I have in my very hands what is claimed to be the world's best processor for
gamers and creators this is the brand
new AMD ryzen 9950 X 3D a 16 core fairly expensive CPU
that promises to make basically no compromises that's right you can have a
CPU that has the horsepower for productivity without making compromises
to gaming at least that's what AMD says
with this brand new chip in here ooh
look at that man CPU unboxings are so exciting hey look we're done all right
video over for the uninitiated here this is one of AMD's 3D vcash enabled CPUs so
they basically take their normal CPUs which to be fair a 99 50x not a normal
CPU kind of the top dog at least until
today and then they add a bunch of cash
and no not like money I mean you need to
add money but in exchange they give you a different type of cash cash that lives
on the CPU it's kind of like the RAM in your system where it it holds the stuff
you're actively working on for quick access except it's way faster than RAM
like inordinately faster than RAM and so
when you can have a good bit more than a normal CPU certain applications and
especially games get a huge performance increase and that is the sell of this
thing and there's even some application that aren't games that get a performance
buff compared to the normal 950x which is a 16 core chip this 950x 3D has
doubled the L3 cache from 64 megabytes
to 128 megabytes and you might not think that that is that much but that L3 cache
is literally multiple multiple times
faster than your system memory and if you can keep crucial information really
close to the CPU that means you can make things go really fast now this all
sounds great in theory but how does it look in practice let's get a test bench
oh my got this is heavy we've got an x870
aorus Master motherboard here with some
6000 cl30 tridon Z Neo RAM and AMD does
still recommend 6,000 Mega transfers per second memory just with low
latency now compared to the previous generation you know the 950x 3D was a
good CPU but it did have its problems
specifically now if you look at the inside of these CPUs it's not just one
CPU like um well most of the CPUs have
been for many many years uh AMD uses something called chiplet technology and
they actually have basically two separate kind of like CPUs fused
together on a PCB and they call them chiplets except that only one of the
chiplets or eight cores of the 16 cores
on the CPU get extra L3 cash the other
eight just has the normal amount so if you're playing something like a game and
the game decides to try to use the cores that don't have the extra cash but
you're going to have a performance hit you're not getting that benefit so on
the last generation it was sometimes a pretty noticeable issue where you were
taking a big performance hit so if you only play video games and you barely do
any productivity stuff where you can really take advantage of like 16 cores
it wasn't a good idea to buy one of those chips but on this generation
thanks to some software stuff which we'll see shortly they in theory fixed
that which we'll show you in a sec I just need to get a cooler on here with
uh some PTM 7950 phase change thermopad from LTT Store.com for graphics card we
have an RTX 490 um this isn't the latest and greatest from NVIDIA but it is what
AMD tested with in their press deck so that is what we're using for now while
we wait for that to turn on let's talk a little bit more about the specific
specifications of this CPU compared to last generation a lot of the specs on
paper look the same so most of this is
kind of architectural however there are some big ones compared to the 7950 X 3D
the new version has the 3D vcash underneath the chip rather than on top
and they use some fancy technology called through silicone bias to
electrically connect it through the 3D V cache which you might wonder why the big
thing is now you can have those cores sitting on top running at what whatever
speed you want overclock to whatever you want whatever power you want and you
don't have that insulating layer like stuck on top uh preventing you from
cooling the cores properly so this new chip now has a 170 watt TDP like the
950x non 3D the previous generation was
limited at 120 watts we've got the nice new tsmc 4 nanometer node we have a
little bit more L1 cache than last generation but other than that it's kind
of like a 9800x 3D with eight more cores
slapped right next to the ones with 3dv cache and in theory hopefully in games
it performs pretty much the same there is technically higher Max boost clock
which is interesting but what I suspect we'll see is that the cores without the
3dv cache the extra ones are going to be able to clock higher than the ones that
do have it and from what I understand there's actually a setting in the BIOS
now where you can um pick your priority
basically so if you run applic that don't really use the 3D vcash and you
could benefit from higher clock speed you can actually tell it in the BIOS to
