AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU Review: Dominant, No Compromise Performance
When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers necessary for our components, disabled auto-updating and OneDrive, and installed all of our benchmarking software. When that process was done, we performed a disk clean-up, cleared any temp and prefetch data, processed idle tasks, and optimized all of the SSDs using Windows' built-in tools. Finally, we enabled Windows Focus Assist to minimize any potential interruptions and let the systems reach an idle state before invoking any tests.
** Note, there are two sets of numbers for the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K throughout our benchmark results. Since its launch, Intel has released an array updates to address issues with its current desktop platform, which resulted in lower than expected performance at launch. To see how AMD's new Ryzen 9 9950X3D compared to Intel's best, we've included a set of results from the Core Ultra 9 including all of Intel's updates, but left the original results intact so you can see what kind of uplift Intel was able to achieve as well.
HotHardware's Test Systems:
AIDA64 Memory Bandwidth, Memory Latency & Cache Latency
AIDA64's CPU Cache and Memory benchmarks measure memory bandwidth during read, write and copy operations, in addition to memory latency, and cache bandwidth and latency.
The Ryzen 9 9950X3D's memory bandwidth characteristics are right in-line with other dual-CCD Ryzen 900 series processors, but fall well shorts of Intel's Core Ultra and 14th Gen offerings.
Memory latency is another story altogether, though. Despite using a similar memory configuration with similar timings, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D's memory latency was somewhat higher than most of the other Ryzen-based systems. You'll notice all of the 3D V-Cache enabled processors have higher memory latency than their standard counterparts.
Cache latency with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, however, is somewhat better than the previous-gen Ryzen 9 7950X3D. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D's cache latency is also much better than any of the Intel offerings from the last couple of generations.
Memory latency is another story altogether, though. Despite using a similar memory configuration with similar timings, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D's memory latency was somewhat higher than most of the other Ryzen-based systems. You'll notice all of the 3D V-Cache enabled processors have higher memory latency than their standard counterparts.
Geekbench v6.3 CPU Benchmark
The GeekBench CPU tests stress only the processor cores in a system (not the graphics card/GPU), with both single and multi-threaded workloads. The tests are comprised of encryption processing, image compression, HTML5 parsing, physics calculations and other general purpose compute processing workloads.
With Geekbench's single and multi-thread workloads, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D lands at the top of the stack. Its relatively high clocks and large amounts of cache allow virtually all of the workloads in this benchmark to operate quickly from within the cache, minimizing fetches to main memory, which results in top performance here.
UL PCMark 10 Applications Benchmarks
Next, up we have some full-system testing with PCMark. We're reporting all test results from the PCMark 10 Applications benchmark suite, which uses actual Microsoft Office applications, in addition to the Microsoft Edge browser. The workloads are specific to each Office application (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), and the Edge tests simulates real-world web browsing.
It's relatively high clocks and massive cache also help the Ryzen 9 9950X3D in PCMark 10. There, AMD's latest desktop flagship trails only the fully updated Core Ultra 9 285K.
Bapco Crossmark Benchmark
Crossmark is a cross-platform benchmark from Bapco that's available for Windows, Android, iOS and MacOS. Like PCMark, Crossmark measures overall system performance and using real-world applications. It provides an overall score based on the results of its Creativity and Productivity benchmarks and system responsiveness tests.
The Ryzen 9 9950X3D also took the top spot in CrossMark, with strong performance across all three of the sub-tests. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D's result in the Creativity test is what propelled it into the lead here.
Browser & Web App Benchmarks: Jetstream 2.2 And Speedometer 3
Next up, we have some numbers from the Speedometer 2.0 and Jetstream 2 tests available at Browserbench.org. The Speedometer Benchmark Suite uses a wide array of latency and throughput benchmarks to evaluate web application performance, while Jetstream evaluates Javascript and WebAssembly performance; both tests take all of their individual results and tabulate them into a final score.
These benchmarks measure performance of an array of browser-based technologies used on modern, rich web applications. Scores in these benchmark are an indicator of the performance users would see when browsing the web and running advanced web apps. All of the systems were tested using the latest version of Google Chrome, with default browser settings, on a clean, fully-updated install of Windows 11.
The Ryzen 9 9950X3D also performed particular well in our browser-based benchmarks, but ultimately trailed the fully-updated Intel Core Ultra 9 285K. Rest assured, however, that all of these processors are plenty fast for web-based applications.
These benchmarks measure performance of an array of browser-based technologies used on modern, rich web applications. Scores in these benchmark are an indicator of the performance users would see when browsing the web and running advanced web apps. All of the systems were tested using the latest version of Google Chrome, with default browser settings, on a clean, fully-updated install of Windows 11.
7-Zip Data Compression / Decompression Tests
The 7-Zip benchmark measures compression and decompression performance using the LZMA method, which leverages the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm to perform lossless data compression. The benchmark produces a final rating in GIPS (giga instructions per second).
7-Zip's compression and decompression benchmarks also showed the Ryzen 9 9950X3D performing well, but its huge cache doesn't help here and the standard Ryzen 9 9950X takes the lead by a small margin.
7-Zip's compression and decompression benchmarks also showed the Ryzen 9 9950X3D performing well, but its huge cache doesn't help here and the standard Ryzen 9 9950X takes the lead by a small margin.
