 Let's get this out of the way. Even the most ardent AMD fan knows that Intel is king when it comes to gaming, and AMD always has been, and always will be, nothing but a second choice for poor people. And everyone, including myself, has only themself to blame for getting wrapped up in the hype around the third-gen Ryzen launch and jumping on the bandwagon too early. Let's throw up some numbers here, shall we? So as you guys can see here, a simple die shrink was never going to, uh... A simple die shrink was... Hey. AMD is tied with Intel. Yeah, that's CSGO. That's known to favor Intel. Are you sure you labeled this correctly? Intel goes here, AMD goes here. This is gaming. Yeah, usually. Is it... Are you sure that's right? Could it be that Intel is behind AMD for gaming? We are gonna need to go a little bit deeper here, folks. Speaking of deeper, if you ever want to take a deeper look at what's going on with your network connection, GlassWire allows you to monitor your network activity and block badly behaving apps. Use offer code LINUS to get 25% off at the link in the video description. Let's do the technical stuff first. At the core of this launch is Zen 2, AMD's aptly named next-generation Zen microarchitecture that incorporates a new chiplet layout consisting of multiple 7nm CPU dies and a dedicated 12nm I.O. die all joined together by an infinity fabric interconnect that runs at double the bandwidth of the previous generation in order to reduce latency. AMD has also thrown in a more efficient branch predictor, much faster AVX, support for super fast frequency switching, a feature that improves both performance and efficiency, kind of like Intel's speed shift, and finally, GAME CACHE! One of the dumbest bits of branding that we've seen since SUPER graphics cards. As it turns out, GAME CACHE is just marketing speak for doubling the amount of level 3 cache on the CPU. The good news is that, stupid name aside, it does help feed Ryzen's hunger for extremely fast data access to the point where AMD claims that this optimization alone is worth double the benefit of going from DDR4-2666 all the way to 3600 on the previous generations. Improving matters even further, 3rd gen Ryzen now natively supports DDR4-3200 and has been seen overclocking as high as 5100 MHz. To put that in perspective, 1st gen Ryzen was so picky about memory that for a while you needed high-end Samsung B-die modules in order to hit 3200 MHz. By contrast, 3rd gen Ryzen's new off-die memory controller design has AMD claiming a sweet spot of DDR4-3733. That's frankly astounding. So they managed all this by optimizing trace routing to the CPU and decoupling the memory frequency from the Infinity Fabric clock. That means that you're no longer overclocking the Infinity Fabric when you overclock your memory. Speaking of overclocking, AMD's updated Ryzen Master Utility provides full-timing control while booted to the OS and lets you import and export those settings, including settings that are generated by 3rd party Ryzen memory overclocking calculators. So if you've got a similar setup to an exported profile from someone you know, then you can actually use those numbers as a jumping off point, which is really cool. We're hoping to follow up with a full overclocking guide, but in a nutshell, it's pretty different, but in a good way. There's even more that AMD has done here too, but the TLDR is that this is far more than just a die shrink and it all adds up to a pretty hefty performance improvement. And the crazy part is that's all before we even get to the new motherboards. Now many second generation and some first-gen Ryzen boards should get support for third-gen chips, but for the best experience, AMD is of course recommending their new X570 chipset. With X570, supported devices, including the chipset itself and the link that it has to the CPU, are going to run at PCI Express Gen 4, which is capable of double the bandwidth of the previous generation. That means that high-performance devices like multi-gigabit network cards, USB 4 controllers, NVMe storage, and future graphics cards will be able to run their best on X570. Okay, so that was a lot of new stuff to take in, so I'm just going to sum it up here. AMD now has much faster cores and, making matters worse for Intel, their modular approach to chip design has enabled them to pack in more of them. Today, right now, AMD has a 12-core, 24-thread consumer CPU on store shelves, and it's priced to match the Core i9-9900K with a measly 8 cores and 16 threads. And, what's even crazier, is it's got 105W TDP, which Intel happens to measure at their base clock, and AMD measures at their boost. Of course, it's one thing to be told all of this, and quite another to see it. So here's the test setup that we're using today. We're going to be pitting the best that both teams have to offer against each other with the most current software and firmware patches on as equal footing as possible. It's worth mentioning up front that we did observe some interesting behavior when testing between DDR4-3200 and 3600 on both Intel and AMD here. We settled on 3600 for this review, but let us know if you'd like to see a follow-up on performance at different memory speeds. Now, let's finally get back to those gaming charts. Immediately we see that not everything is Ryzen-friendly, but AMD has closed the gap considerably over second gen, with even our much less expensive Ryzen 7 sample pulling off respectable numbers compared to Intel's flagship consumer Core i9-9900K. But, mere numbers do not tell the whole story here. Take Battlefield V for example. This looks like a clear win for Intel. It is until we fire up OBS in the background and start streaming our gameplay. Now AMD's on top. Now you might think that that's simply because AMD has more cores and a more efficient interconnect, but look closely here. We saw a lot of run-to-run variation in frame rate seemingly at random. What this suggests to us is that the CPU isn't always using the most efficient group of cores to run the game. Assigning the game to only one of the dies made things a lot more stable and faster. So with some Windows scheduler or game optimization, we think AMD could have significantly