AMD Ryzen 9 3900X

6owners with an opinion

60%of verdicts positive

2/2positive/negative since 2024

0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance; criticized for reliability.

What owners wrote

Doesn’t like it

I had a Ryzen 3900x on a gigabyte motherboard and the fTPM was just totally unreliable for a pretty mainstream combination. Not fully sure which was to blame there. At least it was fixed in the 5900x (and _different_ gigabyte motherboard, but from the same lineup) that replaced it.

Likes it

> There are simply far fewer differences between CPUs made in 2010 and today vs CPUs made in 2000 to 2010. I have stopped replacing machines (and smartphones) because they became outdated: the vast majority of compile tasks is finished in a fraction of a second, applications basically load instantly from SSD, and I never run out of RAM. The main limiting factor in my day-to-day use is network latency - and nothing's going to solve that. My main machine is a Ryzen 9 3900X with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. And honestly? It's probably overkill. It's on the replacement list due to physical issues - not because I believe I'll significantly benefit from the performance improvements of a current-gen replacement. I'm hoping it'll last until AM6 comes around! Every task is either "basically instantly", "finishes in a sip of coffee", or "slow enough for a pee break / email response / lunch break". Computers aren't improving enough to make my tasks upgrade to a faster category, so why bother?

Likes it

I've been using a CS381 for years which sadly now is EoL, don't know if they're replaced it, but it's an excellent case. Previously I was using a Fractal Node 304 but that was cumbersome for drive maintenance. It has 8 hot-swappable SAS bays (also SATA compatible) and I run a Ryzen 9 3900X in 65W eco mode on an AsRock Rack X470 board which has another 8-12 SATA ports (can't remember the exact number, not used because I use an HBA for the bays), so connectivity for storage is high. There's 2 spaces for SATA SSDs on top of the drive bays and you could fit more in various spots if you tried, and 2 NVMe slots on the motherboard. Also got a single-slot nvidia GPU in there and a 4-port Gb NIC to supplement the 3 existing Gb ports on the board itself (one is dual-purpose for IPMI), some models of the AsRock rack have dual 10G ports too. It runs most of the time at around 90W which I think is exceptionally low for the performance available, and can go to about double that when the GPU is in use, still very reasonable.

Doesn’t like it

This is blessed silicon for sure mine ryzen always (3000 series 7000 series) have very high power consumption in idle right now I’m mostly on M1 ultra and are around 7-10W idle compared to 45W on 3900x and 35-40 on 7700. (I have also intel server with 12700k that idle around 15W but it is undervolted a bit)

Neutral

I've been building upon the LLMWare project - https://github.com/llmware-ai/llmware - for the past 3 months. The ability to run these models locally on standard consumer CPUs, along with the abstraction provided to chop and change between models and different processes is really cool. I think these SLIM models are the start of something powerful for automating internal business processes and enhancing the use case of LLMs. Still kinda blows my mind that this is all running on my 3900X and also runs on a bog standard Hetzner server with no GPU.

Likes it

I can confirm that ECC DRAM worked as expected on my current AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, an AMD Phenom II x6 1090T that I had in a previous build, and an AMD Opteron 185 that I had in a build before that. The operating system detects the error-correction capability in the memory controller, and errors are properly detected (tested by reducing the memory timings slightly below stable values). I don't think there's a mass-market laptop with ECC support, but AMD's desktop CPUs have supported ECC for as long as I can remember. That being said, it's been an optional feature that is up to the motherboard maker to implement, and not all do.