The AMD Ryzen 9 3900X was released exactly one year ago today. And we loved this CPU. The abundant core count and the gaming performance there made it one of our favorite CPUs and solidified its place in our best CPU guide. This all-new Ryzen 9 3900XT draws just a bit more power from that impressive chip. The base clock remains the same at 3.8GHz, but the boost goes up from 4.6GHz to 4.7GHz. That's right, a whole 100 MHz.

You may wonder how AMD managed to get a 100MHz clock increase from this chip, even if it is only at boost. Other than that, there are no other changes. The number of cores and threads are the same, the cache levels are unchanged, and there are no tweaks to the underlying architecture.

What is different compared to the existing 3900X is that the 3900XT does not have a Wraith Prism cooler. So basically, you get a 100MHz boost clock increase, but you lose the cooler.

I am a big fan of AMD's coolers and have used them on many builds without issue, and while there is certainly an argument that the 3900XT is the limit of what the Wraith Prism can handle, and many high end builders will want to go the AIO route for such a high end chip, doing so Having the option to do so is quite different from being forced to do so. Of course, this is also true of the 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 3950X, which really pushes the envelope on what Wraith can handle; I don't have the same feeling about the 3900XT, which is a much more powerful chip, but it's not as good as the 3900XT, which is a much more powerful chip.

The Ryzen 9 3900XT, like the 3900X before it, is a beast of a mainstream processor. 12 cores and 24 threads give you plenty of power if you are a content creator who needs video production or 3D rendering. 3900XT is a desktop processor can handle such workloads in a way that is almost impossible with a desktop processor, and it greatly outperforms Intel's top-of-the-line products for such tasks.

The only problem is the 3900X, which actually does not differ by much. There is a 4% difference in the video encoding test and a 3% difference in the multicore results of Cinebench R20. It is good that the new chip represents a performance gain, but we wanted more to offset the loss of the cooler.

In our tests, using a Corsair iCue H115 RGB Pro XT all-in-one cooler to cool the chip, the 3900XT managed to achieve its rated boost speed, up to 4.725 GHz, with an overall CPU temperature of 79°C. However, the maximum frequency tends to be reached only for a very short time, and in more thread-intensive loads, the chip runs at around 4.2 GHz, depending on the workload. [The good news about the Zen 2 architecture is that the chip is also competitive in the gaming arena. While it is true that Intel still has the overall lead, especially at higher resolutions, the difference is minimal. For the past year, we have not had to choose between productivity and gaming, and this is still very much true.

It is worth noting here that there is very little difference between the 3900XT and the 3800XT when it comes to gaming. There are two ways to take this information: either the $100 difference is no gain in terms of gaming, or more positively, there is no gaming trade-off from having an extra core when there is downtime.

Speaking of reserves, the 3900XT has a bit of a problem: the 3600XT is essentially a straight upgrade to the 3600X (it comes with the same cooler), and the 3800XT is a more reasonable upgrade than the chip it replaces. 3900XT is a " new" chip, and is arguably the least attractive of the "new" chips.

Another factor working against the 3900XT is that even though AMD has not made any official price cuts on the 3900X, 3800X, and 3600X, they are generally available at a discount if you look around a bit.

In the case of the 3900XT, this is felt more strongly: the chip that the 3900XT is replacing can be had for $419 (from Amazon right now, but many retailers have similar prices), and that chip comes with a Wraith Prism cooler The chip comes with a Wraith Prism cooler. The chip comes with a Wraith Prism cooler; the AIO allows for higher clocks, but it is still good enough most of the time.

All of this combined makes the 3900XT the least exciting of AMD's new XT chips. While not a bad processor by any means, this latest spin is not particularly interesting either. It definitely reduces the value compared to the chips it replaces (due to the lack of a cooler), and from a gaming perspective, it brings little additional performance. If you already have serious cooling in mind and need this many cores, it's worth considering, but given the price drop of the 3900X, it doesn't seem like an effective use of $80, despite ostensibly having the same performance.

Then there is the Zen 3, which will be released before the end of the year. However, there is a lot of anticipation for Zen 3

as AMD has proven that they are not satisfied with small improvements to the Zen architecture. Personally, I prefer to wait. If you need to build now, there are more affordable options than this, like the Ryzen 9 3900X for starters.