more performance on their hands. Speaking of more performance, productivity is Ryzen's traditional stomping ground, and stomping I think would be a generous way to describe Intel's treatment under AMD's heels here. At worst, AMD roughly matches Intel in per thread performance while also having more cores at the same price. And at best, it's like watching that South Park episode where the kids hockey team plays the Detroit Red Wings. Check out this Mozilla Firefox compile test. That is the Ryzen 7 3700X running over a minute and a half faster than Intel's flagship consumer Core i9-9900K. Now normally when we run through these graphs, we feel like we need to provide voiceover commentary about which kinds of workloads lean more towards which product or if you're this kind of professional, maybe you should consider this. But today we kind of are just killing time while the graphs roll because it's as simple as if you've got real work to do on your computer, you should buy a Ryzen 3rd gen. And the good news keeps rolling. AMD's thermal performance, which can finally be measured without applying a temperature offset calculation, is pretty decent. The new chipset at cozy but manageable temperatures, which is especially relevant because AMD's precision boost, unlike Intel's turbo boost, does not have a duration limit. So much like a GPU, Ryzen 3rd gen will keep boosting for as long as it can within its thermal and power budgets. In other words, these things are designed to redline. Under a Prime95 small FFT load, that translates to a sustained frequency not a whole lot higher than base clock. But that's okay because under a more realistic scenario, like a long blender render, Ryzen 3rd gen CPUs managed to consistently stay a few hundred megahertz over base. When we tried disabling the power limits and enabling the most aggressive options for precision boost overdrive, things did heat up quickly. And I suspect that voltage tweaking is going to be the main way to get better over clocks on these higher end Ryzen chips. Upgraded cooling, of course, required. Leading us perfectly to one of the major downsides of the X570 platform. The active cooling, usually in the form of a small fan required to control the heat output of the motherboard chipset. It's a real bummer for me to see this cooling trend come back because tiny proprietary cooling fans tend to be one of the least reliable components in a PC. Which means that if it fails, the best case is that you're jury-rigging a cooler to limp along and the worst case is that your motherboard throttles your performance or cooks itself before you realize that anything is wrong. Unfortunately, this cooling is a necessary evil, apparently due to the additional power required by PCI Express Gen 4. The good news is that at least it does make a difference for storage throughput. Right now, we're looking at nearly 2 gigabytes per second worth and we could expect more in the future. It's also worth noting here that even while we were hitting ARIORIS SSD with four continuous looping file copies of about a gig of photos each, CrystalDiskMark's sequential write numbers barely dipped below what you might consider reasonable for an entry-level NVMe SSD without any additional load on it. Not too shabby. But PCI Express Gen 4 seems to contribute to toasty operation on the other side of the link as well. And our SSD got really hot during benchmarking despite its massive heatsink. I think we're gonna have to start coming up with some really creative SSD cooling solutions, folks, because while you want the controller to be cool, the NAND itself, actually if it gets too cool, its reliability gets hurt. Anyway, that's a conversation for another time. For now, now that we've made our way through performance, it's time to talk value. And there's just no way to dance around this. Intel must adjust their prices. The Ryzen 7 3700X mostly matches the Core i9 9900K blow for blow, but is priced lower than a Core i7 9700K, which lacks hyperthreading. So it's a bad story now, and we haven't even looked at AMD's less expensive, overclocking capable chips. Remember, every Ryzen is unlocked, or AMD's upcoming 16-core Ryzen 3rd Gen. Now, strictly speaking, if you're a gamer, Intel can technically still claim to be on top. And the Core i7 9700K could still appeal to you if you're all about that raw frame rate. But Intel's margin of victory is very thin compared to what we're used to seeing, and we're only expecting the gap to shrink. So if you do almost anything else on your computer, it gets pretty tough to justify. So then, guys, this is it. Take in the moment, because for the first time in over a decade, AMD is essentially on top of the consumer CPU race, and much like in the Athlon 64 days, Intel has no meaningful response on their roadmap, meaning that it is Intel who is going to have to slash their prices in order to stay competitive. And the craziest part of all of this is that with Team Blue still trying to ramp up 10nm production, AMD may end up having a response for that by the time it rolls out. So the final word, and I really can't stress enough how important this is, is whether you like AMD or hate AMD, they're back in a big way, and you should be absolutely freaking stoked because competition is always good for the consumer. Speaking of good, iFixit's Essential Electronics Toolkit is compact and goes anywhere you go and can be used to fix almost anything. It includes their most popular precision bits that are held in place with high-density foam so you can throw it around with any of the bits falling out, and it's got a lifetime warranty. Get yours today for just $24.99 at iFixit.com slash Linus. We're going to have that linked below. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button, but if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or, you know, I was thinking about saying like, if this video made you blue, or if you're blue about this video, it's not funny. While you're down there, check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like the one I'm wearing, and our community forum, which you should totally join. And AMD will always be a second choice for poor people. Sorry. I'm shy one more time.