The way I see it, you clicked on this video for one of just three reasons. You
either want to watch tech giants in a CPU dunking contest. You could
legitimately be shopping for the fastest PC hardware on the planet.
Congratulations, by the way. Or most likely, you just want to eat some
popcorn and watch the fanboys squabble in the comments about an overpriced CPU.
Well, guess what? Buckle in tight, cuz you're going to see all three today. The
Ryzen 9950 X3D2 Dual Edition is an
eyewateringly expensive, zero compromised product, and I love it. It's
the perfect purebred show horse to excite geeks like us by pushing the
limits of modern technology while also serving as a reminder that most people
really don't need one. What everyone does need though is this segue to our
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Hi. If you're wondering why this video is a day late, well, AMD didn't send us
a chip to review, and they also didn't send a lot of people chips to review.
Make of that information what you will. Anyway, here is our review. Getting
right into the meat of things, I can understand why AMD struggled to name
this chip. And they clearly did because what is this thing? Let's break it down.
It's a 9950X, so that means you got 16
of AMD's latest Zen 5 architecture cores
and 32 threads. It's 3D, which means it
features a large stacked 3D vcache, which can offer a major performance
benefit in certain workloads, notably gaming. and it's two and also dual both
of which seem to mean the same thing because compared to a regular 9950X3D
non two non-dual the big change that the dual edition brings is that AMD's super
large 3DV cache now sits on both of the
core complex dies or CCDs that are under the gray heat spreader rather than only
on one of them. That gives the duel a whopping
192 MGB of level three cache. That's enough to install Windows 95 on your CPU
three times over. Doesn't really work like that. We just thought it was kind
of a funny thing to point out. But hold on a second. If 3DV cache is so great,
then why didn't AMD use it across all of their cores in the past? Well, because
there are some trade-offs. the price for one, but also a considerable 30 watt
increase to total design power that brings the duel to a sweaty 200 watts
that in some situations it even exceeded by a significant margin. And this extra
power seems to have resulted in a small decrease in boost clock speeds.
But hey, that should be more than made up for by the extra 3D cache, right?
Especially in gaming, right? Well, let's talk about that. Out of the gate, things
are looking good in City Skylines 2. a game we chose more for its ability to
bring CPUs to their knees than its uh community appeal. Here, the Duel leads
the pack with the other 9000X3D chips in tow behind it. Makes sense. After all,
they're supposed to be good for gaming, right? And we see the same deal in Cyberpunk 2077. Though, it is worth
noting here that while these high average FPS numbers here are very
impressive, when it comes to the all-important 1% lows, which represent
the performance you can expect in the most demanding moments, some older and
uh much less expensive chips are nipping
dangerously close to their heels. In F124, it seems like any high-end
processor from the past couple generations is going to do you just
fine. Shout out to the venerable 5800 X3D by the way, which is rumored to be
returning for a celebration of the AM4 socket's 10th anniversary. Then in The
Last of Us Part One, the 9950X3D2 duel returns to the top position and is also
about as fast as it gets in Counter-Strike 2, at least as far as 1%
lows are concerned. Across our suite of gaming benchmarks, the Ryzen 9 9950XD2
dual edition is just plain ripping fast, and yet still nearly impossible for me
to recommend. Why? Well, for starters,
we benchmark gaming CPUs at 1080p. This
gives us a clear view of which chips will separate themselves from the pack
in an intentionally CPU bottleneck situation. But if you're buying a $900
chip, you're almost guaranteed to be running at at least 1440p, if not 4K,
where a GPU bottleneck is way more likely than a CPU one. The second reason
is that even if you were an esports professional trying to eek out every
last frame, I still wouldn't sell you a duel. Because while it does have more
3DV cache goodness than anything we've ever seen before, which is cool, in the
real world, it performs basically the same as any of the other 9000 series X3D
chips. But why is that? Well, as some of
you might know, high-end X3D chips have always come with kind of a weird
trade-off. They had all these cores on them, but only some of the cores were
best for gaming, the 3D vcache ones. So, you always wanted to make sure that your
games were running on those. To do this, AMD uses a technique called core
parking, which unintuitively does not stop the core from doing any work, but
rather it forces a given program to only use specific CPU cores and then ignore
the rest. Over the past couple of years, AMD and Microsoft have worked on
dejenifying this behavior to the point where as long as you're running an
up-to-date chipset, BIOS, and operating system, you should find that your 2CD
CPU is using the right cores for any given job. That is, assuming, of course,
that Windows recognizes your games as a game. But we have 3D Vcash on all the
cores now. So, why are we talking about parking anything anywhere? Vroom v room,
right? Well, as it turns out, most games
just plain don't need more than eight cores. And regardless of what type of
cache your cores have if they have to coordinate work across multiple CCDs,
the data has to travel across the Infinity Fabric and the IO die, which is
going to introduce extra latency. So, the solution, the same jank we were
already using, core parking. And that is why the new dual edition performs
basically exactly the same in gaming. So then who is it useful for? Well, for
starters, anyone who might run multiple workloads that benefit from extra cache.
