AMD's new lineup of Ryzen 3000 processors are already making waves with their impressive core counts, affordable price points, and benchmark performance. And, that's all from the processors as they come out of the box, but a Tweet from the dependable hardware leaker @Tum_Apisak shows the Ryzen 9 3900X processor pushed to an incredibly 4.5GHz base clock.
pic.twitter.com/icW7lhfW45July 4, 2019
For reference, the base specs of the Ryzen 9 3900X has it sitting at a 3.8GHz base clock and 4.6GHz max boost clock. While there's already plenty of power available at those frequencies, an overclock to 4.5GHz on all cores would make the Ryzen 9 3900X a performance beast.
When considering that leaked Geekbench benchmarks have already shown the Ryzen 7 3700X beating the Intel Core i9-9900K in multi-core results 34,059 to 33,173, the Ryzen 9 3900X with more cores boosted to an even higher clock speed would stand to trounce Intel's Core i9-9900K while costing only a hair more.
- Check out this 64-core Ryzen Threadripper leak
- Here's what you should know about AMD Zen 2
- See the Ryzen 9 3950X against the Intel Core i9-9980XE
Not your typical overclock
Given the Ryzen 7 3700X was seen beating the near-priced competition from Intel in multi-core benchmarks, it stands to reason that AMD's higher-end CPUs will take it even further. Single-core workloads may still lag behind though, as they did in the case of the previously mentioned match-up. But, overclocking can help there.
However, there are no details on how the 4.5GHz overclock was accomplished on the Ryzen 9 3900X. And, it's highly unlikely it was done simply with the stock Wraith Prism cooler that AMD includes in the package. Responding to another Twitter user's question about whether water or some other cooling method was used to achieve the overclock, Tum_Apisak was uncertain.
The Ryzen 9 3950X was recently overclocked to 5GHz across all 16 cores, breaking records in the process. But, that was achieved using liquid nitrogen to cool it, and that's not a realistic option for PC builders.
When the Ryzen 9 3900X launches on July 7, we'll likely get to see more practical builds that include overclocking to see what the CPU is capable of in realistic settings.
