Reviews of AMD’s newest “XT” line of Ryzen desktop chips are in and while the CPUs offer improved performance and the best silicon batch, it’s overall a meh, hardware testers say.

AMD

We’ll kick off our roundup of XT reviews with Paul Alcorn of Tom’s Hardware, who looked at the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900XT and the 8-core Ryzen 7 3800XT and pronounced both as “underwhelming.”

“The Ryzen XT lineup arrives to do battle with Intel’s Comet Lake, but while the new chips do provide measurable performance gains over their predecessors, you’ll need to run very specific workloads to justify the increased costs associated with the the cooler-less Ryzen 9 3900XT and Ryzen 7 3800XT,” Alcorn says in his review.  “…Overall, the Ryzen XT series does provide another option for discerning shoppers that know their workload, particularly those that frequently use applications that benefit. Still, most will be better served with AMD X-series processors or Intel alternatives.”

AMD

Over at Anandtech.com, Dr. Ian Cutress did more of a preview of the chips, as he is transitioning to a new benchmarking suite. Cutress still managed to bang out nine tests on the Ryzen 7 3800XT and Ryzen 5 3600XT chips. 

“AMD states that this is due to using an optimized 7nm manufacturing process. This is likely due to a minor BKM or PDK update that allows TSMC/AMD to tune the process for a better voltage/frequency curve and bin a single CPU slightly higher,” Cutress writes in his preview. “As we can see, there isn’t much between the old X models and the new XT models – increasing the turbo frequency a little means that there is scope for increased performance in low thread-count workloads, but ultimately the voltage/frequency curve when we start pushing with more cores loaded counts in those high density benchmarks.”

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Stephen Burke of GamersNexus focused in on only the Ryzen 5 3600XT and sums it up against the existing Ryzen 5 3600 in a way only Burke can: “It’s $100. For two letters. So it’s kind of like a buy one get one free, except, it’s buy one, and that’s the one you get.” Burke does, however, say in his review that if his sample is indicative of the new Ryzen 3000 XT line, it does indeed look like the chips feature improved silicon that yields higher frequencies at stock settings. Burke said “the silicon quality is extremely high” and that “it’s really fun to work with.” That, however, is for people who like to tinker and tune their CPUs to 11.

For people who just want to drop it into a box and not think about it, Burke says to skip the Ryzen 3600XT. He also theorizes that the XT’s existence is mainly to help Ryzen CPU prices increase profit margins.

Steve Walton of Techspot.com and Hardware Unboxed comes to a similar conclusion: it’s about the money.