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AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D summed up: gaming and content creation performance, value and alternatives.

Exceptional.

Will Judd avatar
Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry
Updated on
24 comments

Following our testing, it's clear that the 9950X3D is an outstanding processor. It's extremely rare to get a CPU that manages to equal the very best gaming processor in terms of gaming frame-rates while also adding on a huge amount of extra performance for content creation. If you have a foot in each of these worlds, as we do at Digital Foundry, it's hard to imagine a better option.

That leaves the 9950X3D almost unopposed in the market, with Intel's Core Ultra 9 285K not hitting the same gaming highs - normally being as good as the old 14900K at best and considerably worse elsewhere - and only sometimes matching the AMD offering in content creation.

Elsewhere, the only major competition comes from AMD itself. The 9800X3D consumes less power while gaming and hits the same frame-rates in almost all cases while costing less - around £479/$479 - so it's a better choice if you aren't regularly running all-core workloads. There's also the 12-core 9900X3D, which AMD isn't sampling at this stage, but ought to offer a similar mix of gaming and content creation performance - albeit with only six X3D cores versus the eight on 9950X3D and 9800X3D.

Past generations are also worth considering. The 7800X3D still acquits itself decently as a gaming processor, and is worth considering if your AM5 build doesn't have the budget for a 9000X3D alternative. The 5700X3D and 5800X3D can still be good value options too on AM4, but there is now quite a gap between them and the best AM5 options and are probably not worth considering if you're going with a high-end GPU with the RTX 4090, 5080 or 5090.

ryzen 9 9950x3d next to a 3d-printed tank
Image credit: Digital Foundry

As with the 9800X3D before it, there are no major qualms here - the 9950X3D is a refreshingly excellent product that was both stable and performant in our testing, with minimal messing around and maximal results. The only minor complaint here is again on pricing, with the 9950X3D being the most expensive Ryzen processor ever sold at $699/£659. That's a huge chunk of change for a consumer processor, even its high core count makes it best suited for more professional use.

Thankfully, AM5 motherboards are quite affordable these days, as are "sweet spot" DDR5-6000 RAM kits, so your required expenditure pales in comparison to what you'll likely spend on a high-end graphics card at their current inflated prices. It is worth keeping in mind that the 9950X3D does consume more power than the 9800X3D, so you'd probably want to pair it with a high-end tower air cooler or 240mm/360mm AiO to keep all those cores cool. That said, I'm sure the small form factor (SFF) community will have a lot of fun packing this into a tiny PC case, such is the level of performance on offer.

Overall, the 9950X3D is an outstanding performer and easy to recommend for anyone with a need for both bleeding-edge gaming performance and a high-core count CPU for more production-oriented workloads. If you need one CPU that can do it all, the 9950X3D is the one for you.

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