on February 27 2023 AMD's ryzen 9
7950x3d was formally declared to be the
best CPU at every price point in the desktop Market at least by everyone else
normally Gamers can count on us to
confirm or refute manufacturer's claims allowing them to get the most for their
money but we said nothing
well about that first our testing was
plagued with so many crashes
that our original script for this video had us speculating whether AMD had
validated this chip at all and once we
worked that out we're going to touch on that later our performance numbers were
so far off what others were reporting that we went back and we retested
everything and what we found was that the deeper we dug the more complex the
story around this chip became fastest on the planet
yes but maybe only on roads that most
people wouldn't drive it on fastest segue on the planet no but you're
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miss out check out any desk at the link below here are the original graphs that
we were going to publish for our ryzen 7950x3d review you can pause if you want
to look closely but what matters is that at 1080p while we did see performance
improvements over the regular 7950x no
matter how many times we tested our data never quite lined up with AMD's own and
if that wasn't strange enough look at these Modern Warfare 2 results lower
than the 7950x then we turn up the
resolution and I mean how is that even possible normally the performance
differences between CPUs should shrink as we move to 1440p or especially 4K
because we're shifting more of the demand over to the GPU well not here
instead our 7950x3d managed worse performance than
its X denoted cousin in multiple games at 1440p we retested it and retested it
a lot same thing and this flies in the
face of the conventional wisdom that CPUs should be tested at a lower
resolution to better reveal their relative strength I mean it's basically
benchmarking gospel that if it's better for gaming at 1080p it should be better
or at the worst equal for gaming at any
other resolution I mean outside of gaming we expected performance to be
underwhelming due to the 7950x3d's lower clock speeds and TDP the last gen ryzen
7 5800 X 3D behaved much the same way because 3D V cache just doesn't help
that much with most productivity tasks but it was supposed to make up for this
with its outstanding gaming performance something we simply weren't seeing the
bottom line is that the review we never published was scathing performance was
not in line with AMD's claims especially when we increased the resolution and
from what we'd heard and what we're now seeing Supply was expected to be
basically non-existent this combined with our experience with the early
drivers our BIOS issues and the crashes we saw all pointed to a rushed possibly
even paper launch AMD had every opportunity to contest our findings but
when we showed them our results they basically went yeah seems okay so with
nothing else to go on if we had launched that review we would have been the only
outlet with a broadly negative take on this chip to their credit AMD did
eventually acknowledge that our chip was probably defective saving us that
embarrassment and giving us us the time to get the story right now we had some
hints that our review sample was more yellow than golden with the integrated
GPU enabled Windows would immediately crash once our GeForce gpus drivers
loaded and across four different Expo
certified memory kits we experienced constant crashes and memory intensive
applications like blender and 7-Zip both of these behaviors were absent with
regular non-x3d chips and this pattern
was observed with multiple motherboards meaning our x3d CPU was the only common
denominator so you might think why is
that only a hint at a bad chip well the thing is these kinds of teething panes
are a lot more common than you'd probably think on brand new platforms if
you recall we had very similar stability issues with first gen ryzen and with
12th gen core especially at higher memory speeds usually though they end up
being footnotes in the review process because everything is pre-release and we
often see these things resolved by the time they're actually generally
available but but they're important here because all of this troubleshooting and
Reporting all of our findings to AMD including the anomalous performance data
ate up two days out of before that we
had for testing wait only four days to
evaluate this thing ah I'm glad you noticed that the unusually crunched
review window was another reason for us to believe hey maybe our chip is
perfectly normal and AMD is just trying to limit our time with it so that we
don't dig too deep I know that's a pretty cynical take but the truth is we
have seen the strategy before and aside
from the crashing our performance numbers were at least close enough to
AMD's expectations that even they initially told us yep everything looks
fine but here's the thing silicon is notoriously fickle especially with these
bleeding edge process nodes and good or
bad might not be as binary as you might think for any given wafer fresh off the
production line there are going to be multiple unusable eyes it's just the way
it is as exact as the manufacturing process is it is truly ridiculous how
small each transistor is these days smaller than even a virus and when
you're working at that level you're at the mercy of literal quantum physics
get the gate pitch off by a fraction of an animator and maybe that transistor
doesn't flip as quickly as its neighbors and you can't ramp up clock speed or
maybe some of them are bridged together and entirely non-functional unlike our
Tech accessory holder from ltdstore.com it's got lots of compartments and it's
very functional now these kinds of defects are normal and these flawed
lower performing processor dies are often used in lower end products which
is fine except that from time to time a
chip can be so marginal that it barely passes those usual quality control
checks and then ends up falling short in
the field this is what we call losing the Silicon Lottery winning the Silicon
Lottery on the other hand isn't simply getting a working chip it's having an
exceptional one one whose production had very few defects giving it extra
Headroom compared to the average for a given design in other words a good
overclocker this is the part where I tell you that once we got our
replacement chip all of our problems disappeared or at least would be if I
were a big liar the stability problems are gone but the performance problems
the ones that led to our negative conclusion in the first place are
actually no better these new numbers then that I'm showing
you now are the culmination of what is now weeks of testing and troubleshooting
and they leave us with some really tough questions like are AMD's yields bad are
we so unlucky as to get two poor performers in a row or is our testing
methodology out of whack somehow when we ran our original tests we made sure to
use AMD's recommended settings with fresh Windows installs and most
importantly fresh chipset driver installs that last part is much more
important than usual because the pre-release chipset driver only installs
the new performance Optimizer and the awkwardly named PPM provisioning file
driver when it detects a dual die x3d
processor like the 7950x3d or 7900 x3d
the release driver might behave the same way by the way so if you buy one of
