AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X was the flagship Zen 5 CPU for the company’s latest Granite Ridge family of processors before the arrival of the $699 Ryzen 9 9950X3D, but if gaming prowess isn't your main concern, then the 9950X is still king for 16-core workloads. One of the most powerful consumer CPUs around, the 9950X is the perfect processor for multiple-core and multi-threaded workloads and tasks such as content creation and video editing. You can use the 9950X for gaming, but there are better CPU options now available.
Hitting an all-time low price in Amazon's Big Spring Sale, the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X processor is only $528. The Ryzen 9 9950X has an impressive 16 cores with 32 threads and uses 80MB of combined L2/L3 cache with only a TDP of 170W. The base clock speed of the 9950X is 4.3GHz, which can boost to a clock speed of 5.7GHz.
If you're already on the AM5 ecosystem and looking to upgrade, the Ryzen 9 9950X drops into the existing AM5 LGA1718 socket and is backward-compatible with all 600-series chipsets. The Ryzen 9 9950X shines in multi-threaded performance applications and can still be used for gaming but pales compared to gaming-focused CPU iterations like the 9800X3D and recently released 9950X3D. The 9950X3D is also a 16-core processor, so you're paying $167 more for the 3D V-Cache and gaming performance.
For detailed testing and benchmarking results, please check out our review of the Ryzen 9 9950X. In our testing, we found the Ryzen 9 9950X is up to 23% faster than Intel's Core i9-14900K in heavily threaded workloads but falls slightly behind in single-threaded performance. The same is true when compared to Intel's latest Core 9 285K CPU, which also outperforms in multi-core/threaded workloads but is slightly behind in single-core performance.
