(Image credit: AMD)

Geekbench 4 results for AMD's soon-to-be-released Ryzen 7 3800X processor have been unearthed, giving us some performance numbers to to compare against the Intel Core i9-9900K, with a grain of salt, of course.

A well-known tech hardware leaker known as TUM_APISAK on Twitter, spotted the benchmark numbers.

Both the Ryzen 7 3800X and i9-9900K are octa-core processors with 16 threads, making them natural rivals. However, that's where the similarities end. The Ryzen 7 3800X has a 3.8 GHz base clock speed and 4.5 GHz boost clock, while the i9-9900K runs with a 3.6 GHz base clock and 5 GHz boost clock. On paper, the i9-9900K should have the upperhand, but we know that's not always the case in the hardware world.

Intel Core i9-9900K vs. AMD Ryzen 7 3800X

Price (USD) Cores / Threads TDP Base Clock Boost Clock Total Cache PCIe Lanes Memory Support Core i9-9900K $488 8 / 16 95W 3.6 GHz 5.0 GHz 16MB PCIe 3.0 x16 DDR4-2666 Ryzen 7 3800X $399 8 / 16 105W 3.9 GHz 4.5 GHz 32MB PCIe 4.0 x24 DDR4-3200

As always, performance leaks should be taken with a bit of salt. For starters, we don't know under what conditions the tests were performed, or if this is Engineering Sample (ES) silicon. Sometimes it's hard to find a comparable result where both test system's specifications match.

Image 1 of 2 Image 2 of 2

Photo Credits: Geekbench

One important aspect to note about the Ryzen 7 3800X result is that the test system was using DDR4-2133 memory. As third-generation Ryzen parts support DDR4-3200 memory out of the box, running slower memory will limit the chip's performance. With the aim of making this a fair fight, we set out to find a Geekbench 4 entry where the Core i9-9900K is paired with DDR4-2133 memory as well.

With both processors running with DDR4-2133 memory, it seems that AMD is catching up to Intel in single-core performance. Nevertheless, the Core i9-9900K is still around 1.09% faster here, according to the leaked numbers.

The multi-core results, on the other hand, are in AMD's favor. The Ryzen 7 3800X beats the Core i9-9900K by up to 4.95% in multi-core workloads.

The Core i9-9900K surpasses the Ryzen 7 3800X when it's combined with DDR4-2666 memory, Intel's official supported memory speed. The Core i9-9900K performs roughly 14.48% and 0.56% faster in the single-core and multi-core tests, respectively. Basically, what this tells us is that Geekbench 4 is sensitive to memory speeds, and the Ryzen 7 3800X's performance is gimped with DDR4-2133 memory.

It's too early to declare the Ryzen 7 3800X as the winner. We'll have to wait for our in-depth review of the Ryzen 7 3800X to properly judge its performance. Rest assured that we won't be using DDR4-2133 memory in our tests.