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3950x Owners thread

Soldato
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After all the reading online and looking at bench marks and peoples struggles to overclock the 3950x I am glad I waited before jumping on the amd band wagon once more. its no doubt AMD's best CPU to date, unless we talk thread ripper of course but the 3950x is no reason for me to update from a 9900k at 5.1ghz stable 24/7
I really wanted to switch back to AMD but the advantages and overclock headroom are small and in gaming terms no advantage at all. In multithreaded applications the 3950X scores very well, but iam not encoding 24/7 or running benchmarks to that affect, I surf, watch a few movies, bit of photoshop when needed and game.
it seems very very few of the AMD 3950x chips clock very well at all, AMD have set them close to there limit to begin with. Intels X299 boards are showing there age so I don't see that as an upgrade path either and will no doubt be replaced soon offering more onboard advantages motherboard wise like the new AMD boards with 4gen PCie configs.

I will have to wait until the next round of CPU's to get real term performance increase's worth the investment in upgrading M/board CPU and now doubt ram and CPU water block along with it.


Just my personal view, nothing against AMD or there user's. for me the long awaited AMD revolution just wasn't there.
Mine overclocks like a monster I can run it 4.7ghz 4 cores and 4.5ghz the other 12 if I wanted, beats a 9700k in single threaded
 
Soldato
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There is no reason for a 9900k owner to move.
I've had reasons to buy both. Until I did side-by-side comparisons I also couldn't believe that the 3950X and the 3700X was that close to 9900K for single-thread tasks.

It's also interesting to note that when heat dissipation is limited inside a smaller case, even the 3700X can do a better job than the 9900K for considerably high workload such like botting games in four virtual machines.

Overally I'm pretty satisfied with AMD's 7nm offerings. I think it's the way to go forward with, and while I'm not selling my 9900K any time soon, I wouldn't recommend people to continue buying Intel in the next year.
 
Soldato
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There is no reason for a 9900k owner to move.

There was for me, My GF is doing a course that requires her to do various model rendering, Simulations etc... and for me personally I have been converting my entire DVD collection to digital, 100 DVD's takes some time :p

Extra cores for all of those things helps a lot and as I play at 1440P most of the time I see no real FPS difference between this and a 9900K but my workload performance has shot through the roof.
 
Soldato
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Yes, it was relatively easy, just have to get the voltage right.


It's worth it and does give it a boost in gaming for me

Any guides on this? My 3950x is currently sitting at 4.3ghz all core with 1.3v
The overclock was done by a store, but the profile is in the BIOS. How do I go about trying to adjust one of the CCX's to say 4.4ghz? I'm assuming some of the cores can go higher than 4.3ghz and 4.3ghz was just the maximum that the lower quality cores could achieve.

It's worth it and does give it a boost in gaming for me

How do you tell the game to use the higher clocked cores for games that are lightly threaded, or does Windows do this automatically?
 
Associate
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I wish i could get my head around Linux. Plus i don't think my favourite game would run on it, or run well. Football Manager 2020.
I realise you posted this last month but if you want to play around with Linux you can run WSL (windows subsystem layer) in windows 10 and have a full linux distribution running inside windows. Works very well and easy to configure.
 
Soldato
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I decided to put to the test the theory that a stock 3950x is faster at gaming than one which is overclocked. It's very limited, I've only tested one game , SoTTR specifically because it has CPU stats and GPU stats separated out.

Setup: 2080ti, 3950x, 32GB 3600 CL14 RAM
Game settings: 2560x1440p, "Highest" preset with Ray Tracing and DLSS both Off

I'd never done this test before, but I'm glad that I did. I'm now fully content that the overclock is better for gaming too, not just for work. There are some significant gains in CPU test scores between stock and 4.3ghz OC. This particular game is still GPU bound at 1440p and so GPU scores did not change, but with a more powerful GPU that could be different.

Stock 3950x



4.3 ghz all core 3950x

 
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Associate
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I decided to put to the test the theory that a stock 3950x is faster at gaming than one which is overclocked. It's very limited, I've only tested one game , SoTTR specifically because it has CPU stats and GPU stats separated out.

Setup: 2080ti, 3950x, 32GB 3600 CL14 RAM
Game settings: 2560x1440p, "Highest" preset with Ray Tracing and DLSS both Off

I'd never done this test before, but I'm glad that I did. I'm now fully content that the overclock is better for gaming too, not just for work. There are some significant gains in CPU test scores between stock and 4.3ghz OC. This particular game is still GPU bound at 1440p and so GPU scores did not change, but with a more powerful GPU that could be different.

