AMD Wouldn't Send This - Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition Review

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 want to eat some

popcorn and watch the fanboys squabble

in the comments about an overpriced CPU.

Well, guess what? Buckle in tight, cuz

you're going to see all three today. The

Ryzen 9950 X3D2 Dual Edition is an

eyewateringly expensive, zero

compromised 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 segue to our

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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. Getting

right into the meat of things, I can

understand why AMD struggled to name

this chip. And they clearly did because

what is this thing? Let's break it down.

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 vcache,

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 3DV cache 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 duel a

whopping

192 MGB of level three 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 3DV cache 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 duel 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 cache, right?

Especially in gaming, right? Well, let's

talk about that. Out of the gate, things

are looking good in City Skylines 2. a

game we chose more for its ability to

bring CPUs to their knees than its uh

community appeal. Here, the Duel leads

the pack with the other 9000X3D 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

uh 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 going to do you 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 9950X3D2 duel

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 9950XD2

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

duel. Because while it does have more

3DV cache 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 3D vcache 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

dejenifying 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 2CD

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 3D Vcash on all the

cores now. So, why are we talking about

parking anything anywhere? Vroom v room,

right? Well, as it turns out, most games

just plain don't need more than eight

cores. And regardless of what type of

cache 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

going to 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 cache.

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 CCD0 for the time

being. Another focus for AMD's marketing

for this chip is a claimed 5 to 10%

increase in productivity. Let's take a

look at that. And unsurprisingly, the

Ryzen 9 9950 X3D2 dual edition Core 2

dual extreme max plus the sequel is an

absolute monster here as well. In 7zip,

the duel has a clear lead over any other

consumer CPU both in compression and in

decompression. And in Cinebench, it sits

at the top of the chart or darn near it

in both multi-core and single core

performance. The only problem is that

its closest competitor is uh

five $550 cheaper at retail right now.

Uh 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? Where in Blender, the

dual edition does manage an as

advertised 5% improvement over its less

endowed twin and a considerable 15ish%

over the 7950 X3D. This is one of the