Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Ryzen 9 3950X vs. Core i9 9900KS In Nearly 150 Benchmarks

This week our AMD Ryzen 9 3950X review sample finally arrived and so we've begun putting it through the paces of many different benchmarks. The first of these Linux tests with the Ryzen 9 3950X is looking at the performance up against the Ryzen 9 3900X and Intel Core i9 9900KS in 149 different tests.

The Ryzen 9 3950X is AMD's new $749 USD processor just below the Threadripper 3960X. The 3950X offers sixteen cores / 32 threads with a 3.5GHz base clock and 4.7GHz maximum turbo clock. Over the 3900X at $499 is four extra cores / eight threads, a 300MHz lowering of the base clock, 100MHz higher maximum boost clock, and larger L1 and L2 caches while both of these Zen 2 processors share the same TDP of 105 Watts.

The Core i9 9900KS meanwhile is currently retailing for $649+ USD and is the classic eight cores / sixteen threads, 4.0GHz base frequency, 5.0GHz turbo frequency, and has a 127 Watt TDP.

Given it's been several weeks since the Ryzen 9 3950X launched with the first reviews, let's jump straight to our Linux data with this article being quite straight-forward to getting out the data right away.

The systems were run with the Corsair Force MP600 2TB NVMe SSD, 2 x 8GB DDR4-3600 Corsair memory, and were running a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Given this long-term support release of Ubuntu 20.04 is coming up, for this round of testing we did the tests using that stack with the Linux 5.4 kernel.

149 tests (including various sub-test options) were run for this article on the three processors. As you can see, the Ryzen 9 3950X dominates quite well. Only in the single-threaded tests or those not scaling out to 32 threads saw some competition... (All the individual graphs of the highlighted results to follow.) As shown in previous articles, even the Ryzen 9 3900X pretty much kicks around the Core i9 9900KS.

Leading on the performance-per-dollar is the Ryzen 9 3900X at $499 USD, but even the Ryzen 9 3950X at $749 USD is generally delivering better value than the Core i9 9900KS at $649 USD. Only in cases like web browser performance, Intel's OSPray software, x264 video encode, and other select cases was there performance-per-dollar of the i9-9900KS beating out the Ryzen 9 3950X.

Now let's look at some of these results in more detail.