AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D processor with 3D V-Cache technology, 16 cores/32 skewed threads, Zen 4 architecture, 144MB cache, 120W TDP, up to 5.7GHz boost frequency, Socket AMD 5, DDR5 & PCIe 5.0

Product Information

Cache is simply a very direct form of working memory that the processor keeps close by for instructions and data that it is using at that very moment. The more cache a processor has, the fewer trips to RAM it needs to make for data or instructions, which greatly improves performance for many common tasks. Generally, more cache is better, and the 7950X3D has more cache than any consumer processor available today. The Ryzen 9 7950X3D pretty much matches the 7950X in Blender and Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere tests, though it lags a bit in VRay 5 (though not by that much). Where it really shines though is with HandBrake 1.6. This is one of the creative tests we use where we get to measure it's true real-world performance on a creative workload, especially one that is highly CPU dependent.

Aside from these selected retailers, we’re going to be keeping an eye out for what other places will be selling the card. Currently, the only place with an actual listing for the product is Newegg, although they’re not available to buy just yet. Starting with the Ryzen 7000 series, AMD began adding low-power IGPs to all of its Ryzen desktop processors. (Before, it was limited to the subset known as the G-series.) But this has been a bittersweet change since its introduction. The amount of cache on CPUs has grown over time usually by very small steps, but there have also been a few times when AMD and Intel have significantly jumped up the amount of cache in an effort to boost performance. These efforts in the past have seen mixed results with, at the best of times, a modest performance gain occurring and, at the worst of times, nothing really changing. In part, the mixed results are due to software development, as apps need to be explicitly programmed to take advantage of the added cache for a noticeable improvement to occur. In most CPU tests, however, the cache is not that helpful, and this is what paints the worst picture of the Ryzen 9 7950X3D. Out of all of our CPUs tests, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D is beaten by the Ryzen 9 7950X in all of them except one. That one is the single-threaded POV-Ray 3.7 test, and admittedly that's within the margin of error.The Xbox Game Bar contains a KGL (known good list) of games that it detects when active, thus triggering Game Mode (you can also instruct the game bar to recognize unknown games and/or other applications as games). The driver communicates with the Windows Game Mode feature, which becomes active when the Xbox Game Bar detects a game is running. When it comes to the synthetic benchmarks, there's very little difference between the 7950X3D and the 7950X. Both chips are phenomenal multitaskers, and though the 7950X has consistently stronger single core scores than the 7950X3D, the 7950X3D performs better with multi core performance than its non-3D V-Cache counterpart. If we're talking about this being AMD's take on the perfect gaming processor, we need to step outside of the 1080p gaming environment. We traditionally test at this lower resolution for our CPU game benchmarking so we are able to highlight the difference in performance down to the actual processors. As you go higher in the resolution scale you end up relying ever more on the power of the graphics card, to the point where you cease being able to discern meaningful performance deltas between chip architectures. The cache clearly does not help enough to give the Ryzen 9 7950X3D the performance advantage in any other CPU test in our suite. At the same time, its lower TDP and heat limit cause the 7950X3D to operate a bit slower and perform worse in almost every test except that one. The Ryzen 9 7950X is slightly faster in many of these tests, but, considering how much cheaper that chip is at list price, it’s a bit of a no-brainer which is the better value in this scenario. In terms of power draw, the minimum I recorded for the 13900K is a meager 2.882W, and it could hover around this for hours if you're not using your computer thanks to its energy-efficient hybrid-core design. Meanwhile, the 7950X3D is still slurping up just over eight times as much power as a baseline.

The lower power consumption measured during Adobe Premiere and Cinebench gives the Ryzen 9 7950X3D better overall performance per watt and slightly better overall energy efficiency. This is hurt by the high idle power consumption, however, which never drops below 97W with the system sitting idle at the desktop for prolonged periods. This latter issue may be resolved with a BIOS or driver update, though. The heat produced by the 3D V-Cache forced AMD to lower the max operating temperature of the processor from 95 degrees C on the Ryzen 9 7950X to 89 degrees C on the Ryzen 9 7950X3D. A corresponding reduction in thermal design power (TDP) rating also occurred, with the Ryzen 9 7950X having a 170-watt (W) TDP and the Ryzen 9 7950X3D having a 120W TDP.If the software detects a certain high level of thread utilisation, however, it will spin up that dormant chiplet and bring it online if its extra core count is needed. Many will draw parallels between AMD’s approach and Intel’s Thread Director, the latter of which steers threads to either high-performance or efficiency cores in the company’s x86 hybrid CPUs. The two mechanisms have plenty of similarities, but as you would expect, each company has a unique implementation with different goals. There are some tradeoffs to attaining the leading gaming performance, though — some games don’t benefit from the 3D V-Cache, and the chip isn’t as fast in productivity apps as competing Intel chips. The 7950X3D also suffers from many of the pain points we’ve already seen with the fledgling AM5 platform — the motherboard ecosystem is more expensive than Intel’s offerings, and the strict requirement for DDR5 significantly increases costs compared to Intel’s DDR4-friendly platform. AMD’s Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC2) interface already ranks the fastest cores as the highest priority, enabling the OS to schedule threads into these ‘preferred’ cores first. Not all Ryzen cores can reach the rated peak frequency, so this tech is critical to ensure strong performance in lightly threaded apps, like gaming. We've already tested the Ryzen 9 7950X3D and named it the fastest gaming CPU, while the 7900X3D hasn't yet entered the DF labs but is another strong option at a lower price point.