prioritize using the cores with higher clock speed rather than the ones with vcash which is the opposite of the
default behavior however if that's the case you probably shouldn't buy this CPU
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secretlab FC to get your own Titan Evo Ergo chair today and now that we're
booted up we can take a look and make sure our cash is there woo
128 megabytes of L3 cash she
let's take a look at how this all works
now I got this cool piece of software called Park control which is supposed to
let you tweak like core parking which if you're not familiar basically just means
that core is being like kind of temporarily turned off so that the
software on the computer and the operating system tries not to use them
and that is very important like I mentioned before when we're in a game we
only want to be using the cores that have 3D vcash enabled since most games
can't take advantage of more than like eight or so cores anyways and if you
start dipping into the cores with less cash usually you get a performance loss so I'm going to try I'm going to try and
load the built-in solitire and let's see
if we can see hey look at that immediately so if I'm focused on
Solitaire you can see that half of the CPU cores which is say 16 of 32 so
that's the eight 3dv cache cores as well
as their extra multi- threads are enabled and then the other half are
completely parked or turned off so that the operating system doesn't use them
and if we go into task manager this is taking its sweet time okay you can see
we've got like the first block of cores or some of them are being used at least
and then the rest of them had a spike and then now that the cores are parked
there's no activity going on there whatsoever now specifically they've
updated their provisioning package as well as the 3D vcash Optimizer both
features that are part of the AMD chipset driver so if you have an
existing 7000 series x3d chip like the 7950 X 3D with two ccds highly recommend
updating the chipset driver you're going to get pretty much probably some free
performance in certain games and then they also added a new thing which
actually I can see in task manager here we can see that vcash performance
Optimizer service but there's also now an application compatibility database
service now what this application compatibility database service actually
does it uses a Windows compatibility toolkit called processor count lie which
as the name implies it'll just lie to the app and say oh I only have8 CP U
cores and 16 threads so that they only use the vcash and it's for a specific
set of games now it's important to note you need game bar installed if you want
all of these optimizations to work because they rely on Game Bar to know
whether or not a game is running at least to some degree and that's also
helpful because if it doesn't detect it for some reason you can manually tag
something as a game with game bar and then it should start to work which is um
I want to try that actually oh I have to go Windows G while it's the active
window oh I see it okay now and then I go hey there we go okay so remember this
is a game tech power up GPU Z so if I click that close this now go back look
at that it works you see now we've got
16 of 32 cores only half of them are parked when we're using GPU Z and if I
click off of it take it out of focus boom it UNP
Parks the course so the system works now I know that some people don't like game
bar but this way it's like a thing that's already built into Windows that
you can use to flag apps and you don't have to run any like weird software it's
already built into the chipset driver there's no like separate Intel
performance Optimizer app that you have to open and play with it just pretty
much just works let's look at the goo mean of all of the games we tested at
low which is only the three it does still technically put the 9800 x3d on
top at low but it's a close race and
this again is only across three games uh I'm sure if you were to test across even
more games you would see probably a tighter variance but overall that is a
really good showing that makes me really excited about this chip wow rocket
League can actually use some cores even at 1080p Max settings the 950x and x3d
are on top neck and neck then the 9800
and then Intel and last gen on the bottom we've got Warhammer yeah that
seems pretty GPU Limited at Ultra they're all the same same story as we
saw in f124 oh I almost forgot stellar uh this
is kind of like a top down RTS game uh
and this Benchmark specifically simulates one year of game time and
while the numbers aren't crazy different uh this game is super consistent in The
Benchmark with these numbers only varying on a given CPU uh about 1 second
if that even so the 9950 x3d and the 9800 x3d are basically on par but we do
have a bit of speed up from Intel from the non-3d VC variant and definitely a
huge speed up from last gen and that is good to see in all the games we tested
pretty much the 9950 x3d is performing
