If the XT branding looks familiar, that’s because AMD also have XT variants of their Radeon RX graphics cards, such as the budget-friendly RX 5500 XT and our current best graphics card pick, the RX 5600 XT. This is the first time AMD’s attached the XT name to their family of Ryzen CPUs, though. It’s not yet clear whether the Ryzen 3000XT CPUs are full-on replacements for AMD’s existing Ryzen 5 3600, Ryzen 5 3600X, Ryzen 7 3800X or Ryzen 9 3900X CPUs (update: AMD tell me they will co-exist alongside the rest of the Ryzen 3000 family), but this new trio of Zen 2 CPUs have no doubt been introduced to help make AMD’s processor family more competitive with Intel’s recently launched 10th Gen Comet Lake CPUs, such as the blisteringly quick Intel Core i5-10600K and Intel Core i9-10900K. Indeed, AMD’s senior vice president and general manager of their client business unit Saeid Moshkelani said in a statement that, “With AMD Ryzen 3000XT processors, we’re making additional optimizations to the 7nm manufacturing process to deliver industry leading single-thread performance and more choice and flexibility for enthusiasts,” offering an increase of up to 4% in single-threaded performance over existing Ryzen 3000 processors, and up to 40% more power efficiency than the competition. The latter is a particular sticking point with Intel’s new Comet Lake processors, as part of the reason why the Core i5 and Core i9 are so gosh darned powerful is because they gobble up those watts like nobody’s business. If AMD can boost their CPUs’ gaming performance without causing them to guzzle loads of extra power, then that’s definitely a point in their favour, but I’ll have to wait until I get my hands on some review samples before I can pass judgement on whether they’ve got what it takes to break in our best gaming CPU rankings. Here are all the Ryzen 3000XT specs and how they stack up compared to their non-XT counterparts (non-XT prices are based off their original launch price).
Of the three new CPUs, only the Ryzen 5 3600XT will come with a cooler included in the box - one of AMD’s Wraith Spire coolers. As for the Ryzen 7 3800XT and Ryzen 9 3900XT, AMD recommend an AIO solution with a minimum of a 280mm radiator or equivalent air cooler to help keep those temperatures under control and get the best performance from them. If all that wasn’t enough, AMD have also announced a new A520 motherboard chipset as well today, filling out the budget-friendly hole in their AMD 500 series of AM4 motherboards. Aimed at entry-level, everyday PCs rather than gaming PCs, these will have full support for the entire Ryzen 3000 family as well as AMD’s eventual Zen 3-based CPUs further down the line. These boards are expected to arrive in August 2020, with boards from all the usual suspects such as MSI, Asus, AsRock, BIostar, Colorful and Gigabyte.
