So the Ryzen 9 9950X reviews are in and it’s a bit of a mixed bag for AMD’s new flagship CPU. Many people in the tech world have been rightly excited about the 9000 series’ Zen 5 architecture and the possibilities it will open up. That said, for many people AMD’s latest batch of processors have failed to offer a big enough step up in performance to warrant their purchase.
The 9950X does boast great performance when it comes to multithreading and large productivity workloads thanks to its 16 cores and 32 threads. In terms of gaming though, we’d still recommend holding out until the release of X3D variants of the 9000 series are released. Furthermore, reports of malfunctioning chips haven’t exactly made things better.
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X
Cores
16
Threads
32
Boost clock speed
5.7 GHz
Base clock speed
4.3 GHz
L3 Cache
64 MB
TDP
170 W
Platform
AMD Socket AM5
“Ryzen 9 9950X stopped working” during review process
On top of the mixed response that the 9950X has received thus far, there has also been a report of a Ryzen 9 9950X dying during the process of being reviewed. Off that back of this, we even saw someone jump to recommend skipping this generation altogether, but it’s probably a bit early to make that judgment we’d say.
According to Hardware Upgrade the Ryzen 9 9950X they were sent for testing “stopped working” in the midst of their review process. They seem to think the “use of a Beta BIOS that must have allowed some voltages to rise too high” which in turn caused irreversible damage to the processor.
While at first glance this may seem rather worrying, this could be a rare instance of a dysfunctional CPU – a dud. However, Gamers Nexus also seemed to receive a broken Zen 5 CPU in the form of the 9600X. Only time will tell whether other examples of the hardware will experience similar problems outside of these examples.
Is the Ryzen 9 9950X good for gaming?
Despite the mixed response from reviewers and early adopters, the Ryzen 9 9950X has performed pretty damn well in benchmark tests, outstripping its competition in several aspects of performance when it comes to gaming though there has been some disappointment, especially given the bump in price.
The folks over at Tom’s Hardware reckon that the Intel Core i9-14900K and existing AMD X3D processors are still the way to go for those after great gaming performance. There could be better news on the horizon though as there is quite a lot of talk of X3D variants of the 9000 Series.
3D V-Cache technology with its larger cache capacity is perfect for CPU-intensive gaming. That is what has made AMD’s previous X3D processors so popular with gamers ever since they were first released. Waiting for a Zen 5 X3D processor might just be the best approach if you’re trying to get your hands on a top-notch new gaming processor.
