AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition Review: Ultimate No-Compromise CPU
With the Windows installation 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 snoozed notifications to minimize any potential interruptions and let the systems reach an idle state before invoking any tests.
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 9950X3D2 Dual Edition supports the same memory speeds as its predecessor and ultimately offered similar memory bandwidth. Thanks to their official support for much higher memory speeds, the Intel Arrow Lake processors offer significantly more peak bandwidth.
The Core Ultra 200S Plus series' higher clocked interconnects and memory improve memory latency over the initial wave of Arrow Lake processors, which puts them in-line with the Ryzen 9000 series. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition is right there alongside the original Ryzen 9 9950X3D.
Cache latency is also very similar between the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition and the original Ryzen 9 9950X3D. Cache latency is slightly higher than single-CCD Ryzen 9000 series processors, but better than Intel's Arrow Lake processors.
Intel's last few processor generations feature what the company calls an L0 cache, which is a low-latency additional layer that sits below the L1. AMD's cache hierarchy is different and doesn't have an L0, so we're not showing the L0 chart here. As you can see, the Core Ultra 200S Plus series processors offer similar cache bandwidth to their predecessors, but AMD's processors offer much higher bandwidth at every level and the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition is near the top.
Geekbench v6.5 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.
The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition put up the second best single-thread Geekbench run we've seen from a desktop processor, behind only the single-CCD Ryzen 7 9850X3D, and its multi-thread score couldn't quite catch the recently released Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus.
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.
All of the processors we tested are more than capable of running the Microsoft Office suite, but the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition scores a victory here nonetheless, edging out the original Ryzen 9 9950X3D by a couple of percentage points.
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 Core Ultra 7 270K Plus' particularly strong responsiveness and productivity scores help it score another overall victor in Crossmark, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition offered the best Creativity score and ultimately landed in second place.
Browser & Web App Benchmarks: Jetstream 2.2 And Speedometer 3.1
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.
With all that cache and the ability to maintain higher power levels than its predecessor, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition takes the pole position on both of our browser based benchmarks.
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).
The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition put up the best compression and decompression scores of the bunch as well. Whether single or multi-threaded, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition's scores either lead the pack here, or hang alongside the best. Let's get into some more demanding tasks, next...
