Hardware leaker Rogame has discovered a 3800XT benchmark, in which it boosted to a previously unseen (for Zen 2) clock speed of 4.8 GHz. It appears that AMD is still going ahead with the XT moniker for its Matisse 2 CPUs despite the initial leak of this SKU suffix saying that it is subject to change. Thankfully, there are no 3000 series of recent Radeon GPUs, so you won’t be getting confused with those products unless AMD decides to keep this branding for the Ryzen 5000 series.
The result itself is not that impressive, however. One review found that the 3800X achieves about 10100 points in Time Spy, right below the leaked 3800XT score of 10400. However, the leaked CPU was running 2933 MHz RAM, so there is some room for improvement since that review’s 3800X was using 3200 MHz RAM with tight timings. Still, memory will only get you so far, so this score still isn’t really that impressive. But it should be noted that since we do not know the testing conditions, it’s possible that perhaps this isn’t operating with a normal power limit or some other thing is going on that is dragging down performance.
4.8 GHz is a higher boost clock than even seen on the 3950X. Either through binning or switching to the 7nm P node (which is not difficult and increases clocks by 7%), AMD has been able to achieve higher clock speeds on a lower end part. For the 3900XT, could we even see 4.9 or 5 GHz? Maybe, but keep in mind that AMD only hits these clock speeds for like a hundred or so milliseconds, so it’s not exactly a big deal. What matters most is sustained clock speed, and judging by this leak, the sustained clock speed isn’t much higher, if it’s even higher at all, than the original Matisse.
Update: Rogame has another benchmark where the 3800XT only gets 4.6 GHz, which is in line with the original 3900X. Perhaps the 4.8 GHz result is PBO enabled. Like I said, we don’t know the testing conditions so it’s hard to tell what exactly is happening here.
