The Ryzen 9 9950X is AMD’s most powerful Zen 5 desktop offering. Dual CCD Ryzen CPUs have never been the best options for gamers, but they have.
It’s now time to check out AMD’s most powerful Zen 5 desktop offering, the new Ryzen 9 9950X. As usual, we will be doing so from the perspective of PC enthusiasts, covering general desktop tasks, as well as activities like video editing and 3D modeling, and the ultimate focus will, of course, be on gaming.
It’s fair to say that dual CCD Ryzen CPUs have never been the best options for gamers, but they have been the best options for those who like to work and play without having to invest in two different computers for those tasks. In an ideal scenario, one CCD clocks as high as possible, delivering strong gaming performance, with a second CCD as backup for core-heavy productivity workloads.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work like that. The dual CCD design can often end up hurting gaming performance and even lightly threaded productivity workloads. Still, it is a cost-effective solution, and for those who work and play, previous generation 12- and 16-core Ryzen processors have been a godsend.
Now, in the case of these new Zen 5 CPUs, the improvements over Zen 4 have generally been very small for desktop users, especially those focused on gaming performance. For example, the 9700X was just 3% faster than the 7700X in our testing, whereas the 7700X was 21% faster than the 5800X in its day-one review two years ago. Prior to that, the 5800X was 23% faster than the 3700X.
So, gamers have become accustomed to new Ryzen processors boosting gaming performance by at least 20% over previous generation parts, making Zen 5’s sub-5% uplift seriously disappointing. This was a real blow for the 6-core 9600X and 8-core 9700X because outside of gaming, those lower core count CPUs generally aren’t very useful for core-heavy tasks like video editing; for that, you’d typically choose the 12- or 16-core models, assuming you can afford them.
This might be good news for the 9950X, as its 16-core/32-thread design makes it very useful for productivity tasks. However, the question is, how much more useful is it than the 7950X? When compared to the 7950X, the core count remains the same at 16, and both parts boost to the same 5.7 GHz, though the base frequency of the 9950X has dropped by 200 MHz.
Both models feature 32MB of L3 cache per CCD for a total of 64MB, and both have a 170W TDP. A quick side-by-side comparison of the hardware specs doesn’t reveal much, as the changes to the 9950X have been made at the architectural level.
AMD claims that the Zen 5 architecture boasts substantial improvements in energy efficiency, performance, and AVX-512/VNNI computational capabilities for machine learning and AI workloads. This is Zen 5 in a nutshell – AMD has targeted server workloads and development software, not general desktop computing and gaming, which explains the lack of significant gains here.
Still, AMD’s review guide claims that the 9950X is, on average, 8% faster than the 7950X for gaming. They also claimed during their tech day in an official slide that the 12-core 9900X provides gaming leadership over Intel’s Core i9-14900K, offering, on average, 12% better performance than the i9 processor, which is a wild claim.
So, keeping all of that in mind, let’s go over the benchmarks, starting with some productivity tests before jumping into the gaming results…
Before we dive into the bar graphs, let’s take a quick look at how the 9950X behaves under an all-core workload using Cinebench.
The Cinebench multi-core score of the 9950X is impressive, reaching 228,600 points, though that is just a 4% improvement over the 7950X at the same TDP. With the CPU power capped at 165W, the cores on CCD1 averaged 5.2 GHz, while the cores on CCD2 ran at 4.9 GHz. This resulted in a peak temperature of 92°C and an average operating temperature of 82°C during our 30-minute test.
With just a single core active, the CPU power draw was only 31 Watts, and we observed a maximum operating frequency of 5.7 GHz and an operating temperature of 64°C.
When examining power draw from the EPS12V rails, the 9950X consumed the same level of power as the 7950X. So in this scenario, you’re looking at a 4% performance boost at the same power level – not exactly groundbreaking.
The 9950X does look impressive when measuring single-core performance, as it’s able to match the Core i9-14900K, making it 11% faster than the 7950X. That’s a solid result.
Unfortunately, what isn’t as promising is the 7-Zip file manager compression performance. Here, the 9950X is actually 5% slower than the 7950X, which is disappointing – you never want to see a performance regression with a new generation.
The decompression performance wasn’t quite as bad, but even so, the 9950X was still 2.
