A Closer Look

The Ryzen 9 3900X ships in a large cubical paperboard box with carbon-fiber texture on some of its faces. This box looks more premium than the one the Ryzen 7 ships in and has a clam-shell design. There are clear markings on the front that tell you that this is a 3rd generation Ryzen processor, which has PCI-Express gen 4.0 support. The back also mentions "Zen 2". There are also some "VR ready" and NVMe logos on the box.


AMD includes a Wraith Prism RGB cooling solution with this processor capable of thermal loads of up to 140 W.


Besides 4-pin PWM for its fan, the cooler includes two additional cables, an addressable 3-pin RGB cable to control the lighting and a USB cable that plugs into one of your motherboard's USB 2.0/1.1 headers. Both cables are optional. You only need to plug in the 4-pin PWM connector for the fan to spin.


The Ryzen 9 3900X processor looks like any other conventional AMD processor, with a large IHS dominating the top and a 1,331-pin micro-PGA in the bottom. You see national-origin markings for three places—USA, China, and Taiwan. The 7 nm "Zen 2" CPU chiplets are made in TSMC, Taiwan. The 12 nm I/O controller die is made in the US at GlobalFoundries. The two dies are packaged into the MCM at a facility in China.