AMD Ryzen 7 3800X Review
General Overview
By now we are all familiar with the CPUs and the underlying Zen 2 architecture. For a deep dive and some technical insight, you should visit AnandTech and read through their editorial piece. It breaks down many of the more technical elements of the design, while keeping accessible to a wide audience. Definitely worth a read. 
Regarding the more obvious differences between the Ryzen 7 3800X and its direct competition in the Core i9 9900K. The Core CPU has a much higher clock frequency, but in terms of compute performance per clock / per watt; the 3rd generation Ryzen architecture and thus the Ryzen 7 3800X is superior. Personally, I’m not as concerned about the game performance as I am the power consumption. As you see in thew chart below, the power consumption of the Ryzen 7 3800X, even when overclocked to 4.4GHz (on all cores), consumes less power than an overclocked Core i5 9600K at 5GHz. That’s rather significant in terms of power efficiency.
Moreover the Ryzen CPU runs cooler, under the same conditions. This is of course not a direct comparison between the two, however it is worth highlighting that the additional performance the Core CPUs provide in gaming come at a cost outside of just the purchasing of the hardware.
(Please note that Prime95’s load testing does not represent typical application loads. The AIDA 64 FP-64 test even less so, hence the odd 4375MHz clock frequency as opposed to 4,400MHz used for all other tests. This test, produces an incredible amount of heat and can cause an instant shutdown on some systems, even with no overclocking)
AMD has always touted its value proposition over INTEL regarding performance per Dollar/Rand. Regardless of how one may feel about that, AMD does make a valid point here as the retail package comes with the Wraith Prism RGB with programmable LED lights if you care for that sort of thing.
While this is nowhere near what the best CPU coolers can provide on the market today, it is still usable and allows the CPU to reach its factory clocks without any issue. Overclocking room is very limited for sure, but compared to not getting any sort of cooling at all with the competition’s offerings, AMD does score points here.
