AMD Ryzen 9 3900X Linux Memory Scaling Performance

For those wondering if upgrading your RAM to higher frequency DIMMs is worthwhile when moving to AMD X570 and a new Zen 2 processor like the Ryzen 9 3900X, here are some reference benchmarks at different frequencies while maintaining the same timings.

In case you missed it, the new AMD processors offer native DDR4-3200 memory support while back during AMD's press briefings they recommended DDR4-3733 as a "sweet spot" for those wanting optimal latency at a reasonable speed. But if you are after pushing high-end DDR4 to their limits, they say DDR4-5100 can be achieved on air cooling with mild overclocking.

For the purposes of this quick article, I ran some tests on the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X with different frequencies while using the ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO, Corsair Force MP600 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD, and the Trident-Z Royal DDR4-3600 2 x 8GB DIMMs supplied as part of the Ryzen 3000 series reviewer kit. I tested various frequencies from DDR4-2600 to DDR4-3800 for reference as the frequencies most of you will encounter with current generation DIMMs and for most of you not investing much time in overclocking or tweaking.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite, various synthetic and real-world Linux benchmarks were carried out for this Ryzen 9 3900X memory scaling benchmarks from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the Linux 5.2 kernel.