Stock 3950x



4.3 ghz all core 3950x


That's great but can you do the same test in 1080p to eliminate gpu bottleneck. Thx
 
Soldato
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Under the hot sun.
That's great but can you do the same test in 1080p to eliminate gpu bottleneck. Thx

Same thing applies. I use the 3900X with 1usmus powerplan, PBO OFF and XFR ON.
Having a CPU running at 4300 Ghz max when gaming with all core overclock and the other at constant 4620 on 100% load with just normal boost, there is a difference.
Hence I prefer the later. Screw CB20 all core benchmarks, as they are not representative of game & light load performance.
 
Soldato
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That's great but can you do the same test in 1080p to eliminate gpu bottleneck. Thx


Same thing applies. I use the 3900X with 1usmus powerplan, PBO OFF and XFR ON.
Having a CPU running at 4300 Ghz max when gaming with all core overclock and the other at constant 4620 on 100% load with just normal boost, there is a difference.
Hence I prefer the later. Screw CB20 all core benchmarks, as they are not representative of game & light load performance.

when mine is stock, HWinfo records 4.5ghz on two cores while running a single thread test in Cinebench. But while gaming in SoTTR the clocks fluctuate between 4.15ghz and 4.275ghz and the game appears to be using about 12 threads checking task manager. If I run a multi core Cinebench test the clocks lock to 3.85ghz on each core.

That is totally stock, no pbo and the amd default windows optimized power plan. Max power draw is 140w in multi thread and 110w while gaming.

With the 4.3ghz all core, max power draw while gaming is 10w less at 100w. You might think this is odd, why does stock draw 10w more but run slower at 4.15ghz to 4.275ghz. HWinfo reports 1.35v on each core while gaming in SoTTR stock, but only 1.3v for the 4.3ghz overclock

I don't have a screenshot because I forgot to take it but I did rerun the SoTTR benchmark at 1080p using the resolution slider - stock 3950X returned average of 140fps with 35% of the time gpu bottleneck and 4.3ghz all core returned 155fps with 68% of the time gpu bottlenecked.

I may go back and redo the 1080p and perhaps even 720p and take screens this time.

Unless I'm doing something very wrong when the CPU is stock, it looks like I'm getting higher performance, higher clocks and using less power in this ONE game with my all core overclock, I do stress it's one game only, I don't have time to check heaps plus most games don't have built in benchmarks
 
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Soldato
Joined
6 Feb 2019
Posts
17,595
Borderlands 3 has it's own benchmark, so I've run both at 1080p as requested. It spits the data out in a excel sheet by frametime, so I've had to calculated the stats myself.


3950x stock

Average
131 fps

95th percentile
176fps

5th percentile

96fps

3950x 4.3ghz overclock

Average
138 fps

95th percentile
182fps

5th percentile

105fps



Game settings

ScreenResolution: 1920x1080
RenderResolution: 1920x1080
ScreenPercentage: 100
HDR: Off

GameUserSettings
- FullscreenMode: Fullscreen
- UseVSync: 0
- PreferredMonitor: ACR0490
- bPrimaryIsPreferredMonitor: 1
- PreferredRefreshRate: 0
- StatsLevel: 2
- FPSLimit: Unlimited
- GfxQuality-Override: Undefined
- GfxQuality-Recommended: Ultra
- GfxQuality: Ultra
- TextureStreaming: Ultra
- MaterialQuality: Ultra
- Aniso: SixteenX
- Shadows: High
- DrawDistance: Ultra
- EnvironmentDetail: Ultra
- Terrain: Ultra
- Foliage: Ultra
- CharDetail: Ultra
- CAS: 1
- CameraBlur: 0
- ObjectBlur: 1
- AA: Temporal
- VolumetricFog: Medium
- SSR: High
- AO: Ultra
 
Soldato
Joined
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17,595
That's great but can you do the same test in 1080p to eliminate gpu bottleneck. Thx

I've gone back and re-done SoTTR. Same graphics settings before, this time testing @ 720p to remove all GPU bottlenecking

You will notice that the benchmark reports 0% GPU bottleneck, these framerates are all down to the CPU.

The results show a win for the overclocked 3950x by 10.5% over stock in average FPS and 10.2% in minimum fps

4.3ghz 3950x







stock 3950x


 
Last edited:
Soldato
OP
Joined
26 Sep 2017
Posts
6,189
Location
In the Masonic Temple
Any guides on this? My 3950x is currently sitting at 4.3ghz all core with 1.3v
The overclock was done by a store, but the profile is in the BIOS. How do I go about trying to adjust one of the CCX's to say 4.4ghz? I'm assuming some of the cores can go higher than 4.3ghz and 4.3ghz was just the maximum that the lower quality cores could achieve.



How do you tell the game to use the higher clocked cores for games that are lightly threaded, or does Windows do this automatically?
Sorry I missed this, do you still need answers?

To the second bit, yes windows allocated to the highest clocks ccx
 
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