One factor that is not prime of the road in the intervening time is the GeForce RTX 4090, although we’re utilizing that now as an alternative of a Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

The RTX 50 sequence was a number of months away from being introduced once we started amassing up to date check knowledge, and we opted to maintain the GPU the identical for our 9950X3D testing so that we might have a bigger corpus of information to check the chip to. The RTX 4090 continues to be, by a substantial margin, the second-fastest client GPU that exists proper now. However sooner or later, once we’re able to do yet one more spherical of totally-from-scratch retesting, we’ll probably swap a 5090 in simply to make certain we’re not bottlenecking the processor.

Efficiency and energy: Advantages with fewer drawbacks

The 9950X3D has the second-highest CPU scores in our gaming benchmarks, and it is behind the 9800X3D by solely a handful of frames. This is likely one of the issues we meant once we mentioned that the 9800X3D was the higher selection should you’re solely nervous about recreation efficiency. The identical dynamic performs out between different 8- and 16-core Ryzen chips—larger energy consumption and warmth within the high-core-count chips often carry recreation efficiency down only a bit regardless of the nominally larger increase clocks.

You will additionally pay for it in energy consumption, at the very least at every chip’s default settings. On common, the 9950X3D makes use of 40 or 50 % extra energy throughout our gaming benchmarks than the 9800X3D working the identical benchmarks, despite the fact that it isn’t able to working them fairly as shortly. But it surely’s much like the facility use of the common 9950X, which is sort of a bit slower in these gaming benchmarks, even when it does have broadly related efficiency in most non-gaming benchmarks.

What’s spectacular is what you see once you examine the 9950X3D to its speedy predecessor, the 7950X3D. The 9950X3D is not dramatically sooner in video games, reflecting Zen 5’s modest efficiency enchancment over Zen 4. However the 9950X3D is a lot sooner in our general-purpose benchmarks and different non-gaming CPU benchmarks as a result of the modifications to how the X3D chips are packaged have helped AMD preserve clock speeds, voltages, and energy limits fairly near the identical as they’re for the common 9950X.