7950X3D: Cache Talks While The Watts Walk

[Laughter] the flagship is launching we didn't have to wait long for that at all did we the 7950x3d with 3D stacked V cash what are we looking at here [Music] this is it this is what a lot of people have been waiting for and there really is a lot to be excited about because it Intel's worst nightmare the answer to the 13900 KS coming just mere very small amounts of time after the 3900k is launched it's 16 cores so it's obviously not just for gamers remember that AMD is launching three CPUs in the am5 7000 series that have the 3D V cash previously the 5000 you just got the eight core the a core made everything pretty simple it worked you had one CCD one compute complex with all eight of its cores having access to the Stacked V cash well not so on the 7950x which I have here today 7950x 3D we have one CCD that is frequency optimized it's going to run really fast we have another CCD that has the V cash stack on it so in that way the ccds aren't exactly the same well it's still 16 cores it still turbos up to 5.7 gigahertz it's 120 watts it's locked for a manual overclocking but you can do PBO and you can squeeze out a fair bit more performance if you use PBO now in order to make this work on Windows it does require a fair bit of software but if you're into Linux be sure to check out the level 1 Linux Channel because I also found some pretty good accessibility for the features of this CPU on the Linux side as well in fact you have bios control you can tell your bios to prioritize the frequency optimized CCD to tell the operating system via acpi hints that that is where it should schedule processes before scheduling the other CCD or vice versa you can say that the large cache CCD is what you prefer in Windows the general approach is that you put game most games on the CCD that has the large cache but as AMD was doing their work and their experimentation for this that wasn't necessarily always the case so there are tools now built into the windows game mode functionality it's sort of what AMD has co-opted and extended in order to be able to deliver this performance with 16 cores this is the only CPU I have with vcash right now I'll be very curious to take a look when we get a chance to look at the you know 7800 the ryzen 7 basically that's a single CCD like the previous generation but in terms of generational improvement over the 5th gen it is really really awesome to see AMD investing the time and materials and headache because oh boy there's definitely some headache in getting that working to be able to support a different ccds different compute complexes that behave differently one that's faster and one that has a larger cache Let's uh let's build a system and uh get to testing well of course we're going to test the 7950x 3D in gaming although probably that 7800 X 3D is going to be the better CPU for gaming better in terms of cost but not performance I mean if you can get 16 cores in the full gaming performance and you're an Enthusiast why would you do this how does it stack up against the 13900 KS I was curious about that I was curious about that with both Team Green and team red because remember when our 7900 XTX launched it didn't do quite as well at lower resolutions when we're talking about getting you know 400 FPS and it's really what we're talking about 400 FPS with shadow of the Tomb Raider which I never would have thought was possible on the am5 platform okay we don't get caught there I mean you could put the graphics Fidelity settings on low to lower the size of the textures and get there but yeah this CPU can do it and this is one of the titles where you know AMD and Intel they really do trade blows unquestionably I think the 7950x 3D is the better overall CPU you can get better gaming performance with some games on the 13900 KS but for the games that we're testing it's a really interesting breakdown most of these frame rates aren't really super realistic either if we start at 1080P and we want to talk about Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Borderlands 3 and all of the games that you know are pretty common in our Benchmark lineup team red it sort of keeps coming out on top if you look at games that are not really super memory sensitive super memory latency aware it's it's a little bit of a watch things where you've got more CPU frequency to work with are a little bit better and remember with our 7950x3d with the vcash one of our ccds is clocked a little lower than our other CCD so we have one CCD for very high clock speeds and we have one CCD with lots of cash It's the Best of Both Worlds and our scheduling software and some of the other more advanced features that we talked about really come into play here helping make sure that the game is sort of shunted to the right CCD now there are some interesting things that washed out in our benchmarks Borderlands 3 Deus Ex I mean obviously everybody expected AMD to take the lead here and they have it's less headache to get these frame rates from the am5 platform of the 78950x 3D and then it is a 13900 KS our 3900 KS I was rocking it our 7200 memory kit from g-skill although I did have to loosen the timings just a little bit keep that in mind when you're considering these benchmarks this is sort of the best of the best of what a 13900ks can do for performance and memory speed and memory speed is going to be the difference here memory speed is going to be the difference between an Intel win and an AMD win because well our AMD platform is running at ddr5 6000 and ddr56000 is a little more attainable on the Intel platform than ddr5 7000 and 7200 which I'll talk a little bit more about in the conclusion but there aren't really any surprises here but there was a couple of interesting things that washed out and that is our one percent lows and our 0.1 percent lows now our one percent lows of course again having the huge cash really seems to help AMD but some of the scheduling stuff with our 0.1 percent lows there were a few select game runs where Intel would pull ahead in the 0.1 percent lows so I'm telling you subjectively playing the game and actually you know sitting there for 30 minutes or an hour and playing through the game or a couple of hours as it may have been the actual gaming experience seemed to be better on the AMD system but there were a couple of runs where I could get 0.1 percent lows to have the Intel system pull ahead you know significantly because there was a stutter or something like that during the AMD system it was very hard to try to capture when this was happening it may have been scheduling