AMD has brought out three new 3000-series Ryzen CPUs, fending off the threat from Intel’s latest Comet Lake chips. The three new models are based on AMD’s Zen 2 microarchitecture, and come in Ryzen 9, 7 and 5 versions.
At the top of the stack is the Ryzen 9 3900XT, which has 12 cores (24 threads), a base clock of 3.8GHz and a turbo clock of up to 4.7GHz. As a point of comparison, its predecessor, the Ryzen 9 3900X has the same number of cores, and 64MB of L3 cache, but its 4.6GHz boost clock is 100MHz lower.
Similarly, the Ryzen 7 3800XT and Ryzen 5 3600XT retain the respective 8-core and 6-core designs of their predecessors, but up the boost clock speed. The 3800XT boosts to up to 4.7GHz, compared to the 3800X’s maximum 4.5GHz boost. Likewise, the Ryzen 5 3600XT has a 3.8GHz base clock and can boost up to 4.5GHz, while the Ryzen 5 3600X could only boost up to 4.4GHz.
It was hoped that the introduction of the new XT CPUs would push down the price of their non-XT predecessors, but the current fluctuations in component pricing make that hard to verify. As an example, a Ryzen 9 3900X cost £402 inc VAT from Scan when we checked it a couple of weeks ago, but it now costs £440 inc VAT. That’s a good cheaper than the new £500 3900XT now, but it’s hardly a bargain compared to a few weeks ago.
You can see the full pricing of the CPUs below.
AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT
- 12 cores / 24 threads, 3.8GHz base clock, 4.7GHz boost clock
- £500 inc VAT
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
- 12 cores / 24 threads, 3.8GHz base clock, 4.6GHz boost clock
- £440 inc VAT
AMD Ryzen 7 3800XT
- 8 cores / 16 threads, 3.9GHz base clock, 4.7GHz boost clock
- £400 inc VAT
AMD Ryzen 7 3800X
- 8 cores / 16 threads, 3.9GHz base clock, 4.5GHz boost clock
- £340 inc VAT
AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT
- 6 cores / 12 threads, 3.8GHz base clock, 4.5GHz boost clock
- £250 inc VAT
AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
- 6 cores / 12 threads, 3.8GHz base clock, 4.4GHz boost clock
- £209 inc VAT