AMD has announced the start of global sales of two new desktop processors from the Ryzen 9000 series based on the Zen 5 architecture – the 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X and the 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X. Both chips join the lineup of processors for the AMD Socket AM5 platform and offer increased single-threaded and multi-threaded performance for creative applications.
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The flagship model Ryzen 9 9950X, priced at $650, has 16 Zen 5 cores on board with support for 32 virtual threads, with a base frequency of 4.3 GHz and a maximum frequency of 5.7 GHz. The processor received 64 MB of L3 cache and has a stated TDP of 170 W. In turn, the $500 Ryzen 9 9900X has 12 Zen 5 cores with support for 24 virtual threads, with a base frequency of 4.4 GHz and a maximum frequency of 5.6 GHz. It also received 64 MB of L3 cache. Its TDP is stated at 120 W. Both processors are equipped with two integrated graphics execution units based on RDNA 2 architecture, operating at 2.2 GHz. “Built-in” is mainly intended to be able to run a PC without a discrete video card.
Reviewers of new products agree that although the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X processors turned out to be interesting, especially in terms of performance in resource-intensive applications, they have great difficulties with competition in the gaming segment. For example, instead of the same Ryzen 9 9950X for games, it is more reasonable to buy the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, Core i7-13700K, Ryzen 5 9600X or Ryzen 7 5800X3D, saving up to $300 on their purchase, which can be invested in a more powerful video card. This is guaranteed to give a more noticeable increase in the number of frames per second.
It should be added that although the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X are fully supported by current models of motherboards based on AMD 600 series chipsets, new motherboard models based on the latest 800 series chipsets will be released for Ryzen 9000 processors in mid-September.
In the future, the line of Ryzen 9000 processors is also expected to expand, which should also include “purely gaming” models of X3D processors equipped with additional 3D V-Cache cache memory.