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 9950X3D, 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 9950X, 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 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 applications that
aren't games that get a performance buff. Compared to the normal 9950X, which is the 16 core chip,
this 9950X3D has double the L3 cash from 64 megabytes to 128 megabytes. And you might not
think that that is that much, but that L3 cash 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 test bench. Oh my God. This is heavy. We've got an x870e AORUS master motherboard
here with some 6000cl30 TridentZ Neo RAM. The AMD does still recommend 6000 mega transfers per second
memory, just with low latency. Now compared to the previous generation, you know, the 7950X3D 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, well, most of the CPUs have been for many, many years. 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 in the CPU gets extra L3 cache. 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 cache, well, 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 some PTM7950 phase change thermal pad from LTTstore.com. For graphics card, we have an
RTX 4090. 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 7950X3D. The new version has the 3DV cache underneath the chip rather than
on top and they use some fancy technology called through silicon BIOS to electrically connect it
through the 3DV cache, which you might wonder why the big thing is now you can have those cores
sitting on top running at 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, preventing you from cooling the
cores properly. So this new chip now has 170 watt TDP like the 9950X non 3D. The previous generation
was limited at 120 watts. We've got the nice new TSMC 4nm node. We have a little bit more L1 cache
than last generation, but other than that, it's kind of like a 9800X3D 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 pick your priority basically. So if you run applications
that don't really use the 3DV cache 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 Vcache, which is the opposite of the default behavior. However, if that's the case,
you probably shouldn't buy this CPU. And look, wow, it's a computer. You can even fit our sponsor on
here. And now that we're booted up, we can take a look and make sure our cache is there. Woo, 128
megabytes of L3 cache. 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 3dv cache enabled since most games can't take advantage of more than like a or so cores
anyways. And if you start dipping into the cores with less cache, usually you get a performance
loss. So I'm gonna try I'm gonna try and load the built in solitaire. And let's see if we can see a
look at that immediately. So if I'm focused on solitaire, you can see that half of the CPU cores
just a 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 a 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 3dv
cache optimizer, both features that are part of the AMD chipset driver. So if you have an existing
7000 series x 3d 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 the
cache 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 have eight CPU cores and 16 threads, so that they only use the v cache.
And it's for a specific set of games. And 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 I want to try that actually. Oh, I have to go
Windows G while it's the active window. Oh, I see. 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 unparks 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 geo mean of all of the games we tested at low,
which is only the three, it does still technically put the 9800 x 3d on top at low, but it's a close
race. And this again is only across three games. 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 9950 x and x 3d 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 f 124. Oh, I almost forgot Stellaris. This
is kind of like a top down RTS game. And this benchmark specifically simulates one year of
game time. And while the numbers aren't crazy different, this game is super consistent in
the benchmark with these numbers only varying on a given CPU, about one second, if that even so
the 9950 x 3d and the 9800 x 3d are basically on par. But we do have a bit of speed up from Intel
from the non 3d v cache 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 x 3d 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 engineer, 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 Premiere, you get a little bit of a bump. But overall,
this new chip is still on top, 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 3d v cache and faster than the rest. Good to see Cinebench. Man, Intel does really
good in Cinebench. 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. Intel actually does have another spot where they're
winning here a little bit above everything else. But in h264, the 9950 x 3d and its non 3d v cache
counterpart are on top with a good lead. So in terms of productivity, the 9950 x 3d is basically
on top unless you're happened to be AV one encoding on CPU or running Cinebench. In the other
applications, it was right up there. And in games, it seems to perform pretty much neck and neck with
the 9800 x 3d. Except for a couple edge cases, there still seems to be. I'd be interested to see
if city skylines does see further improvements with some future chipset driver updates, or if you
might be able to remedy that with the gamebar trick I told you guys earlier. 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 Cinebench
and see where we get. Oh, actually, before we do that, let's check out the power and thermals,
because I'm really interested in that. The 9950 x 3d 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
ish gigahertz. Even though Intel did edge out like a tiny bit of a win, it's not 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 in a game,
if we look at f1224 at 4k with ray 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 bottlenecked test. I mean,
the 9800 x 3d is like barely even drawing power if you're going for efficiency. Now, to be clear,
these are two very limited situations. 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. 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
to 26 ish. Based on the data I can see from the Labs testing with pbo on, it looks like we're
getting about 100 megahertz more on average and our score is somehow lower. Compared to the motherboard
default pbo not set to enabled but auto, we're doing about 20 25 watts more on average and getting
somewhere between 70 to 120 more megahertz on average across the cores. But we did get a little
bit lower score. So who knows? It 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 x 3d 16 core 3dv cache,
seemingly monster is 699. 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 x 3d. 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 premier, 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 as a 9800 x 3d.
In most of the situations we saw the 9800 x 3d and the 9950 x 3d 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 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
And maybe check out the 5600 x 3d ShortCircuit I did a while ago. That was that is still a
really solid chip. That's pretty cheap. Bye