these as an upgrade double check to be sure we're gonna have purchase links
down below these two tools are essential for getting the best performance out of
these chips because only one of its two dies has 3D V cache and runs at a lower
clock speed while the other is a standard Cash die that's optimized for
higher clock speeds performance Optimizer then automatically promotes
the appropriate dies course as the preferred cores in Windows scheduler
while the PPM provisioning file driver Parks or puts to sleep the cores on the
unused Die games will then assuming everything's working properly typically
gets sent to the 3D V cache die for best performance and as far as we can tell
this is down to a simple integration with Windows game mode and Xbox game bar
rather than any special sauce that's been cooked Up by Andy themselves an
important thing to note though the driver does not disable the other die
entirely and if enough threads are needed it will wake them up even if
you're in game so it's worth noting that a 7900x 3D would wake up more often
since each die has only six cores instead of eight unsurprisingly then if
these features aren't working properly the Windows scheduler is just flying
blind unaware of the differences between the two processor dies and it'll end up
ranking the best course based on the fastest available across the whole CPU
something it can't rightly determine this can lead to situations where an app
might run across multiple dies at once despite only needing one die's worth of
CPU threads which can incur latency penalty since the Dives will have to
transfer data from cash to cash rather than accessing it directly now we
confirmed that ours is definitely working correctly by comparing our data
running stock versus having only one die
manually enabled in the BIOS so you can see here that in games our performance
numbers are roughly the same between stock and forcing the V Cash die while
forcing the frequency die often ran much slower all of which sounds totally
normal and fine right with the right drivers x3d performs better for gaming
what's the problem the problem is that it doesn't look at f122 at 4K with Ray
tracing enabled this is a really heavy GPU load so our CPU should easily be
able to hit Max boost but not the 7950x3d I mean we expect it to run at a
lower clock speed than the 7950x but we
didn't expect is this inconsistency I
mean with adequate cooling both the 3900k and the 7950x are Rock Solid at
5.5 gigahertz but the x3d it's all over
the place that ended up leading to lower GPU power and therefore lower GPU
performance and when we looked at the CPU package power we can see why the
7950x3d in this gaming load is drawing less than half of its rated 120 watt TDP
such low power draws certainly impressive but on a chip that advertises
pinnacle-tier raw gaming performance it's not a behavior that we we want to
see and our replacement chip behaved like this across three motherboards from
three different vendors with multiple Expo certified RAM kits with fresh
Windows installs and even with different chipset drivers so there were two things
wrong with AMD's review kit to us the defective chip and the bad product
positioning I mean if you like to drag race your 700 CPU at 1080p High hits the
bee's knees but I think it's fair to say that most people with this kind of money
are running 1440p monitors at least and
probably don't mind turning on some in-game eye candy and for them our data
simply doesn't support the conclusion that the ryzen 9 7950x3d is
unquestionably the gaming performance Monarch that isn't to say it's a bad
chip AMD in our mind just made the wrong
call by calling out their less impressive and less defensible claims of
performance leadership and instead we feel they should have put far more
services on their true strength performance per watt I mean if we step
back you are getting core I9 3900k ish
performance for a substantial reduction in power consumption even in a GPU bound
scenario like this one that's astounding mind-boggling even under a full Prime 95
load the 13900k consistently pulls over
320 Watts with the 7950x3d at less than
half of that AMD should be shouting this from the rooftops but instead they were
so focused on the gaming performance crowd that we followed them down that
rabbit hole expecting to find the same thing but as it turns out the Dual die
x3d chips work differently from most other CPUs and it looks like the cores
will aggressively try to clock down or even sleep whenever possible when
they're not fully loaded and that would explain what we observed with our GPU
bound scenario and with our 1440p results it would also explain where some
of that lost TDP went our best guess
here is that AMD is airing on the side of caution when it comes to their x3d
chips in order to keep them from redlining thanks to the 3D V cache being
much more sensitive to voltage and to heat than a typical ryzen die this
behavior of course means that there is some performance being left on the table
and we can actually see some of that being clawed back with ryzen Master's
curve tuner function while it isn't the fully unlocked overclocking that we were
promised for x3d going forward it does do a decent job of undervolting the chip
allowing it to push higher frequencies more often the performance difference
isn't night and day but you are more likely to see that performance
leadership that AMD is after assuming that your sample is more golden than
yellow if you enable this function and in our GPU bound F1 run at 4K we can see
that where the stock performance is all over the place it is much flatter with
curved tuner enabled while also drawing even less power than it did before it's
actually scary how efficient this chip is its performance characteristics like
these which we first noticed to a lesser degree with the 65 watt non-x ryzen 7000
CPUs that pushed us to start testing at multiple resolutions and that's the
reason why we will continue to do so going forward it's also why we insist on
re-running our tests with the latest drivers latest BIOS revisions and the
same OS date as of the date that we start testing a new product we've been
doing that for years now and while it means we need to rush more to make these
deadlines because we are retesting every time we're committed to giving you guys
a lesser quantity maybe of truly up-to-date data versus a greater amount
of outdated data the answer to the question then of whether the Dual die
x3d chips are worth the extra hundred dollars two weeks and 2300 words later
is probably not if you need all of the
strengths it brings to the table good gaming performance double-digit core
counts and industry-leading power efficiency that's the big one then maybe
but it comes at the cost of worse productivity performance relying on
chipset drivers to manage the dissimilar dies and the inability to overclock in
the traditional sense so I suspect that most people would be better off with the
regular or X variants of the 7950 and 7900 or better off waiting for the 7800
X 3D but should be able to clock Higher by putting more of its TDP towards its
single die we're going to have a full review of that chip when it launches but
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guys this was a very different format from our usual CPU reviews so maybe go
check out our review of the ryzen 70065 watt chips for a little bit more about
the other options available to you on socket am5