AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT

Incremental increases

- ALAN DEXTER

THE AMD RYZEN 9 3900X was released exactly a year ago today, and we loved it. Loads of cores and decent gaming performance made it one of our favorite processors. On paper, this brand new Ryzen 9 3900XT takes that impressive chip and squeezes just a little more power out of it. The base clocks are unchanged at 3.8GHz, but the boost goes from 4.6GHz to 4.7GHz. Yup, a whole 100MHz.

You may be wondering how AMD has managed to squeeze an extra 100MHz out of this chip, even if it is only at boost, and apparently it’s down to a better understanding of the 7nm production process. There are no other changes, though. The core and thread counts are the same, the cache levels are unchanged, and there are no tweaks to the underlying architecture.