The coming month is going to be like Christmas for content creators and high-performance HEDT enthusiasts alike. AMD is planning to launch the 16 core Ryzen 9 3950X flagship as well as the 3rd Gen Threadripper lineup packing as many as 64 cores. As if that weren’t enough, Intel’s Cascade Lake-X processors are priced half as much compared to their Skylake predecessors while offering better performance albeit on the same process. As November draws near, we’ve started seeing leaks and rumors pertaining to AMD’s HEDT lineup. Today, a well known Twitter source has shared the Geekbench and 3DMark score of the Ryzen 9 3950X, and guess what? It manages to beat the Intel Core i9-10980XE. Keep in mind that the former is part of the consumer “Matisse” range and can run using a cheap B450 board while the latter is a high-end Cascade Lake-X product that costs almost $1,000, a quarter thousand dollars more than the 3950X.
AMD Ryzen 9 3950X vs Intel Core i9-10980XE: 3DMark Physics
Let’s have a look at the 3DMark scores first. Since these tests were run using two different GPUs, we will have to ignore the graphics score. The Physics score, however, is unaffected by the GPU, so that is still valid. The Ryzen 9 3950X score 32,082 points while the Core i9-10980XE trails by a whole 5K margin. This is rather glaring considering that the latter is an 18 core CPU while the 3950X is a 16 core part. Perhaps, the lower clock speeds have robbed the Intel Cascade Lake-X CPUs of the single-threaded advantage that their Coffee Lake counterparts boast.
Geekbench
As there is no Geekbench score available for the 10980XE, we’ll substitute it with the older i9-9980XE. Since both have the same core counts, process and architecture, it’ll be safe to assume that the former won’t be a big step up. Once again, the Ryzen 9 3950X marks a clear win in both the single-threaded as well as multi-threaded benchmarks. I was a bit surprised when Intel announced price-cuts to their HEDT line, but after looking at these results, I’m not sure if it’ll be enough. We’ll keep you posted as more info comes out.
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