related it may have been core parking related it may have been utility related but this happens so infrequently that I don't even really think that it's a real issue I think it's just an anomaly in The Benchmark because it's not really anything that I noticed in the game while gaming if that makes sense but it does show up on the graphs it does show up in something that you can sort of see and tangibly worry about and so that may be something to keep an eye on as you play now for other Edge case games like Stellaris this CPU can do about four to five days in the late in-game stage per cycle now if you're not familiar with Stellaris it's a 4X game it's a lot of fun at the end of the game you've got so much stuff it takes a lot of computational horsepower to simulate a day in the game so when you put it on the fastest setting it'll just do it as fast as your computer will let you I'm not sure that I've ever experienced any computer that's able to do four to five days per second at the end game it's actually kind of laughable because you keep getting these pop-ups about you know because your planets are overpopulated and crime is running out of control and it's a lot of fun if you're picking up a 7950x 3D and you're going to use anything less than a flagship GPU it really it doesn't matter you might be better off waiting for the 7800x388 core if you want to build a machine specifically for gaming but for a workstation loads and mixed gaming plus content creation it does really well when we're talking about cinebench the 3900ks still pulls ahead the frequency loss that we have with the 79 50x3d the one CCD that has more cash it doesn't help as the Center bench because cinnamon already fit in Cache but for other real world creative workloads having the extra cash does help those workloads so while our performance you know the best we were able to get from our 7950x3d was just about 40 000 in the multi-core score and we're at about 35 36 000 here with the 7950x3d even doing our PBO overclock pushing air fmax 100 megahertz which the CPU was actually able to do is you know so you do get some overclocking and you know 16 e-cores on the Intel platform plus or eight P cores is something to be contended with in terms of rendering and everything else but as a general purpose CPU I still think the 16 cores that are relatively homogeneous just varying in Cache size is perhaps a better situation for a lot of scenarios unless it's just pure rendering unless it's just some of the other scenarios so again it's not as much of a one-two knockout punch that AMD enjoyed with a 5800x 3D when they launched it but it's still a really solid option and definitely a flagship leader in the market here let's talk for a second about overclocking the V cash CPUs were pretty locked down last generation okay not completely locked down a little bit locked down last generation on am4 am5 they're still not completely unlocked owing to Technical and Engineering challenges but you can run curve Optimizer so you can undervault your CPU and get more efficiency out of it and you can use PBO and you can change the frequency Boost Max so it will opportunistically self boost you know up to 200 megahertz for my testing my CPU boosting 100 megahertz with the Arctic cooler 420 millimeter monster that it is to keep it nice and cool because our new TJ Maxx is 89 degrees C it worked pretty well and the efficiency here is kind of off the scale meanwhile on the Intel platform with the 3900ks when we're looking at you know 320 Watts through the socket as Intel's competitive advantage to push their CPU AMD is actually squeezing even more efficiency out of their 7950x3d over the 7950x which is kind of bananas 120 watt TDP for the 7950x 3D yeah surprised I was too especially when we look at the raw performance for everything but gaming it's really not much of a compromise cinebench is your worst case scenario and you're still able to eke out a score of over 35 000. now our test machine configuration was a little bit special now this is one of our two test systems for the 7950x 3D this is using the ASRock Tai Chi x670e and for storage we're using the p5800x optane from tell with my new gen Z breakout cable so it is literally the fastest SSD that you can possibly get for GPU testing we use the reference 7900 XTX as well as our Zotac 4090 both of those gpus are running at stock speed stock configuration no overclock there for our memory kit we're using the g-skill Trident z6000 kit and that is the one with the better timings and of course we configured the Expo profile and all that on the AMD platform as one would expect for the CPU configuration we tested with both the stock out of the box configuration as well as using PBO and carbon Optimizer to really kind of dial in some settings to get some better performance but even with the overclocks we didn't see anything dramatically better you get one two percent three percent maybe no more than three percent so I didn't really make a huge difference with without the overclocking for most scenarios multi-core a little bit of an exception for multi-core performance and things like cinebench but for gaming and everything else not a huge difference this is our Intel system we're using the Arctic 420 millimeter cooler this is an AIO this is pretty much the best AIO that you can get for LGA 1700 this is rocking a z790 Tai Chi Carrera Carrera marble also from ASRock now we traded the cooler back and forth between the LGA 1700 system and our am5 system we also used a more modest fractal 360 millimeter AIO with our am5 system and for the am5 system it didn't really make a huge difference for a 3900 KS 6 gigahertz was basically unattainable without a cooler this beefy so your mileage may vary on the Intel platform we also try to use the g-skill Trident Z 7200 memory kit and that is a big differentiator on the LGA 1700 platform if you can get your memory kit stable really fast then the gaming performance as we see in our benchmarks is a little bit better but I think that's where Intel messed up see Intel doesn't really technically bend their memory controller for CPUs anecdotally it seems like the ks memory controller is a little bit better than the K but you know I've got a bunch of K processors and the folks on our Forum have had trouble getting their memory controller to work sometimes even above ddr5 6000 on the 13900k I mean obviously the 3900k and 3900 Ks are the best quality silicon that Intel has you know coming out the gate but there is a variability in memory controller our storage and GPU configuration for the system was