The AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen Deep Dive Review: 3700X and 3900X Raising The Bar
by Andrei Frumusanu & Gavin Bonshor on July 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTSection by Gavin Bonshor
X570 Motherboards: PCIe 4.0 For Everybody
One of the biggest additions to AMD's AM4 socket is the introduction of the PCIe 4.0 interface. The new generation of X570 motherboards marks the first consumer motherboard chipset to feature PCIe 4.0 natively, which looks to offer users looking for even faster storage, and potentially better bandwidth for next-generation graphics cards over previous iterations of the current GPU architecture. We know that the Zen 2 processors have implemented the new TSMC 7nm manufacturing process with double the L3 cache compared with Zen 1. This new centrally focused IO chiplet is there regardless of the core count and uses the Infinity Fabric interconnect; the AMD X570 chipset uses four PCIe 4.0 lanes to uplink and downlink to the CPU IO die.
Looking at a direct comparison between AMD's AM4 X series chipsets, the X570 chipset adds PCIe 4.0 lanes over the previous X470 and X370's reliance on PCIe 3.0. A big plus point to the new X570 chipset is more support for USB 3.1 Gen2 with AMD allowing motherboard manufacturers to play with 12 flexible PCIe 4.0 lanes and implement features how they wish. This includes 8 x PCIe 4.0 lanes, with two blocks of PCIe 4.0 x4 to play with which vendors can add SATA, PCIe 4.0 x1 slots, and even support for 3 x PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 slots.
| AMD X570, X470 and X370 Chipset Comparison | |||
| Feature | X570 | X470 | X370 |
| PCIe Interface (to peripherals) | 4.0 | 2.0 | 2.0 |
| Max PCH PCIe Lanes | 24 | 24 | 24 |
| USB 3.1 Gen2 | 8 | 2 | 2 |
| Max USB 3.1 (Gen2/Gen1) | 8/4 | 2/6 | 2/6 |
| DDR4 Support | 3200 | 2933 | 2667 |
| Max SATA Ports | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| PCIe GPU Config | x16 x8/x8 x8/x8/x8* |
x16 x8/x8 x8/x8/x4 |
x16 x8/x8 x8/x8/x4 |
| Memory Channels (Dual) | 2/2 | 2/2 | 2/2 |
| Integrated 802.11ac WiFi MAC | N | N | N |
| Chipset TDP | 11W | 4.8W | 6.8W |
| Overclocking Support | Y | Y | Y |
| XFR2/PB2 Support | Y | Y | N |
One of the biggest changes in the chipset is within its architecture. The X570 chipset is the first Ryzen chipset to be manufactured and designed in-house by AMD, with some helping ASMedia IP blocks, whereas previously with the X470 and X370 chipsets, ASMedia directly developed and produced it using a 55nm process. While going from X370 at 6.8 W TDP at maximum load, X470 was improved upon in terms of power consumption to a lower TDP of 4.8 W. For X570, this has increased massively to an 11 W TDP which causes most vendors to now require small active cooling of the new chip.
Another major change due to the increased power consumption of the X570 chipset when compared to X470 and X370 is the cooling required. All but one of the launched product stack features an actively cooled chipset heatsink which is needed due to the increased power draw when using PCIe 4.0 due to the more complex implementation requirements over PCIe 3.0. While it is expected AMD will work on improving the TDP on future generations when using PCIe 4.0, it's forced manufacturers to implement more premium and more effective ways of keeping componentry on X570 cooler.
This also stretches to the power delivery, as AMD announced that a 16-core desktop Ryzen 3950X processor is set to launch later on in the year, meaning motherboard manufacturers needed to implement the new power deliveries on the new X570 boards with requirements of the high-end chip in mind, with better heatsinks capable of keeping the 105 W TDP processors efficient.
Memory support has also been improved with a seemingly better IMC on the Ryzen 3000 line-up when compared against the Ryzen 2000 and 1000 series of processors. Some motherboard vendors are advertising speeds of up to DDR4-4400 which until X570, was unheard of. X570 also marks a jump up to DDR4-3200 up from DDR4-2933 on X470, and DDR4-2667 on X370. As we investigated in our Ryzen 7 Memory Scaling piece back in 2017, we found out that the Infinity Fabric Interconnect scales well with frequency, and it is something that we will be analyzing once we get the launch of X570 out of the way, and potentially allow motherboard vendors to work on their infant firmware for AMD's new 7nm silicon.
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Yorgos - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
I am wondering what's the dissipation rate in each cooler used, but I cannot find it anywhere.A fair comparison would be using the same cooler on all cpus, not mix and matching.
I have trouble concluding on what's the purpose of these "tests" or what's the conclusion of this mess.
3 year old gpu, different bench conditions, half of the Intel security patches are missing, passmark was "weird"....
Andrei Frumusanu - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
I talk about this in the conclusion...palindrome - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
One line on the conclusion is an afterthought. Perhaps it should have been included in the intel vs amd comparison tables on the first page...Arbie - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
+1Andrei Frumusanu - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
You're right, I've added it in the tables and a mention.Arbie - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
++1palindrome - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
After looking at the "Test Bed and Setup" page, it appears that none of the results between generations are truly comparable as your margin of error is too large to draw an accurate conclusion. The test beds differ in memory brand, quantity, number of DIMMs and (surely) timings. HSFs are all over the place with Intel getting the benefit of a tower cooler (with mystery fans being used) in the 9X00 series vs stock coolers for the AMD chips. HSFs are also not factored into the price of the AMD chips vs Intel.It is a shame that you guys did all this work in making everything so precise when the data is truly incomparable. I guess you could argue that this is "better than nothing" to compare dissimilar test benches in different environments. I would argue that this data has an error margin of +/- 5%-10%, rendering most of the graphs useless.
WaltC - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
The review was fine, but Ryzen 3k series deserves a Gold of course, as Intel is beaten in cost, power consumption, process node, performance (as no games that I know of today are single threaded), and security--the last a huge win for AMD. A silver is for 2nd place--and I'll only agree with that if you give Intel a Bronze...;) (But then, who's left?....;)) With all these ancient and creaking Intel-compiler optimized synthetic benchmarks around--some of these had to be resurrected for this comparison!--it reminds me of the early days of the Athlon versus the original Pentium long years ago. For the first few months the benchmarks held that AMD still had some catching up to do--advance the clock a year later release and there was almost nothing Intel was winning anymore! Pretty much everything now showed Intel bringing up the rear--both in games and synthetics. The reason for that was that the Athlon/K7 compilers were then in wide circulation and use--along with the standard Intel compilers--so that game-engine designers and benchmark devs could optimize their work for *both* architectures. AMD walked away with it--and a short time later Intel threw in the towel (after A64, I believe) and cancelled the original Pentium entirely and went back to the drawing board. I think it's obvious that few if any of the games and synthetics tested were properly optimized for the R 3k series--and possibly not even for Ryzen 1(!), as well. Time will tell...;)Phynaz - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Hey Walt, what’s it been a decade since you AMD fanboys have had something decent?You still can’t seem to understand the concept of writing concisely.
Korguz - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
hey Phynaz, how long as intel been screwing you intel fanboys ?? lies about 10nm being on track, keeping the mainstream stuck on quad core, over charging for its products ?? making sure every 1 to 2 cpu release REQUIRES are new mobo as well....