AMD Ryzen 9 3950X easily beats Intel’s mighty Core i9-10980XE in leaked benchmark

Another day, another set of leaked benchmarks, and once again we’re seeing the power of AMD’s imminent Ryzen 9 3950X – this time in a comparison to Intel’s incoming Core i9-10980XE (although this is not an apples-to-apples comparison in several different respects – more on that later).

So, before we come to the caveats – the most obvious one being that we assume these benchmarks are genuine – let’s take a look at the actual 3DMark scores as provided by the ever-present CPU leaker TUM_APISAK.

As you can see, we’re looking at the AMD and Intel chips in 3DMark, Fire Strike, specifically the ‘Physics’ score which pertains to the processor – the other results can’t be compared because the benchmarked PCs had different other hardware components (including, most tellingly, different graphics cards).

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So the Ryzen 9 3950X hit 32,082 easily outdoing Intel’s Core i9-10980XE which recorded a result of 25,838. That’s a victory to the tune of 24% for the Ryzen processor, with both CPUs running at their stock clock speeds.

Of course, with these being pre-release chips, we don’t know if the Intel silicon might be an earlier engineering sample, maybe – and we shouldn’t put all that much emphasis on the importance of a sub-test from a single benchmark anyway.

Different worlds

Remember that these chips are from different worlds, too: the Ryzen 9 3950X is a consumer flagship, and the Core i9-10980XE is the flagship of Intel’s incoming range of Cascade Lake-X high-end desktop processors.

In other words, they are built for different purposes, with Intel’s Cascade Lake-X targeted at heavyweight computing usage and coming with other performance benefits as such (like 48 PCIe lanes, and quad-channel memory).

Nonetheless, this certainly illustrates just how the power of even Ryzen consumer processors has been ramped up, to the point where the flagship 3950X is outdoing an equivalent (in terms of cores and base clocks) current-gen Threadripper as we saw yesterday.

Although of course, 3rd-gen Threadripper is around the corner, and that’s really where the battle will lie for Cascade Lake-X CPUs – and Intel’s anticipating a fierce fight, by the looks of things, given the massive price slashes we recently witnessed to the Core i9-10980XE and all the way down the range.