A class of its own: AMD Ryzen 3950X – Power consumption and efficiency analysed and documented in detail

1 - Introduction, methods and test system 2 - Intel vs. AMD - Efficiency analysis and performance per watt 3 - Kernskalierung und Leistungsaufnahme 4 - Power consumption for various tasks and conclusion

Power consumption for various applications

I am mean now and leave the Quadro RTX 6000 simply in the system, also in the games. Because this card is the full version of the TU102 with 24 GB memory and only slightly slower than the RTX Titan. You can also see that it doesn’t matter whether SMT was activated or not, except for the special and well parallelizing applications. The few watts difference can easily be neglected. Interestingly, games and workstation applications run a bit faster without SMT except for very few render tests, although the CPU consumes slightly less power.

Summary and conclusion

These measurements actually only confirm what I had already indicated in the first test “AMD Ryzen 9 3950X und 3900X im Workstation-Test gegen Intels Skylake X, Coffee Lake und natürlich sich selbst im 65-Watt-Eco-Mode” the Ryzen 9 3950X is a truly highly efficient CPU, which, however, always requires jobs that can be easily parallelized. But even Blender fails from 10 cores (20 threads) upwards because of his own overhead, because not all tasks can be shared by force and distributed to many hungry mouths.

But be it as it is – the double efficiency in Blender compared to the Core i9-9960X shows very impressively where the journey can go and I’m surprised once more why AMD withholds such results on its own PR slides. A benchmark result should be put in context to the effort and if you include the factor time for power consumption, then the Ryzen 9 3950X suddenly has the stunning charm of a wrecking ball for Intel’s current processors.

But with all the euphoria about performance and efficiency – this CPU is currently a homeopathic deceptive package, because you can’t buy it for a reasonable price and AMD also organized the sampling in such a way that you can’t go further into the tests due to lack of time. To give a buying tip would therefore be pure cynicism towards those who couldn’t even touch such a part. Without real availability, the Ryzen 9 3950X remains the same desirable piece of technology as before, but with an extremely bland aftertaste of a feasibility study without any real reference to reality.

Maybe next year we’ll be able to buy another real CPU somewhere for a normal price, at Threadripper I’ve already given up hope. There’s not even a rotation of the CPU yet. I definitely don’t support black market-like prices as a matter of principle and otherwise they just test what you can buy. Too bad, but that’s the way it is.