AMD Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Intel Core i9 9900K Performance In 400+ Benchmarks
Given the recent AMD "ABBA" Ryzen 3000 boost fix, the upcoming release of Ubuntu 19.10 powered by Linux 5.3, here is a fresh round of AMD Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Intel Core i9 9900K benchmarks in a side-by-side matchup . It's just not any comparison but our largest i9-9900K vs. 3900X comparison ever: 112 gaming benchmarks and 321 system/CPU benchmarks carried out for our most extensive look yet at how these ~$500 CPUs are competing in this fierce race.
This round of Core i9 9900K vs. Ryzen 9 3900X benchmarking was done while both systems were running the latest daily release of Ubuntu 19.10 powered by the Linux 5.3 kernel, which itself brought some nice performance-related work over previous kernels. Ubuntu 19.10 is also now running GNOME 3.34.0 that can make a difference for some gaming benchmarks while its default driver stack is currently on Mesa 19.1.6.
The Core i9 9900K was running with the ASUS PRIME Z390-A motherboard and the Ryzen 9 3900X with the ROG CROSHAIR VIII HERO WiFi motherboard, both boards using their very latest public BIOS releases as of testing. Both systems were tested with the same GSKILL 2 x 8GB DDR4-3600 memory, 280GB Intel Optane 900p NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics card. The RX Vega 64 was used over the Radeon RX 5700 series due to Ubuntu 19.10's older Mesa build not having Navi support and the Navi support in general still maturing and recommended for use with Mesa 19.3-devel, so with this not being a graphics card comparison anyhow, the RX Vega 64 was the safer and more accurate card to use for this round of testing.
Ubuntu 19.10 was a clean install and running with its default packages and settings. Via the Phoronix Test Suite over one hundred different combinations of Linux gaming benchmarks were carried out (including Steam Play games) and more than three hundred system/CPU benchmarks. With the Phoronix Test Suite all of the tests are run in a fully-automated and standardized manner. With the Phoronix Test Suite generally running each test a minimum of three times for statistical accuracy, running these nearly 500 benchmarks was quite a lengthy process for the two systems... If you enjoy the daily Linux benchmarking done by your's truly, consider showing your support by joining Phoronix Premium (enjoy ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page!) or making a PayPal tip but at the very least to not view this website with any ad-blocker.