identical to am5 for what that's worth but I thought it was worth taking a close look at these systems since uh this horse race can be close depending on what configuration you opt for best of the best or like for like I'm trying to do a little bit of both so when we're doing compile tests we're kind of cheating a little bit here with our optane p5800x I mean this is a an 800 gigabyte 2 000 SSD if you are a computer science student or someone who is developing games and you don't want you know a full fat five thousand dollar workstation you know well over five grand you would be hard-pressed to choose a better CPU than the 7950x3d in terms of performance value everything else I mean yeah it's 700 plus the cost of the motherboard is you know at least another 250 300 plus I'd recommend 64 gigabytes of memory in the form of two 32 gig dimms at ddr5 6000. okay the price of the system starts to add up a little bit but this is premium this is premium am5 and this is best in class performance until you start getting into real expensive workstation pricing territory and if you're using blender Maya 3D uh the Unreal Engine for game development doing you know cross operating system stuff maybe you're doing some steam deck development and you want to boot into Linux or boot into Manjaro and do something you would be hard-pressed to choose a better CPU for those kinds of workloads and this is really a head and shoulders upgrade over the 5950x and over the 1500x 3D and you don't have to choose you get the best of both worlds now if you're looking for just the absolute maximum gaming performance the 7950x 3D is not for you I think the 7800x 3D or possibly the 5800x3d still on fire sale because oh boy that's an inexpensive system potentially is a really good buy so he's got the best CPU this generation it's a gaming CPU or Flagship CPU I'll make the distinction the 7950x 3D is a good gaming CPU no compromise this game gaming CPU but the 7800x 3D is likely to be the gaming Champion once again because it's going to cost less if it doesn't matter to you that much about costs and everything else I still think the 5800x 3D is a better choice because you're going to be more likely to be able to replicate my results this is where I think Intel messed up the 1300k and the 1300 KS technically speaking Intel doesn't really bend their memory controller you're rolling the dice if you get you know six thousand sixty eight hundred seven thousand seventy two hundred eight thousand and Beyond and in order to get the very best gaming performance numbers you need the very best ddr5 memory on the Intel platform it's not really a thing on the AMD platform for better or worse and so ddr5 6000 Expo you can reasonably recreate the values that I show here in this video to say nothing of longevity and everything else just seems like the am5 platform is a better buy and there's certainly no compromises on gaming performance I was perhaps a little bit surprised that I didn't see that much of a performance uplift for amd's own gpus gpus like the 7900 XTX which is a flagship GPU that just launched but we are seeing performance improvements even at 1440p and 4K even though I'm sure a lot of the benchmarks today are going to be focused on 1080p gaming I don't know really how realistic that is but the larger cache and better ability to juggle lots of background tasks mean that when you're using this CPU and gaming you can expect that your frame rates will be a little more consistent and that was true whether you were using team green or team red gpus and the game I worry that the 7900x3d is going to be the odd man out here because that six cores per CCD how is that going to work with with games how is that going to work with the the other performance stuff that we have I don't no I'm not going Hands-On yet but I should be getting one probably around the time of this review so try to have that content out in a week or so maybe 10 days something like that I gotta run really quickly and put it together and see how it goes I have a feeling the 7900x3d is probably going to be more well suited for the you know 700 bucks workstation but the cost Delta between the 7900 X 3D and the 7950x 3D for four more cores you probably should just go for the 7950x 3D I mean there's not that much of a cost Delta there especially taking into account the entire cost of the system you should be aware that the the driver does do some really interesting stuff when you update your bios you get the CPU you update your bios and you install the latest drivers chipset drivers and everything else from AMD when you do that you get a new system service that's going to monitor what's going on with your system in the background it's compatible with the Xbox game bar right out of the gate the Xbox game bar yeah it's part of Windows 10 and windows 11 and it has to do with uh de-prioritizing background tasks because we're entering a world where the CPUs are not necessarily homogeneous or you actually may want to do you know core pinning or core priority or you may want to turn off CPU cores that are uh mostly idle just to keep processes from bouncing to core Decor because of that cache latency penalty as the cash unloads from one core and loads in another the scheduler and all the Machinery the operating system will start putting those cores to sleep initially I was very skeptical of actually doing the core parking stuff the way that AMD was doing it but in actually using a system I was pretty delighted that it didn't end badly the way that I sort of figured that it would when I started playing with it it actually seemed to work well for both the gaming and mixed gaming productivity workloads that's enough rambling for this one I had a lot of fun doing this review if you have any comments or questions or anything that you want to see I've got the 7950x and the 7950x 3D what would you like to see be tested or what would you like to see what would make a compelling upgrade for you or did you get the 5800x3d on fire sale and you'll be good for the next two three four generations I know we've certainly done a lot of videos on that and uh that would have been a good move all right I'm little this level one I'm signing out you can find me in the level one forums I love all this cash [Music]

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 45,646

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: jNMcdIkef_c

Length: 20min 34sec (1234 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2023

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[u/alper_iwere]

Once again, Clausewitz Engine loves cache.