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 wanna eat some popcorn
and watch the fanboys squabble in the comments about an overpriced CPU.
Well, guess what? Buckle in tight, cause you're gonna see all three today.
The Ryzen 9950X3D2 Dual Edition
is an eye-wateringly expensive, zero-compromise 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 segway to our sponsor.
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.
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 vCash,
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 3D vCash 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 dual a whopping 192 megabytes of level 3 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 3D vCash 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 dual 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 vCash, right?
Especially in gaming, right? Well, let's talk about that. Out of the gate, things are looking good
in city skylines too. A game we chose more for its ability
to bring CPUs to their knees than its community appeal.
Here, the dual leads the pack with the other 9000 X3D 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 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 gonna do ya 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 9950 X3D2 dual 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 9950 X3D2 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 dual because while it does have more 3DV cash 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 3DV cash 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 de-jancifying 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 two CCD 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 3DV cash on all the cores now. So why are we talking about parking anything anywhere?
Vroom, vroom, right? Well, as it turns out,
most games just plain don't need more than eight cores.
And regardless of what type of cash 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 gonna 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 cash, 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 CCD zero for the time being. Another focus for AMD's marketing for this chip
is a claimed five to 10% increase in productivity.
Let's take a look at that. And unsurprisingly, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 dual edition
Core 2 dual extreme max plus the sequel is an absolute monster here as well.
In seven zip, the dual has a clear lead over any other consumer CPU,
both in compression and in decompression. And in Cinebench, it sits at that top of the chart
or darn near it in both multicore and single core performance.
The only problem is that its closest competitor is a, $550 cheaper at retail right now.
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? We're in blender, the dual edition does manage
and as advertised, 5% improvement over its less endowed twin
and a considerable 15 ish percent over the 7950X3D.
This is one of the first cases we've seen where the dual 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 dual 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 AV1.
In Puget Bench's Photoshop benchmark, the dual 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 3DV cache chip
like the 7950X3D. 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 percent on our chart.
However, as with gaming, the situations where we see large improvements
over the non-dual, are few and far between.
As for Premiere Pro, it's kind of like a grade schooler going to the gym.
The games are there, but they're minor. So yeah, in our creator focus testing,
the dual 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 science C workloads.
Check out this result from Veronica's review of the original 9950X3D.
Since we're a day late, we have the rare second mover advantage and we can actually just show you some of Veronica's results.
And you can see that there's some workloads where the chip benefits a lot from the extra V cache.
You might be thinking, that's not very many workloads and yeah, yeah.
Anyways, if you do want to learn more, we highly recommend going over to Veronica's,
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 de-gritting radio signals from space,
this could be your new powerhouse. Speaking of power, at 200 Watts,
this is the highest TDP that AMD has ever set on a consumer chip.
And who 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 1400K levels of power draw.
But thankfully, it doesn't have the same power density
and IHS problems as the 1400K.
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 oh yeah, probably also your CPU cooler.
That's a tech tip. The good news in all of this is that the extra power draw only rears its head
in heavy all-core CPU workloads.
In F124, 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 Las Vegas heat.
In conclusion, the Ryzen 9950X3D2 Dual Edition
puts a punctuation point on AMD's last three 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 our DNA3 GPUs
or hey, how about finally bringing Zen 5 to budget buyers?
Where is Ryzen 3 AMD? Also, where is my sponsor?
If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the one we did recently on how X3D chips in particular
don't really need the fastest memory for gaming which could help save you some money
if you're putting together a new system.