If you are an enthusiastic user of your computer and everything it can possibly do then you'll know how important it is to have a well rounded CPU that has enough performance to handle video rendering or high resolution photo editing whilst also being easy enough to use to let you game whenever you wish without having to disable cores or worry about your fan profiles.© Copyright Time To Live Media 2012-2020That is, as always, what we're here to discover.In short, you want a one stop solution. But for $70 less. That chip came away from our first look at the Ryzen 3000 series with an Editor's Choice award, going toe-to-toe with Intel's Core i7-9700K, so it's fair to say we have high hopes for the higher-performance model. It comes with increased frequencies, featuring the same 3.90 GHz … Unlocked CPU Pricing and Select Others: AMD (MSRP Pricing) Cores: AnandTech: Cores: Intel* (OEM Pricing) $900-$999: 18/36: Core i9-10980XE ($979) $800-$899 Please refresh the page and try again.Out of the box, the Ryzen 7 3800X offers a better mixture of single- and multi-threaded performance than Intel's competing chips, and support for the PCIe 4.0 interface unlocks the potential of ultimate storage throughput. That opens up much more aggressive boost behavior, on both single and multiple cores, that could widen the performance gap beyond what we see on the spec sheet. The Ryzen 7 3800X slots in beneath the Ryzen 9 3900X, which comes with two 7nm compute die tied together with a 12nm I/O die to yield a 12-core 24-thread part. As a result, Intel's commanding presence in the enthusiast space is threatened in a way we haven't seen in over a decade.AMD has improved memory overclocking substantially, partly due to decoupling the Infinity Fabric from the memory clock. The Ryzen 7 3800X is an impressive chip and offers a better mixture of performance than Intel's Core i7-9700K, no doubt, but in this case, value seekers might opt for its less expensive sibling.Due to the dynamic nature of AMD's Precision Boost 2 algorithms, the chip will react based upon its environmental conditions, with thermal dissipation being a key variable that dictates performance. The impressive power efficiency and performance make for a compelling upgrade, but value-seekers who aren't afraid of minimal tuning should look to the less-expensive Ryzen 7 3700X for similar performance.And that's exactly what we've found. Contrary to popular belief, these ratings aren't meant to quantify power consumption. Given the 3800X's maximum 142W PPT measurement, that means, at least on paper, that the Wraith Prism might come up a tad shy of dissipating the full heat output of the 3800X at stock settings.Get instant access to breaking news, in-depth reviews and helpful tips.That something is the Ryzen 7 3800X.