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The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 is living proof that, in CPUs, more isn’t always better. It all comes down to what you plan to use your PC for. In games, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is faster for $400 less. And in applications, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D delivers a much better value with largely similar performance and a price that’s around $250 less at the time of writing. But we’re talking about a $900 CPU here, where marginal gaming leads and price-to-performance go out the window. This is a CPU you buy if you want the best of the best, and it delivers on that front, no matter how marginal those advantages are from a 10,000-foot view.
The jump in performance rarely goes into the double-digit range over the 9950X3D, but it occasionally does. And those applications are what matter for the 9950X3D2. It’d be one thing if we saw a 5% improvement across the board with a binned CPU; that’d make sense for a KS-style CPU from AMD. But we’re actually seeing some much larger increases in performance, just in highly specialized workloads.
There’s no clear advantage in games, but AMD never claimed there would be. The biggest feat the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 could achieve is keeping pace with the other Zen 5 X3D CPUs, and sure enough, it keeps pace without any problems. No, it’s not as fast as the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, but it might as well be. Looking at all of the Zen 5 X3D CPUs, you’re getting top-shelf gaming performance, short of maybe the Ryzen 9 9900X3D.
In overall application performance, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 looks like that KS-style chip, offering a minor 3.9% jump over the 9950X3D in multithreaded performance when taking common workloads into account. It’s the best of the best, even if only by a bit. The strength here, however, comes from those specific workloads, like data science, where the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 really shoots ahead.
I wouldn’t recommend the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 to most people, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad chip. It’s a unique offering with some (highly specific) upsides, and although it’s expensive, it only appeals to a group of buyers who need that compute power, no matter the cost. I hope AMD doesn’t double down on dual-cache CPUs simply because 3D V-Cache has become somewhat of a brand, but for the 9950X3D2, it’s hard to deny that it works.
- MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy
- MORE: AMD vs. Intel
- MORE: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D review
