Product On Review: Ryzen 9 9950X & Ryzen 9 9900X
Manufacturer: AMD
MSRP (Ryzen 9 9950X):
- US: $649 excl. Sales Tax
- AUS: TBC
- UK: ~$610 inc. V.A.T.
MSRP (Ryzen 9 9900X):
- US: $499 excl. Sales Tax
- AUS: TBC
- UK: ~£470 inc. V.A.T.
We’re scarcely a week on from the delayed launch of AMD’s debut Ryzen 9000-series processors and the next two models are ready to be tested ahead of general availability. Arriving this week are the Ryzen 9 9900X and flagship Ryzen 9 9950X, the larger 12 and 16-core counterparts of the first two Zen 5-based designs.
Both of the previous CPUs drew muted praise for their power efficiency but criticism for performance that wasn’t the leap over the 7000-series many were hoping for. In part this would have been down to the decisions to constrain the 9600X and 9700X with tighter power limits than the chips they supplant, but that reasoning didn’t overcome disapproval of pricing that was at odds with this performance level. The 9600X could potentially make a case for itself, particularly to OEMs and SIs; the 9700X will be a much harder sell.
Without wishing to pre-empt our conclusions, clearly this will be a challenging launch for the larger 9000-series chips. The new chips will however potentially benefit from less restrictive power limitations, matching their 7000-series counterpart's TDP.
The Ryzen 9 9900X is the 12-core/24-thread member of AMD’s 9000-series, clocking at up-to 5.6GHz from a base clock of 4.4GHz. It’s equipped with 64MB L3 Cache and has a TDP of 120W. An MSRP of $499 is $50 less than the 7900X’s original guidance but almost $150 more than the older chip's current Newegg listing.
The Ryzen 9 9950X meanwhile is Zen 5’s full-fat consumer chip, boasting 16-cores and supporting 32-threads with operating frequencies up-to 5.7GHz from a 4.3GHz base clock. It too has 64MB of L3 cache to rely on, but a higher TDP of 170W. It has an MSRP of $649, also $50 less than the 7950X’s original guidance yet almost $150 more than its current Newegg listing. Critically for gaming, both 9000-series chips are also significantly more expensive than their 7000X3D-series counterparts.
These two new CPUs are therefore oriented squarely towards productivity workloads that can leverage plentiful compute cores and Zen 5’s higher projected IPC alongside to pull ahead of their generational competition. It's notable that the 9900X boosts a littler lower than the 7900X, and both the 9000-series chips have a lower base clock than the 7000-series equivalents. Dynamic clock frequency adjustments likely mean that there's little stock to be placed in these exact figures figures.
All Ryzen 9000-series CPUs support the AM5 socket platform, i.e. AMD 600-series and upcoming 800-series motherboards. They’re compatible with DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0 signalling for both GPU and (optionally) high-speed NVMe storage. Each is also equipped with an iGPU for basic video-out and other limited (see: non-gaming) capabilities including AV1 audio/video decode.
Prior Ryzen generations aside, the Ryzen 9 9900X and 9950X’s primary competition will be Intel’s Core i9 and high-end i7 parts from the 13th and 14th Generation. Raptor Lake architecture has strong single and multi-threaded performance at the expense of extreme power draw and generated heat. They are excellent options so long as you have the power delivery and cooling support to match.
Or, at least, they were. Significant stability and longevity flaws have recently been uncovered by investigators looking for the root cause of an increasing number of partial and total CPU failures. Intel have just pushed a microcode fix (ref: 0x129) for their i9 and i7 CPUs to combat the problems but it remains to be seen whether they will totally or only partially ameliorate the chip degradation experienced by client and enterprise users alike.
