Alongside the 3900X and 3700X that we’re also reviewing, AMD launched its R5 3600 today to the public. We got a production sample of one of the R5 3600 CPUs through a third-party and, after seeing its performance, we wanted to focus first on this one for our initial Ryzen 3000 review. We’ve been recommending AMD’s R5 CPUs since the first generation, as Intel’s i5 CPUs have seen struggles lately in frametime consistency and are often close enough to AMD that the versatility, frametime consistency, and close-enough gaming performance have warranted R5 purchases. Today, we’re revisiting with the R5 3600 6-core, 12-thread CPU to look at gaming, production workloads with Premiere, Blender, V-Ray, and more, power consumption, and overclocking.

This week has been the busiest in our careers at GN. The editorial/testing team was two people, working in shifts literally around the clock for 24/7 bench coverage, and the video production team was three people (all credited at article's end, as always). We invested all we could into getting multiple reviews ready for launch day and will stagger publication throughout the day due to YouTube's distribution of content. We don't focus on ad revenue on the site these days and instead focus on our GN Store products and Patreon for revenue, plus ad revenue on YouTube. If you would like to support these colossal efforts, please consider buying one of our new GN Toolkits (custom-made for video card disassembly and system building, using high-quality CRV metals and our own molds) or one of our system building modmats. We also sell t-shirts, mousepads, video card anatomy posters, and more.

Notable changes to our testing methods, other than overhauling literally everything (workstation overhaul, gaming overhaul) a few months ago, would include the following:

• Windows has all updates applied on all platforms, up to version 1903
• All BIOS updates and mitigations have been applied
• For new AMD Ryzen CPU testing, we are using a Gigabyte X570 Master motherboard with BIOS version FC5 installed, per manufacturer recommendations
• We have changed to GSkill Trident Z RGB memory at 4x8GB and 3200MHz. The 32GB capacity is needed for our Photoshop and Premiere benchmarks, which are memory-intensive and would throttle without the capacity. 

The memory kit is an important change for us. Starting with these new reviews, we are now manually controlling every timing surfaced. That includes secondary and tertiary timings. Previously, we worked to control critical timings, like primary and RFC, but we are now controlling all timings manually. This has tightened our margin of error considerably and has reduced concern of “unfair” timings being auto-applied by the various motherboards we have to use for CPU reviews. “Unfair” in this instance typically means “uncharacteristically bad” as a result of poor tuning by the motherboard maker. By controlling this ourselves, we eliminate this variable. Some of our error margins have been reduced to 0.1FPS AVG as a result, which is fantastic.

Leading into the busiest hardware launch week of our careers, we talk about Intel's internal competitive analysis document leaking, DisplayPort 2.0 specifications being detailed, and Ubuntu dropping and re-adding 32-bit support. We also follow-up on Huawei news (and how Microsoft and Intel are still supporting it) and trade tensions.

Show notes continue after the embedded video.

Hardware news this week has a few more AMD rumors -- one of which we're debunking (X590) and another we're re-highlighting (B550) -- with additional news coverage of the US tariffs and impact to consumer pricing. On the topic of pricing, aside from an overall increase as a result of tariffs, Intel has expressed interest to reduce its desktop CPU prices by 10-15% with the launch of Ryzen.

The show notes continue below the embedded video.

AMD’s X570 chipset marks the arrival of some technology that was first deployed on Epyc, although that was done through the CPU as there isn’t a traditional chipset. With the shift to PCIe 4, X570 motherboards have grown more complex than X370 and X470, furthered by difficulties cooling the higher power consumption of X570. All of these changes mean that it’s time to compare the differences between X370, X470, and X570 motherboard chipsets, hopefully helping newcomers to Ryzen understand the changes.

The persistence of AMD’s AM4 socket, still slated for life through 2020, means that new CPUs are compatible with older chipsets (provided the motherboard makers update BIOS for detection). It also means that older CPUs (like the reduced price R5 2600X) are compatible with new motherboards, if you for some reason ended up with that combination. The only real downside, aside from potential cost of the latter option, is that new CPUs on old motherboards will mean no PCIe Gen4 support. AMD is disabling it in AGESA at launch, and unless a motherboard manufacturers finds the binary switch to flip in AGESA, it’ll be off for good. Realistically, this isn’t all that relevant: Most users will never touch the bandwidth of Gen4 for this round of products (in the future, maybe), and so the loss of running a new CPU on an old motherboard may be outweighed by the cost savings of keeping an already known-good board, provided the VRM is sufficient.

AMD’s technical press event bore information for both AMD Ryzen and AMD Navi, including overclocking information for Ryzen, Navi base, boost, and average clocks, architectural information and block diagrams, product-level specifications, and extreme overclocking information for Ryzen with liquid nitrogen. We understand both lines better now than before and can brief you on what AMD is working on. We’ll start with Navi specs, die size, and top-level architectural information, then move on to Ryzen. AMD also talked about ray tracing during its tech day, throwing some casual shade at NVIDIA in so doing, and we’ll also cover that here.

First, note that AMD did not give pricing to the press ahead of its livestream at E3, so this content will be live right around when the prices are announced. We’ll try to update with pricing information as soon as we see it, although we anticipate our video’s comments section will have the information immediately. UPDATE: Prices are $450 for the RX 5700 XT, $380 for the RX 5700.

