Testbed

Taking these things into account, we used the same test platform as we did in our Zen 2 launch review, namely an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X processor, the MSI MEG X570 Godlike motherboard, and the excellent GSkill SniperX 16GB DDR4- 3200 CL14 kit, based on Samsung B-Die ICs. We used a Noctua NH-D15 cooler equipped with the factory fan for cooling the CPU, and a Seasonic P1200 PSU to power up the system.

Other parts used are Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, the most powerful video card at the moment, and a 1TB Samsung 970PRO SSD on which we installed the OS. We use Windows 10 Pro x64, with all the upgrades up to date (1903 in this case). We only use original operating systems, benchmarks and games, with all the updates available installed. The system was tested on an HSPC Top Deck Station test bench, with ambient temperatures around 28 oC.

We used single-threaded test and applications and multi-threaded applications, apps that are used by millions of users around the world on their personal PC, but also applications designed especially for the professional environment (3D Studio MAX), games that we have used for some time now, but also some of the latest titles, all of which will help us get a complete picture of the performance in terms of our specific needs.

In the first part of this test, we used 5 memory settings, with an equal difference in frequency and latency. Namely, DDR4 2800 12-12-12-28, DDR4 3200 14-14-14-36, DDR4 3600 16-16-16-36, DDR4 4000 18-18-18-39 and DDR4 4400 18-20-20-42. Because AMD recommends DDR4 3733 1: 1 as a sweet spot, we also tested this configuration with 16-16-16-36, uClk set 1: 1 and fClk set at 1800 MHz. Using these 6 settings, we went through all the benchmarks and games that we used in our CPU launch review.