AMD's new generation of Ryzen 3000 CPUs is here and it's blowing away hardware reviewers the world over. From the entry-level Ryzen 5 3600, right up to the Ryzen 9 3900X, they are trouncing their rival Intel chips in multi-threaded work loads and matching or exceeding their single-threaded and gaming performance. In many cases they're even beating out the Intel chip above them in the pricing structure.
Effectively, AMD's biggest competition at this point is itself, which means if Intel wants to remain even remotely relevant in the year to come before its next major desktop release, it's going to have to lower prices.
The Ryzen 3600 and 3600X offer some of the most affordable, entry-level gaming power in years, with higher clock speeds, improved IPC, and greater level 3 cache, all helping to deliver frame rates in game that exceed those of Intel's 9600K. Not only that, but it competes favorably with Intel's 9700K in multi-threaded work loads. All for $200-$250.
When you move up to the $330 3700X, things get more exciting. It matches and often exceeds the 9700K in gaming tests, and can even challenge the 9900K if pushed with a little overclocking. It often dominates both in multithreaded tasks, thanks to its 8-cores and 16-threads, as well as its raised clock speed over the 3600 chips.
The 3800X and 3900X are Intel killers through and through, though at $400 and $500, they're outside the price range of most gamers. If you do buy them though, they're monstrously powerful, offering gaming power around that of the 9900K and they demolish it in multithreaded tests.
Intel's chips are comparably priced, but with weaker overall performance than AMD's new chips, Intel will need to shave prices or it's going to lose out big time.
