renderer
- Unigine Heaven
- Unigine Superposition
- Unigine Valley
- VP9 libvpx Encoding
- XZ Compression
- Xonotic
- Xsbench
- YafaRay
- Zstd Compression
- asmFish
- ctx_clock
- dav1d
- ebizzy
- libgav1
- libjpeg-turbo tjbench
- lzbench
- m-queens
- oneDNN MKL-DNN
- rays1bench
- toyBrot Fractal Generator
- x264
- x265

From those tests and the various options exposed, 381 different test cases were evaluated on these three Intel/AMD processors under Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux. The open-source Phoronix Test Suite was used for facilitating all of these benchmarks in a fully-automated, transparent, and reproducible manner with statistical accuracy.