So here’s the deal: I’m going to play some video games.
I’m going to benchmark some processors.
And you’re going to watch!
That’s how this works, right?
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AMD’s Zen 2 or Ryzen 3000 line of processors are honestly quite incredible for the price.
I’ve already covered the 3600 and 3600x, which provide great value for your money and
today I’m covering the next two tiers up - the Ryzen 7 3700X and Ryzen 9 3900X.
One of these will be quick and easy, the other has a few small quirks.
I’m going to skip a lot of the lower tier testing from my 3600x review, as it’s all
doable with both of these CPUs and I don’t like being redundant, and there’s great
optimization tips in that video as well, so be sure to check it out, even if you have
a 3700X or 3900X instead.
I’ll include timecodes on-screen and in the description if you want to skip bits you’ve
already heard.
Thankfully I get a small break in my CPU benchmarking, as the 3950X seems to be taking its sweet
time to come out.
I’ll have another video coming soon on performance numbers for these CPUs in video production
tasks soon, as well, so stay tuned for that.
With, you know, the subscribe button.
I’m EposVox, and welcome back to Stream Guides.
Guides..
For your Stream…
Methodology My tests were done on the Ryzen 7 3700x and
Ryzen 9 3900x sent for review by AMD.
They’re not paying for this review, seeing it before it is posted, nor sponsoring the
video in any way.
I have the processors installed on the ASUS Crosshair VIII motherboard - which I’m actually
liking quite a bit more than the X570 Taichi in a few ways, notably that I don’t have
to pull the entire massive heat plate off the board to swap NVMe drives, and there’s
no obnoxious back plate, plenty of component cooling, and a quiet chipset fan.
The CPUs are cooled by the dual fan Noctua NH-U12A, which is doing a great job of keeping
them cool under load without getting loud.
Also, as Wendell noted in his Ryzen 3000 cooling video here, the heatpipe layout is actually
very well optimized for the Ryzen 3000 chiplet layout.
I love these little coolers.
For GPU, I’m still using my Founders Edition RTX 2080.
It’s from my gaming rig.
It’s all I can spare for test benches.
I’m finally replacing this crappy test bench in an upcoming video, though!
For my performance tests, I set up OBS with either a 720p or 1080p canvas, and primarily
tested at 6mbps at 1080p using X264 encoder on Fast, Medium, and Slow CPU Usage Presets,
as well as my “secret sauce” settings - covered in this video here - and then at
720p on Slow and Slow with my “secret sauce” settings.
The games are running fullscreen at 2560x1440 at a 120hz refresh rate - this is a “median”
format of people who come to me asking for help, BUT is higher resolution that what most
streamers are actually using.
The most common resolution is 1080p or similar.
BUT the advantage here is that by validating performance based on running at 1440p, anyone
running lower than this will have similar or even better results.
BUT this is where many streaming reviews fall short.
I didn’t JUST include gameplay in my OBS scene.
Very few people out there are streaming with only gameplay footage showing, and those who
do aren’t likely to net many followers while doing so.
Instead, I also added on a facecam, using this AVerMedia PW313 live stream webcam - review
soon - on default settings, and my usual animated webcam frame and recent follower or tipper
feed bars.
These are on a loop and everything is consistent between tests.
I didn’t bother with the text or anything else - I felt like this was a good enough
scene to more closely simulate a proper streaming setup.
Too many people test their streams with just gameplay and then switch to a full layout
and performance is WAY different.
This fixes that.
Also, while this is a Windows image made specifically for this benchmarking purpose, I didn’t
want to keep it totally vanilla, as that’s not representative of streaming setups either.
So I had the Stream Deck running w/ HWInfo graphs and controls for my benchmarking process
as well as the GoXLR app and services for audio.
3900X I’m going to go on and just start with the
3900X, because this thing is a beast.
Seriously.
It can stream ANYTHING.
Even stuff that I didn’t think could be streamed well with single PC.
Apex, PUBG, Black Ops 4, Fortnite, Overwatch, Minecraft, Dota 2, Tekken 7, Rocket League,
CSGO, they can ALL be streamed at 1080p 60fps on Slow X264 settings with basically no issue.
I’d still recommend medium or my Vox Config, detailed in the video linked below, for PUBG,
Overwatch, and Tekken, to be safe, but overall… my testing was made easy.
