AMD Ryzen 9 5900X vs Intel Xeon E5-2696 v3

Ryzen 9 5900X vs Xeon E5-2696 v3 comparison

In our benchmarks, the Ryzen 9 5900X beats the Xeon E5-2696 v3 in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Xeon E5-2696 v3 in all gaming tests too.

In terms of the number of cores of each of these CPUs, the Xeon E5-2696 v3 has significantly more cores than the Ryzen 9 5900X. Indeed, the Xeon E5-2696 v3 has 18 cores compared to 12 cores found in the Ryzen 9 5900X. It also has more threads than the Ryzen 9 5900X. A Ryzen 9 5900X CPU outputs less heat than a Xeon E5-2696 v3 CPU because of its slightly lower TDP. This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

Most CPUs have more threads than cores. This technology, colloquially called hyperthreading, improves performance by splitting a core into multiple virtual ones. This provides more efficient utilisation of a core. Indeed, the Ryzen 9 5900X has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.