One thing that isn’t top of the line at the moment is the GeForce RTX 4090, though we are using that now instead of a Radeon RX 7900 XTX.
The RTX 50 series was several months away from being announced when we began collecting updated test data, and we opted to keep the GPU the same for our 9950X3D testing so that we’d have a larger corpus of data to compare the chip to. The RTX 4090 is still, by a considerable margin, the second-fastest consumer GPU that exists right now. But at some point, when we’re ready to do yet another round of totally-from-scratch retesting, we’ll likely swap a 5090 in just to be sure we’re not bottlenecking the processor.
Performance and power: Benefits with fewer drawbacks
The 9950X3D has the second-highest CPU scores in our gaming benchmarks, and it’s behind the 9800X3D by only a handful of frames. This is one of the things we meant when we said that the 9800X3D was the better choice if you’re only worried about game performance. The same dynamic plays out between other 8- and 16-core Ryzen chips—higher power consumption and heat in the high-core-count chips usually bring game performance down just a bit despite the nominally higher boost clocks.
You’ll also pay for it in power consumption, at least at each chip’s default settings. On average, the 9950X3D uses 40 or 50 percent more power during our gaming benchmarks than the 9800X3D running the same benchmarks, even though it’s not capable of running them quite as quickly. But it’s similar to the power use of the regular 9950X, which is quite a bit slower in these gaming benchmarks, even if it does have broadly similar performance in most non-gaming benchmarks.
What’s impressive is what you see when you compare the 9950X3D to its immediate predecessor, the 7950X3D. The 9950X3D isn’t dramatically faster in games, reflecting Zen 5’s modest performance improvement over Zen 4. But the 9950X3D is a lot faster in our general-purpose benchmarks and other non-gaming CPU benchmarks because the changes to how the X3D chips are packaged have helped AMD keep clock speeds, voltages, and power limits pretty close to the same as they are for the regular 9950X.
