I'm pretty sure we can all agree that AMD beats Intel price-wise, but are they ahead in performance?
Let's take the
Intel Core i9-9900K and compare it to the
AMD Ryzen 7 3700X. Both very similar processors but at dramatically different prices (
£500 and
£280 respectively).
The
9900K and the
3700X each have
8 cores with a base clock speed of
3.6GHz. For the
i9, this can go up to as much as
5GHz if need be while the
Ryzen 7 only has a turbo clock speed of
4.4GHz. This shouldn't be an issue for most gamers out there however if you're planning to be running some hardcore, CPU-intensive applications then you might want to keep this in mind. This being said, the
3700X does have twice as much cache as the 9900K.
Now onto some of their core features —
The
9900K boasts its own integrated graphics capabilities. With Intel's
UHD Graphics 630, it means that if you're a little low on budget (which I doubt you are if you're going to buy this) then a graphics card might not be necessary.
AMD's
3700X however comes with a free
Wraith Prism CPU cooler. This can be a handy addition to your setup, especially if you're planning to overclock the processor.
One of my personal favourite things about AMD's latest generation processors is that they support
PCIe 4.0, which is twice as fast as what traditional solid state drives use -
PCIe 3.0. When used with
Sabrent's PCIe 4.0 Rocket NVMe SSDs, they can provide R/W speeds of up to 5000
/4400 megabytes per second. That's
fast.
I'd also like to mention the
recent security vulnerabilities found within Intel's caching system.
Overall, my personal opinion is that AMD is the market leader. With the recent launch of their
64 core server processor, there's no doubt that they are on the way to beat Intel both price and performance-wise.
Hopefully this helped your decision in choosing what CPU manufacturer to choose. Any questions or feedback? Let me know your opinion below!
Josh