The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D Review: AMD’s Fastest Gaming Processor
This week is the long-awaited launch of AMD’s second generation of V-Cache equipped consumer chips, the Ryzen 7000X3D family. Aimed primarily at gamers, tomorrow morning AMD will be releasing a pair of their latest-generation Ryzen 7000 chips with the extra cache stacked on, including the Ryzen 9 7950X3D (16C/32T) and the Ryzen 7 7900X3D (12C/24T). Both chips build upon their Ryzen 7000X-series predecessors by adding a further 64MB of L3 cache, bringing them to an impressive total of 128 MB of L3 cache.
Meanwhile, a third SKU, the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, is in the works for April 6th. That part will offer 8 CPU cores and 96 MB of L3 cache, making it the most direct successor to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D.
Ultimately, all three chips will serve to update AMD’s product stack by combining the strengths of the Zen 4 CPU architecture with the performance benefits of the extra L3 cache, which during the overlapping period of the last several months, has been split between the Ryzen 5000 and Ryzen 7000 families. In short, PC gamers will finally be able to have their cake and eat it too, gaining access to AMD’s Zen 4 microarchitecture and its myriad of benefits (higher IPC, higher clockspeeds, DDR5, PCIe 5) with a nice helping of additional L3 cache slathered on top.
From that stack, today we’re reviewing the new flagship Ryzen 9 7950X3D. The 7950X3D offers 16 Zen 4 cores spread over two CCDs (8C/16T per CCD). AMD had to elect one of the CCDs to stack the additional L3 cache onto, resulting in a new-to-AMD heterogeneous CPU design, but they do have some special sauce as a garnish to make it work. We aim to determine if the Ryzen 9 7950X3D is the chip gamers have been yearning for and how it stacks up against other Ryzen 7000 chips (and Intel’s 13th Gen) in our test suite.