It could just handle it.
I also tested thread-limiting X264 to 18 threads like I do on my i9 for 720p Slow with VoxConfig
and it worked in Apex and CSGO, but other games had some hiccups.
You don’t need to thread manage here, especially for 1080p.
If you’re using this as a dedicated streaming PC for console or for some reason for another
gaming PC, it can do 1080p60 on Slow.
It can also do 1440p60 on Medium, and it can ALMOST do 4K60 on VeryFast, but struggles
a little too consistently to be recommended.
This may seem silly to test, but things are pushing further and if people think streaming
1080p60 at 6 megabits per second to Twitch is fine, then there will be people who want
to utilize Mixer’s 10 megabits per second to stream 1440p or higher.
I thought I’d really push my luck and try 720p60 on Slower, but while it dropped a low
% of frames, it was consistent, intermittent bursts of drops and would be a poor viewing
experience for your fans.
But overall, this CPU is insane, streams better than I could possibly imagine.
Something you might also notice on these charts is that much of the render lag you saw in
the 3600x video has disappeared.
Granted, I’m still using specific optimizations to prevent this - OBS preview has stayed disabled,
the mismatched refresh rates issue is still rampant here, I’ve also still thread-limited
some games.
Fortnite and PUBG I was able to up the frame limit to 120fps, as the CPU has enough headroom
for them to run a little more freely.
Overall, render lag CAN still be a problem, since it is GPU based, but it’s a balance
of some games needing both CPU and GPU to carry the load, more CPU power can make the
difference in being able to stream.
Plus those Windows 10 1903 patches are really doing good work.
A lot of this streaming was not possible even on my i9 and a 1080ti a couple years ago.
This CPU is so powerful that, among other reasons, I think I might be switching from
my 7980XE to it.
Video soon, if that turns out.
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3700X Let’s talk the middle child: The Ryzen 7
3700X.
This is still an insane CPU and would’ve been a dream come true just a year or two
ago, but it’s not quite as free-flowing STREAM ALL THE THINGS as its bigger brother
is.
For the most part, across all games, 1080p60 Medium streaming is a sure fire thing, sometimes
1080p60 Slow is, but frequently that caused bad frame pacing issues, as I discussed in
the last video, causing stutter and input lag.
PUBG could be streamed on Slow with no problem in the stream, but a heavy impact on frame
times, so stick to medium.
If you stick to 720p Slow with my Vox Config, there’s no impact on frame times at all.
Apex Legends can mostly do Slow if you frame limit to 60 to mitigate render lag, and it
can for certain do Medium.
For whatever reason, only on this CPU, I had a LOT of trouble getting OBS to hook the game.
Every time I changed a setting, I had to reboot or I’d get a black screen.
This is really weird.
Fortnite needed to be capped to 60fps but could be streamed at 1080p on Slow.
Black Ops 4 was fine to stream on 1080p60 Medium, but my VoxConfig and 1080p Slow had
bad bad frame pacing.
720p60 Slow with VoxConfig was fine.
Overwatch had bad frame pacing at 1080p60 Slow - frame limited to 120fps - but was fine
in all other modes.
Minecraft had terrible pacing at 1080p Slow - but my Minecraft test is specifically over-cranking
the CPU by flying fast through newly-generating chunks.
For Slow, it’s still not feasible, but Medium would be perfectly fine.
Dota 2 could be streamed on Slow with no issues.
This was a viewer request, though I’m horrible at the game and it was a miserable experience,
haha.
Tekken 7 had some hitches at 1080p60 Medium with my Vox Config, had one or two hitches
at 1080p60 Slow - which I’m highlighting because this is frequently considered not
an option for fighting games - but was perfect at 1080p60 Medium.
Rocket League had hitching at 1080p60 Slow, but was great at 1080p60 Medium and with my
Vox Config.
CSGO was great at everything except 1080p60 Slow, where there was some bad frame pacing.
If you want to use the 3700x in a dedicated streaming PC, 1080p60 Slow was fine, but 4k
VeryFast, 1440p Medium, and 720p Slower were all not usable.
GPU Allocation Issues I mentioned frame capping your games.
This is due to some GPU allocation issues that I explained last time, so… listen to
that for a sec if you haven’t heard it already.
