The $900 AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition For Those Rich With DDR5
Take Sebastian’s Advice And Wait For The Return Of The Ryzen 7 5800X3D
The reviews of AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition are starting to roll in and it turns out this is no Threadripper replacement. The extra 3D V-Cache on the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 certainly consumes more power, but compared to the current Ryzen 7 9800X3D the performance is not all that different. As far as gaming goes there is essentially no performance difference between the two chips. For productivity workloads such as Geekbench and Blender you do see significant benefits from the extra 3D V-Cache on the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition compared to the non-dual X3D chip but it doesn’t even come close to the performance offered by a Threadripper.
The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition is an amazing demonstration of AMD’s technical wizardry, but overall it offers little for gamers and even less for those that would use it during their day jobs. This is not to say it’s a bad chip, but at $900 for maybe a 10% performance boost over the ~$480 Ryzen 7 9800X3D it is a hard sell, especially if you also need to buy DDR5.
A full year later and we finally have the CPU that we wanted and it comes with a clanger of a name, 'AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition'. Let's park that thought, dive into the silicon and see what AMD has created.