A great example would be someone who wants to stream or record their gameplay
while they're gaming without burdening their GPU. A more niche benefit is that
overclockers and system tuners could identify which of their CCDs runs the
fastest and then put their most performance sensitive workloads on those
cores. Or at least that would be an option if AMD and Windows allowed you to
choose. From our testing, it seems that games are locked to CCD0 for the time
being. Another focus for AMD's marketing for this chip is a claimed 5 to 10%
increase in productivity. Let's take a look at that. And unsurprisingly, the
Ryzen 9 9950 X3D2 dual edition Core 2
dual extreme max plus the sequel is an absolute monster here as well. In 7zip,
the duel has a clear lead over any other consumer CPU both in compression and in
decompression. And in Cinebench, it sits at the top of the chart or darn near it
in both multi-core and single core performance. The only problem is that
its closest competitor is uh
five $550 cheaper at retail right now.
Uh but hey, those are kind of just benchmarks, right? And if you're in the
market for a CPU this expensive, you probably want to get some real work done
with it, right? Where in Blender, the dual edition does manage an as
advertised 5% improvement over its less endowed twin and a considerable 15ish%
over the 7950 X3D. This is one of the
first cases we've seen where the Duel actually kind of stands out for its
value. To be clear, it only beats the much more affordable 270K Plus by 10
seconds. But if you use your system to make money, every second counts, and the
Duel is as fast as it gets without paying a considerable premium for a
workstation platform motherboard. And it even continues AMD's bro move of
supporting ECCU dims on select motherboards, making it a great semi-pro
offering. And that carries over to encoding as well, where the X3D2 is
again at the top of the charts in H.264 and close in AB1. In Puget Bench's
Photoshop benchmark, the Duel is the first consumer x86 CPU we've tested that
cracks 14,000 points, which is cool, but
only a negligible increase over the rest of the Zen 5 contenders. and NVIDIA
editing. She's a chart topper again and more importantly can offer an uplift
that you might actually feel compared to an older generation 3D cache chip like
the 7950 X3D. Now, you wouldn't think that based on the overall score from
Puget Bench, but we found that depending on the files you're working with, you
might find performance enhancements that are much greater than the two-ish% on
our chart. However, as with gaming, the situations where we see large
improvements over the non-duel are few and far between. As for Premier Pro,
it's kind of like a grade schooler going to the gym. The gains are there, but
they're minor. So, yeah, in our creator focused testing, the duel doesn't offer
much, but to be fair, there are lots of kinds of productivity, and the extra
level three cache can be huge in mathy and sciency workloads. Check out this
result from Feronx's review of the original 9950 X3D. Since we're a day
late, we have the rare second mover advantage. And we can actually just show
you some of Feronx's results. And you can see that there are some workloads
where the chip benefits a lot from the extra vc. You might be thinking that's
not very many workloads. And uh yeah.
Yeah. Anyways, if you do want to learn more, we highly recommend going over to
Feronics, looking at their Linux and scientific benchmarking. It's pretty
cool. There's going to be a link in the description. >> But I will say there's a solid chance
that if you are degridding radio signals from space, this could be your new
powerhouse. Speaking of power, at 200 W,
this is the highest TDP that AMD has ever set on a consumer chip. And does it
ever deliver on its promise. In Cinebench, this thing pulls up to 260
watts across the total CPU package. That is like Intel 14900K levels of power
draw. But thankfully, it doesn't have the same power density and IHS problems
as the 14900K. With that said, if you were thinking of upgrading from a Ryzen
5950X to this new CPU, you should make sure that your power supply can handle
the extra power draw. And uh oh yeah, probably also your CPU cooler. That's a
tech tip. The good news in all this is that the extra power draw only rears its
head in heavy all core CPU workloads. In
F-124, for example, we found this chip drew about the same power as its
siblings, meaning that you can enjoy manageable temperatures while just
pretending to race in the uh Las Vegas heat. In conclusion, the Ryzen 9
9950X3D2 dual edition puts a punctuation
point on AMD's last 3 years of CPU domination. But while I love the new
fastest one as much as anyone does, it's hard to recommend a chip that demands
such a price for such small gains. And it feels a little bit like this is an
unnecessary victory lap. And I would rather AMD focus their development
efforts on things their community really wants. Like, oh, I don't know, maybe
bringing FSR4 to RDNA3 GPUs. Or, hey,
how about finally bringing Zen 5 to budget buyers? Where is Ryzen 3 AMD?
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Scheduling subscription. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the one we did recently on how X3D chips
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