as AMD said it's damn good for gaming
but let's look at productivity because that's what this chip is really for the
content creator the engine nerd the whatever who also games and look at that
Puget bench in Photoshop it's really not
a big difference it's a bit faster with a few more cores but man this is really
close and in premere you get a little bit of a bump but overall this new chip
is still on top uh even if the performance improvements are not huge in
Adobe apps we all know how well optimized those are in the blender
monster Benchmark it's neck and neck with the non- 3dv cache and faster than
the rest good to see cinebench man Intel
does really good in cin bench either way this is the only test we did I think
where Intel's 285k is actually on par
with these AMD chips and that is like really close if we go to single core
Intel wins out a tiny bit in handbrake oh I lied uh Intel actually does have
another spot where they're winning here uh a little bit above everything else
but in h264 the 950x 3D and its non-3d
vcash counterpart are on top with a good lead so in terms of productivity the
9950 x3d is basically on top unless
you're happen to be av1 encoding on CPU
um or running cine bench in the other applications it it
was right up there and in games it seems to perform pretty much neck and neck
with the 9800x 3D um except for a couple
edge cases there still seems to be uh I'd be interested to see if City
skylines uh does see further improvements with some future chipset
driver updates or if you might be able to remedy that with the game bar truck I
told you guys earlier um but what I want to try now is all of those tests were
done with PBO off and if you're not familiar PBO is like AMD's automatic
overclocking thing you turn it on in the BIOS and it kind of removes a bunch of
the power limits and stuff because this is a fully unlocked chip I want to just
do that and run cin bench and see where we get oh actually before we do that
let's check out the power and thermals cuz I'm really interested in that uh the
9950 x3d average CPU power during a
cinebench run around 200 Watts our
temperatures were around 75 it's clocking you know between 5.2 and 5.5 is
GHz even though Intel did Edge out like a tiny bit of a win it's it's at a fair
bit more power you're talking at least 10% more power and it wasn't 10% more
multi-threaded performance by any stretch of the imagination and at Max it
was more than 10% you're talking 20 25%
more power damn it almost seems like AMD made like a really good CPU here this
thing crushes in gaming crushes in productivity and it does it while
drawing less power even like like in a
game if we look at F1 2024 at 4K with
rate tracing on which is not going to be a huge CPU load you know what the
average of the 285k is a tiny bit lower In This Very GPU bottleneck test I mean
the 9800 x3d is like barely even drawing
power if you're going for efficiency now to be clear these are two very limited
situations um there are probably circumstances depending on your
application where one might be more efficient than the other but overall
seems like a very good showing for AMD um and those Intel chips are very
efficient in certain applications honestly not a ton higher
on the wattage I think we said the average before was like 200 and now it's 226 is
based on the data I can see from the Labs testing with PBO on it looks like
we're getting about 100 MHz more on average and our score is somehow lower
woohoo compared to the motherboard default PBO not set to enabled but Auto
we're doing about 2020 25 watts more on average and getting somewhere between 70
to 120 more megahertz on average across
the cores um but we did get a little bit lower score so who
knows it uh it's definitely not something that's always going to make
your stuff better I kind of want to just play games on this thing now but like
overall this CPU seems like a banger what's the price this new chip the 9950
X3 16 core 3D vcash seemingly monster
uh is $6.99 it's the same price as last generation a fair bit more expensive
than the non-3d cache variant and a lot more expensive than a 9800 x3d so if all
you do is game that's still going to be your best gaming option but if you do
other stuff things that can use more cores if you're running Premiere if
you're doing I don't know crunching pie
on your computer this chip as far as
we've seen today can seemingly do both almost as good is a 9800 x3d in most of
the situations we saw the 9800 x3d and the 9950 x3d were pretty much neck and
neck and you're not compromising on the productivity to get that gaming prowess
I mean this thing is a is an absolute unit of a processor and uh yeah GG AMD
it's not cheap but if you use your computer for work and getting stuff done
and making money this could be a very
very good option if you also game and maybe check out the um 5600x 3D
ShortCircuit I did a while ago that was uh that is still a really solid chip
that's pretty cheap bye