AMD’s press event yielded a ton of interesting, useful information, especially on the architecture side. There was some marketing screwery in there, but a surprisingly low amount for this type of event. The biggest example was taking a thermographic image of two heatsinks to try and show comparative CPU temperature, even though the range was 23 to 27 degrees, which makes the delta look astronomically large despite being in common measurement error. Also, the heatsink actually should be hot because that means it’s working, and taking a thermographic image of a shiny metal object means you’re more showing reflected room temperature or encountering issues with emissivity, and ultimately they should just be showing junction temperature, anyway. This was our only major gripe with the event -- otherwise, the information was technical, detailed, and generally free of marketing BS. Not completely free of it, but mostly. The biggest issue with the comparison was the 28-degree result that exited the already silly 23-27 degree range, making it look like 28 degrees was somehow massively overheating.

Let’s start with the GPU side.

Computex 2019 is next week -- a few days from now, technically -- and hardware news has been alight with PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 discussion for Intel platforms, Huawei's ban from the US, DDR4 overclocking close to 6GHz, and more. Intel's biggest news is certainly the PCIe 5 and DDR 5 discussion, which will be our leading story for today's news.

Written show notes are below the video embed.

We recently revamped our CPU benchmarking for significantly expanded workstation benchmarks, allowing us to better analyze CPU performance in non-gaming scenarios. Of course, this methodology update wouldn’t be complete without revisions to our gaming tests. These updates include more games, better testing in games where we’ve encountered GPU bottlenecks (that limit usefulness in CPU reviews), and improved accuracy of results. This takes the knowledgebase of what we’ve learned over the past year and builds upon shortcomings we’ve found.

With Ryzen 3000 CPUs just around the corner, likely announced at Computex next week, we have begun the process of preparing our test bench for the inevitable 3700X (or whatever they end up calling it). This means re-running CPUs through our testing until we repopulate the charts in time for Ryzen 3’s release, which is a process that we’ll begin publishing today.

AMD didn’t claim that its R7 2700X Gold Edition would be special in any frequency or binning sense of the word, but exposure to the Intel i7-8086K has obviously led us to project our hopes onto AMD that it would be binned. This is, of course, a fault of our own and not of AMD’s, as it’s not like the company claimed binning, but we still wanted to try and see if we could get a golden Gold Edition sample. In this content, we’ll be establishing that the special 50th anniversary edition 2700X doesn’t come with higher clocks than stock (but it’s not like AMD claimed otherwise), then attempting to find more overclocking headroom than our 2700X and 2700 original samples.

For the most part, this CPU was released as a commemorative item. It has a laser engraving of CEO Lisa Su’s signature (not an actual signature), which clearly illustrates its purpose as more of one for display than some special bin. Despite the 50th Anniversary gift being gold, it would seem the 2700X Gold Edition is named more for its bundling with The Division 2 Gold Edition and a 1-year season pass, alongside World War Z. If you were buying these anyway, it’s not a bad deal. If not, you’d still be better off buying a 2700 and overclocking it – purely from a financial standpoint – than spending the extra money on the Gold Edition. That said, you wouldn’t get the box or laser-etched name, so once again, this is very obviously priced higher for AMD purists and fans.

This is an exciting milestone for us: We’ve completely overhauled our CPU testing methodology for 2019, something we first detailed in our GamersNexus 2019 Roadmap video. New testing includes more games than before, tested at two resolutions, alongside workstation benchmarks. These are new for us, but we’ve added program compile workloads, Adobe Premiere, Photoshop, compression and decompression, V-Ray, and more. Today is the unveiling of half of our new testing methodology, with the games getting unveiled separately. We’re starting with a small list of popular CPUs and will add as we go.

We don’t yet have a “full” list of CPUs, naturally, as this is a pilot of our new testing procedures for workstation benchmarks. As new CPUs launch, we’ll continue adding their most immediate competitors (and the new CPUs themselves) to our list of tested devices. We’ve had a lot of requests to add some specific testing to our CPU suite, like program compile testing, and today marks our delivery of those requests. We understand that many of you have other requests still awaiting fulfillment, and want you to know that, as long as you tweet them at us or post them on YouTube, there is a good chance we see them. It takes us about 6 months to a year to change our testing methodology, as we try to stick with a very trustworthy set of tests before introducing potential new variables. This test suite has gone through a few months of validation, so it’s time to try it out in the real world.

This GN Special Report looks at years of sales data from which CPUs our viewers and readers have purchased. The focus is our audience, and so we’re looking at Intel versus AMD sales volume and, to some extent, marketshare in the enthusiast segment of GN content consumers. Our data looks at average selling price (or ASP) of CPUs, the most popular CPU models and change over a 3.5-year period, and the overall sales volume between Intel and AMD across 4Q16 to 1Q19.

AMD has undoubtedly gained marketshare over the past two years. Multiple factors have aligned for AMD, the most obvious of which is its own architectural innovation with the Zen family of processors. Secondary to this, Intel’s inability to keep up with 14nm demand has crippled its DIY processor availability, with a third hit to Intel being its unexpected and continual delays to 10nm process. It was the perfect storm for AMD: Just one of these things would have helped, but all three together have allowed the company to claw itself back from functionally zero sales volume in the DIY enthusiast space.