The AMD Ryzen 3000XT series of processors came out of nowhere, but the more we pause to think about it, the more these chips make sense from an AMD standpoint. Up until now, AMD promptly released a new generation of Ryzen processors roughly 4–5 quarters apart (Ryzen 1000 series in March 2017, Ryzen 2000 series in April 2018, Ryzen 3000 series in July 2019), but now, it's rumored that "Zen 3" won't arrive before the end of 2020. 2019–20 has been the best year for AMD's processor business in over 15 years, as the company achieved IPC parity with Intel and dominated the company's 9th Gen Core processor family, riding on more cores and threads to the dollar. Intel was relegated to the gaming segment not because of higher IPC, but only because their process lets them run their CPUs at higher clock frequencies.

If you read the spec sheets, Ryzen 3000XT chips, such as the 3800XT in this review, only offer modest 100–200 MHz speed bumps. As we detailed earlier, there's more to these processors. In addition to negligibly higher clocks, the boosting algorithms of the XT chips are tuned to offer higher "boost state residency" (ability for the processor to stay in elevated boost states for longer or better). There's a secret sauce that goes into making this happen without adversely affecting power/thermals, and interestingly, it's not binning. Apparently, AMD worked with TSMC to refine its CCD (8-core chiplet) transistor technology using the existing 7 nm (N7) process node, which resulted in a single-digit percentage gain in power efficiency.

The 3800XT is an important product for AMD, as maxed-out 4K gaming, including some streaming thrown in, can be accomplished with eight cores—you needn't spend vast amounts of money on 10 or 12 cores, or HEDTs. A case in point is the Intel Core i7-10700K 8-core/16-thread processor dominating our gaming performance charts. The i7-10700K beats the 3700X by 8.2% in 1080p gaming on average. The lead slims to 3% at 1440p and 1.2% at 4K, as the performance bottleneck shifts towards the GPU. This is precisely why the academically relevant 720p test—where the bottleneck is on the CPU—highlights a vast 14% gap between the two chips. Here's where things get interesting. The new Ryzen 7 3800XT offers identical gaming performance at 720p, meaning that in CPU-bottlenecked scenarios, the minimum frame rates between the two chips won't be any different. Gaming performance at real-world resolutions, such as 1080p, 1440p, and 4K, are with margin of error between the 3700X and 3800XT, too. So the increased clock speeds and power limits don't help the processor in any way. The i7-10700K remains 8% ahead at 1080p, 3.4% ahead in 1440p, and less than 1% ahead in 4K. Clearly, gaming shouldn't be your clincher for the 3800XT as the i7-10700K continues to fare better here, even though the differences are small, especially at higher resolution.

When it comes to compute performance, the Ryzen 7 3800XT feels more discerning, posting slightly visible performance leads in single or lightly threaded apps owing to higher frequencies and better boosting. In apps such as Photoshop and Premiere Pro, we see 5.5% and 4.3% performance leads over the 3700X, respectively. The i7-10700K is 4.3% ahead of the 3800XT in Premiere Pro, and 10.7% percent ahead in Photoshop. The 3800XT has a slight upper hand over the i7-10700K in both H.264 and H.265 video encoding. Overall, the 3800XT ends up 2% faster than the Ryzen 7 3700X, 6% behind the i7-10700K in our mix of applications.

When it comes to power, the 3700X and 3800XT are quite comparable, with the 3800XT drawing a bit more power under load, which isn't unexpected. Single-threaded efficiency is a bit lower on the 3800XT, probably because it runs higher voltage to achieve its 4.7 GHz boost clock selling point. The Core i7-10700K offers identical idle and single-threaded power draw, but with more performance at the same time, making the i9-10700K the winner in 1T efficiency. Multi-threaded performance is where the 14 nm fab process begins to betray Intel. Both the 3700X and 3800XT pull 20%–30% less power than the i7-10700K. Thanks to its stellar power draw in multi-threaded workloads, the 3700X tops the energy-efficiency charts, the 3800XT isn't too far behind.

Overclocking the Ryzen 7 3800XT is somewhat easy, and we managed to push it to 4.30 GHz all-core, and put it across all the tests in our suite (you'll find the value highlighted in blue). The 4.30 GHz all-core overclocked 3800XT ends up behind the stock 3800XT in most of our tests because it runs at fixed 4.3 GHz no matter the workload, whereas the default configuration of the 3800XT lets it adjust clocks more intelligently. This means that manual overclocking isn't worth it for the Ryzen 7 3800XT unless you run very specific workloads, like rendering, which show a few percent improvement from overclocking.

In conclusion, I feel the Ryzen 7 3800XT, like the rest of the 3000XT family, is a minor refresh, an attempt by AMD to show that it has something new to offer this 7/7, and while we see moments of the 3800XT outpacing the 3700X, there certainly isn't anything in there to justify a $60 higher price. Making matters worse is the comparison with the price-matched Core i7-10700K, which offers consistently better performance both in gaming and productivity tasks, but mostly in the single-digit percentages. If we look only at the comparison of the Ryzen 7 3800XT vs. the Intel Core i7-10700K, we'd pick the Intel CPU. These two processors don't exist in a vacuum, though. There are several great alternatives, like the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 and 3600X that have incredible price/performance, or even the Ryzen 7 3700X that's 42% more cost efficient than the Ryzen 7 3800XT and includes a stock cooler. Especially for gaming you want to save as much cash as possible on the CPU and spend the savings on a better GPU. What was AMD thinking pricing this thing at $399? A more realistic price would be around $350, no way AMD can price it that close to the Core i7-10700K. Considering the lack of a cooler on the XT I'd even say $340 and below would be required to get the 3800XT our Recommended award.