AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT / Ryzen 7 3800XT / Ryzen 9 3900XT Linux Performance In 130+ Benchmarks

Particularly with these CPUs just being a refresh, higher-clocked SKUs, there isn't any new Linux support worries with the 3000XT line-up. These CPUs were running great on Ubuntu 20.04. For the purposes of this benchmarking all of the CPUs were tested on Ubuntu 20.04 with the Linux 5.8 Git kernel. Using Linux 5.8 meant the latest k10temp thermal driver support as well as the new AMD Energy driver for being able to query the per-package CPU power consumption for AMD Zen/Zen2 processors.

Throughout all of the testing under the different processors there was an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card, 2 x 8GB DDR4-3600 Corsair memory, Samsung 970 EVO 500GB NVMe SSD, and the aforementioned Ubuntu 20.04 LTS + Linux 5.8 configuration. All CPUs were tested with their default (and latest) CPU security vulnerability mitigations.

Given that 135+ benchmarks were able to be completed on each of the CPUs in time for launch day, this article will be structured a bit differently than my usual Linux CPU reviews given the extra testing already completed. First up is a look at the workloads by breaking down the performance across different test suites / logical areas and taking their geometric mean for looking at the performance and Intel competition.

When looking at the AV1 encode/decode performance on these CPUs using dav1d, SVT-AV1, and AVIFENC, the Ryzen 9 3900XT represented a 2% improvement over the 3900X, which was already faster than the Core i9 10900K. In turn this puts the Ryzen 9 3900XT being just about 4% faster than the i9-10900K in these particular tests. Likewise, the Ryzen 5 3600XT was 4% faster than the Core i5 10600K in these AV1 related tests.

Across many different web browser benchmarks with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, the XT CPUs were ever so slightly faster than the 3000X series and the Intel Comet Lake competition. Granted, browser tests are rarely interesting on higher-end desktop processors.

For chess benchmarks including Crafty, Stockfish, and Asmfish plus the related N-Queens, the AMD Zen 2 CPUs continue offering measurably better performance than the Intel Comet Lake CPUs.

Similarly, for code compilation workloads the Ryzen 3000XT series provides an even stronger fight against Intel Comet Lake. From the Ryzen 9 3900X to 3900XT was 2% faster code compilation speeds when measuring the time to build PHP, the Linux kernel, ImageMagick, GCC, LLVM, FFmpeg, MPlayer, and Build2. With all of these code-bases being built, the Ryzen 5 3600XT was 14% faster than the Core i5 10600K competition.

The Zen 2 CPUs provided very compelling leads in data compression tests around Zstd, Blosc, and XZ.