AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D review and benchmarks

It’s no secret that AMD has been dominating in PC gaming CPU performance, but you always had to make a difficult choice between Intel and AMD if you used your gaming PC for professional workloads as well. With AMD’s $699 Ryzen 9 9950X3D, you don’t need to choose: AMD now has the best CPU for both gaming and creator tasks.

With double the cores of the $479 Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the new 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X3D boosts performance in creator workloads like Photoshop and Premiere Pro, to the point where it comfortably beats its closest competitors in the form of Intel’s Core i9-14900K and even the latest Core Ultra 9 285K processor.

While AMD’s first Zen 5 CPUs disappointed everyone in gaming, the latest X3D versions have more than made up for that. The 9800X3D became the best gaming CPU last year, and now the 9950X3D greatly improves creator workloads while mostly maintaining that stellar gaming performance.

AMD promised it would be “the world’s best processor for gamers and creators,” and the 9950X3D is truly that. It’s the ultimate blow to Intel’s flagship CPU lineup.

AMD’s latest productivity improvements with the 9950X3D required a redesign of its latest X3D chips. AMD’s second generation of its 3D V-Cache technology sits below the processor cores, giving those processor cores better access to cooling. That lets AMD increase the base clock speed of the 9950X3D by 100Hz (compared to 2023’s 7950X3D) to squeeze out more performance, because the 3D V-Cache is less sensitive to high temperatures.

I’ve been testing AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D with Gigabyte’s X870E Aorus motherboard, 32GB of G.Skill DDR5-6000 memory, and Nvidia’s RTX 4090. (I’ve held off switching our CPU testing to the RTX 5090 due to some early Nvidia driver issues.) To truly see where it fits, I’ve run a variety of workloads, synthetic benchmarks, and games across all of the top gaming CPUs: AMD’s new Ryzen 9 9950X3D, its existing $479 9800X3D and $449 7800X3D chips, and Intel’s $589 Core i9-14900K and Core Ultra 9 285K.

All my tests were run on Windows 11 (version 24H2) with virtualization-based security (VBS) and resizable BAR enabled, and performed at 1080p resolution to analyze raw CPU performance. We don’t test at 1440p or 4K in games to ensure we’re demonstrating the differences between CPUs rather than GPUs, as most games rely more on the GPU at higher resolutions. Still, a better CPU can still help out at 4K, especially with upscaling technologies like DLSS or in CPU-heavy titles like Baldur’s Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy, and Microsoft Flight Simulator.

In an average of nine productivity-focused tests that I ran, AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D beats the 9800X3D by nearly 24 percent. It also beats Intel in my single-threaded Geekbench 6 tests, and only falls slightly behind on the muti-threaded score. Geekbench measures how well a CPU can deal with quick bursts of performance in tasks like launching apps, video encoding, or unzipping files. It’s a good benchmark for measuring day-to-day tasks.

For heavier and sustained workloads, Cinebench is a better test for CPU performance. The Ryzen 9 9950XD matches Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K in single-thread performance in Cinebench 2024, but also manages to beat it when it comes to multi-thread performance. The 9950X3D is 80 percent faster in this multi-thread Cinebench test compared to the 9800X3D. That’s a big win for AMD, because with the 9800X3D it didn’t have enough cores to compete fully with Intel’s sustained performance; you had to sacrifice it for a chip that was better at gaming. The 9950X3D can now deliver impressive creator and gaming performance seemingly without any compromises.

Intel’s chips did better showing me fancy graphics in a 3DMark benchmark, but we also use our CPUs for rendering videos or working on big Photoshop files, and AMD is winning there. Both the Premiere Pro and Photoshop PugetBench tests show that AMD is now comfortably ahead of Intel’s 285K and 14900K for these key creator workloads. The 9800X3D was still behind Intel’s latest Core Ultra 9 285K, but the 9950X3D pushes it ahead in the tests that matter to creators. The 9950X3D is also a big leap in productivity performance over the 7800X3D, around 46 percent faster in an average of nine tests.

Bigger scores are better, apart from when it comes to CPU power draw and heat.

Over on the gaming side, AMD is so far ahead of Intel that it’s not even close. In the five games I tested across Intel’s top gaming chips, neither of them managed to beat AMD’s 9950X3D. That’s not all that surprising given how well the 9800X3D performed against Intel’s latest last year, but it means you’re not losing out on gaming performance if you need the extra cores and performance for creator workloads.

The only game where I found the 9950X3D performed worse than the 9800X3D was Metro Exodus, where the 9800X3D was around 2 percent faster. The 9950X3D was identical or within margin of error with the 9800X3D for the rest of the games.

I also took the opportunity to re-test Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K after its round of microcode updates designed to improve gaming performance. In my previous tests the 285K was just ahead in Metro Exodus against the 14900K, and behind in the other four games. This time around Intel has managed to improve its Cyberpunk 2077 performance so that the 285K is now ahead, but in Forza Motorsport and Shadow of the Tomb Raider the 285K is still behind the previous 14900K flagship.

To add insult to Intel’s injury, AMD’s 9950X3D can also be overclocked to squeeze out even more gaming performance and compete with Intel’s overclocking capabilities even further, which hasn’t been possible with previous generations of X3D chips. Some AM5 motherboards also have an X3D turbo mode that boosts single-thread performance by enabling some bandwidth tuning, unifying CPU core distribution, and balancing some of the hardware power. The result is better gaming performance, while sacrificing some creator app performance. The X3D turbo mode makes a lot more sense on the 9800X3D if you’re primarily buying that CPU for gaming, but on the 9950X3D you’re probably buying this CPU for the mix of creator and gaming tasks.

The most impressive part of AMD’s CPU performance dominance is that it manages to achieve this using less power and while running cooler than Intel’s top chips. During the Cinebench 2024 multi-thread test I found that the 9950X3D maxed out at 200 watts of power, compared to 239 watts on Intel’s 285K and a massive 272 watts on the 14900K. The 9950X3D also hit a maximum of 81 degrees Celsius during that same test (cooler than even the 9800X3D), compared to 87C on the 285K and 94C on the 14900K.

AMD has raised the power requirements of the 9950X3D to a 170-watt TDP compared to the 120-watt 7950X3D, but that matches the 170-watt TDP of the 9950X and 7950X, which similarly offer 16-cores for creators but don’t additionally beat Intel in gaming.

Why would anyone buy a flagship Intel CPU right now? That’s what I kept thinking throughout my tests. There could be some certain workloads that I haven’t tested where Intel still pulls ahead, or future app optimizations for Intel CPUs that could affect performance, but for the vast majority of creator and gaming tasks AMD is ahead where it counts.

The only drawback for AMD is pricing. At $699, the 9950X3D is an expensive processor, just like the 7950X3D was when it debuted at the same price in 2023. You can pick up Intel’s 14900K at $499 on Best Buy, or even the latest 285K for $619. There, AMD also has a $599 12-core 9900X3D that should also improve creator performance over its traditionally gaming-focused X3D chips. But if you’re willing to spend extra on a desktop CPU, the 9950X3D is the best on the market, seemingly without any of the performance sacrifices we’ve seen in the past.

AMD used to make you choose between X-series chips for professional workloads, or the X3D versions that dominated in gaming. The 9950X3D removes that awkward choice, with a chip that is great at gaming as well as creator tasks. AMD has well and truly closed the gap on the productivity side to the point it’s easy to recommend the 9950XD as the best CPU, period. If you just want a gaming PC, go for the 9800X3D, but either way AMD is the obvious choice if you want the most powerful CPU for your next PC build.

Photography by Tom Warren / The Verge