AMD’s Big Guy, The Ryzen 9 5950X

Ryzen 9 5950X At $799, Good Deal Or Bad Investment?

AMD’s new flagship CPU, the 5950X comes with a hefty price tag and so it is worth asking if spending the money is worth it for you and your PCs quality time together.   With 16 3.4 GHz cores and 32 threads capable of hitting up to 4.9 GHz and a 105 W it is hard to resist, but the price puts it in a class all it’s own.

TechPowerUp attached the new Ryzen 9 to an ASRock X570 Taichi and 16GB (8 x 2) of DDR4-3200 for baseline testing, as well as overclocking it to a 4.5 GHz based paired with DDR4-3800.  In gaming tests, you can run at 720p and actually spot differences when playing, with Intel’s i9-10900K giving you a double handful of extra FPS, but once you are gaming at a reasonable resolution the differences are less than a percent difference between that i9-10900K or even between the different Zen 3 chips for that matter.

On the other hand, if what you do involves Blender, Keyshot, Visual Studio C++, Tensorflow or various scientific simulations or training, then there is a reason to fork over for the Ryzen 9 5950X.  In those cases we see this chip blowing pass Intel’s offerings as well as faster performance than you see on the R7 series processors. 

While it is certainly an impressive chip, you should take a look at what you will personally be using your machine for before you back order it.