Overall and Final Verdict
Back in September when I took a look at the new 7000 Series Zen 4 CPUs I was extremely impressed with their performance, especially in games which is an area that Ryzen has struggled at times. The Ryzen 9 7950X with its 16 cores and 32 threads and with a boost clock of 5.47 GHz was and still is a monster. With the addition of AMDs 3D V-Cache stacked cache for half of the Ryzen 9 7950X3D and its crazy total cache of 144MB their latest addition has that same feeling. This is the type of performance that not long ago seemed impossible. The 7950X3D is an interesting case though because this isn’t a new flagship, it sits next to the original 7950X at the same price and with two different focuses even though they share a lot. In a lot of the synthetic benchmarks the 7950X3D with its asymmetrical chiplet design, lower base clock speed, and lower TDP isn’t always the fastest option. In fact, if standard raw processing power is what you need, in most cases the 7950X will still be the better pick. Its setup however improves in other areas, especially in gaming. Even when compared to the i9-13900K in our game benchmarks it was 12% faster on average. Its performance in some tests stands out completely on its own and had me in my testing redoing testing for days trying to make sure because it's rare to see that kind of standout performance, especially when in other benchmarks it is running closer to the 7900X.
The new lower TDP helps calm down the crazy power and thermals that I saw from the original launch as well which in itself is a welcomed improvement. Interestingly the new setup struggled more in the onboard video testing, not that I think anyone will need to worry about that short of using the onboard to initially set things up or in between a GPU upgrade in the future. The power draw was improved but I did still see the higher than normal idle wattages that I’ve seen on all of the 7000 Series Ryzen CPUs. You also don’t have full overclocking as an option, AMD has that locked down with the exception of a few one-click options that they offer. But you can still get into other BIOS options for power and everything else so all is not lost.
If you are looking for a monster when it comes to processing power but still also want to use your PC for gaming when you aren’t working the Ryzen 9 7950X3D fits the bill perfectly. It isn’t cheap with an MSRP of $599 and a motherboard to match it is also going to be expensive. But considering the pricing of the highest-end video cards these days it isn’t going to be the most expensive part of your build and when combined with a high-end GPU like in our testing, its performance will be crazy.
Live Pricing: HERE