[gpu allocation cut]
Something that I was constantly battling up against - something I have run into for years
and have a salty FAQ rant-style video about here, linked below - is the issue of limited
GPU resources.
BUT I did finally utilize and confirm a specific fix - which is obvious and I’ve suggested
before - that made this setup work here.
To sum it up briefly: You only have a finite amount of processing power on your graphics
card, just like your processor.
This amount of power is used both by your game that you’re playing and OBS itself.
OBS uses the same processing power as your games to composite and render your scene that
it streams.
This is inherent to how OBS works, and cannot be avoided.
To “remove” this would be to prevent you from at all being able to use anything but
your gameplay as a source and change the scale of it, etc.
Windows 10 has typically done a bad job of managing this and allowing programs to compete
with one another.
So while your game is using 80%+ of your graphics card and OBS starts to try to claim another
20% or more, they both suffer, but OBS’s performance is the most problematic.
You start to lose frames without any obvious reason why.
In the Windows 10 1903 update, this situation has improved quite a bit for those gaming
at 1080p.
Enabling Game Mode, Windows is now able to allow OBS to reserve the resources it needs
and generally this is not a problem.
At 1440p high refresh rate, and at 4K, however, this is still an issue.
It’s being worked on, but slowly.
The obvious fixes are to reduce your GPU usage - so lowering game settings or resolution,
limiting your game’s frame rate to 60 or 120, lowering your OBS canvas to 720p, and
so on.
However for some games, like Apex Legends in my case, this isn’t enough.
Especially given that my monitors are of mis-matched refresh rates.
The monitor I’m gaming on is at 120hz, the one I’m monitoring OBS on is 60hz.
This meant that even though I could get Apex Legends down to using only 50% of the GPU
on its own, having OBS running was pushing that to 100% and then losing frames!
There is a confirmed bug in the way the Windows DWM handles different refresh rates when OBS’s
preview is going that causes this usage to go out of control and cause performance problems.
So the saving grace for this setup was disabling the preview.
This… sucks, as I regularly monitor the preview while I’m live streaming, but a
necessary evil.
That being said, I still had to frame cap certain games, too.
We’ll touch on this next.
Again, none of this really has anything to do with the CPU specifically - but I’ve
made recommendations before and then people run into these GPU-limited scenarios and think
the processor is the problem.
This is something you have to deal with whether you’re on the 3600X, 3900X, or my 18-core
i9-7980XE.
It’s… fun.
Conclusion Overall, the 3700x is a fantastic CPU and
probably a much better value per dollar for game streaming scenarios, but it’s hard
to argue with the 3900X’s ability to stream pretty much anything without question.
Do keep in mind that the Slow and Medium X264 presets at 1080p will run your CPUs at MAX
speed and require some serious cooling.
But I was using this with the Noctua NH-U12A with a Thermal Pad from IC Graphite instead
of thermal compound - because when I’m swapping CPUs 3+ times per day, re-doing paste just
ain’t gunna happen - so while the CPUs weren’t overheating, I was leaving some boost clocks
on the table due to temperatures.
So if you actually use paste with your cooler, you might see slightly better performance.
Some of the quirks might even be evened out a tiny bit as PBO and boosting gets fixed
by AMD at the end of the month.
The goal of these StreamGuides videos is to make sure you have the tools available to
make this CPU work for your stream.
Usual optimizations here apply, framecap when needed, disable OBS preview if on mismatched
refresh rate monitors, maybe stick with 720p if you want the best quality, per my previous
videos.
This ASUS X570 Crosshair VIII motherboard is pretty baller and I recommend you check
it out.
As always, product links for everything discussed here will be linked below.
I finally have a Newegg affiliate link working again if you shop there.
I hope this answers most of the questions you may have about the Ryzen 3700x and 3900x
for streaming.
If you have more, consider joining our inner circle on Floatplane, where you get a special
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Like the video, subscribe, do all the normal social things, and keep an eye out for some
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I’m EposVox, and I’ll see you next time.
Hopefully this video is in focus this time after my Discord video was not.
I’m using a 50mm T/1.5 lens and wirelessly focus-pulling… but all I have to do is move,
with that tiny plane of focus, and I have no idea if it’s in focus.
FOCUS.
I dunno.