Ryzen™ 9 9950X 16-Core, 32-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor

Got lucky with the silicon on this chip — absolute beast once you dial it in. I’ve got it running with an all-core CO at -30, no boost override, and stability is flawless. Also tweaked VCORE SOC and VDDG CCD/IOD in BIOS to keep memory and fabric happy, which made a huge difference. Temps stay cool even under full load thanks to a custom Corsair loop, and no crashes or throttling anywhere. Easy to install, compatible with X870 mobos and the power consumption top tier. Handles everything I throw at it — gaming, streaming, multitasking — buttery smooth. If you’re comfortable fine-tuning BIOS settings, there’s a lot of performance headroom here without sacrificing stability. Pair it with good cooling and this CPU will absolutely fly.

This chip is the most powerful one I've purchased yet. It's definitely good for someone who multitasks and even handles virtualization very well. Gaming performance is also great. So why did I get this chip instead of the X3D variant? Well, because I didn't want to have to mess with the annoying core parking and also I didn't want to deal with the reliability issues of the 3D cache variants. I do a lot more than gaming so I found this processor to be ideal for my application. It's rock solid stable on an X870 board and I haven't had a single crash yet. No blue screen or anything. I am extremely happy with this ship and it stays cool under load with a simple 360mm AIO. You will not be disappointed with this chip. BUY IT!

I installed this card in my recent PC build, and it has completely exceeded my expectations. I paired this with an AMD Radeon 9070xt GPU and use a 3-fan liquid cooling unit on the CPU. In real use, this thing is a workhorse. In Blender, viewport performance is buttery smooth even with complex scenes, heavy geometry, and high-resolution textures. Cycles renders are significantly faster and tasks like baking, denoising, and simulation previews feel far less painful than before. In Unreal Engine 5, the card absolutely shines. Lumen, Nanite, and high-quality lighting run with far fewer stutters than I expected, even in detailed environments. Large open worlds load quickly, and I can work at higher settings without constantly worrying about frame drops or performance bottlenecks. For game development and 3D work, it feels like I finally have headroom instead of constantly fighting hardware limits.

Insanely good performance, stability, and responds super well to undervolting. Brought down idle temps 10c doing so.

Excellent processor. Upgraded from a 7950x, and it runs much cooler. Only gotten past 80ish degrees a few times with a higher load, and sits around 40 or 50 generally. I haven't had any stability issues or errors once the motherboard was updated. Power consumption is manageable with a decent PSU. Easy enough to install, just be careful not to bend any pins on the motherboard when you place it. Pins bending isn't easy to fix. Some motherboards might require a BIOS update, so if you have any issues initially, give that a try. This thing can run just about everything at once. Setup is primarily used for solid gaming and/or a budget workstation.

It gets HOT, but it's an absolute beast. Also this has almost as a 3d processor in the uhh I forgot what it's called, v-cache, wait isn't that GPU.. Ehh hopefully you know what I mean.. My brain just not working atm. With PPO on Auto, as I type this I have 4 windows of games running via a script, 2 windows of VS code, 40 or so browser windows open, I'm using 4% of my PC power and it's running at 5.6Ghz. I stay around 55-60c temps, but if I start gaming on high load games or start doing major video compressing via scripts and such, it will jump up to 90c briefly.

This is a brilliant processor at a reasonable price. So why not 5 stars? Well the reason is the 9950X3D. Yes, it carries a considerable price premium, but it has the same base clock speed (4.3GHz) and the cache is able to mitigate the limitations of intra-chiplet communications. The result is that, in business applications, the 9950X3D is approx 2% faster than the 9950X. But the real gain comes in gaming where the 9950X3D is, at time of review, simply the fastest gaming CPU on the market. Hence the premium price. I installed my 9950X on an ASUS ROG STRIX X670E A-gaming motherboard with 32GB of high performance DDR5 memory. There were no issues configuring the board or loading Windows 11 Pro. I thoroughly recommend using a water-to-air heatsink for this CPU and motherboard combination. The problem is that most modern gaming cards seem to use through-card cooling, which means hot air is blown direct onto a chip-mounted heatsink! Not good news! A water-to-air cooler, mounting the fins at the front or top of the machine, solves this issue. The 9950X (or X3D version) needs good heat dissipation! Overall, this is a cost effective CPU that offers fantastic performance and is easy to setup on the 670E chipset motherboards. Memory ran at the recommended sweet spot without problems, and provided you employ just two sticks of RAM, you should have no problems. AMD CPU's have the momentum from Intel. I was even able to buy a 9060XT (16GB) at close to the RRP! Can I recommend this CPU? Absolutely. Even doing data science and perform mathematical transforms on Very Large Datasets, I see no slow down in performance after several hours of maxing-out the cores. Would I buy the 9950X3D over the 9950X? Yes, but unless you are a hardcore game, the 9950X is the better choice when you're on a budget.

As a Youtube Streamer I am very impressed with this CPU. I recently upgraded to the 9950x AM5 from the 5900x AM4. Of course this also included a new motherboard and ddr5 ram, so cant give 100% of my experience to the cpu but, its a great cpu! Im running this with a 4070ti at 1440p/max high graphics in all games and Im getting 160-200fps in Delta Force, 120-140fps in Rust, 110-140fps in Tarkov, 600-700 fps in Rocket League, 130-160fps in PubG. This is all while running OBS outputting 2 streams in 1440p at 28mbps bitrate, Discord, rgb software for lights, Nvidia Broadcast.. and more. Im running a Lian-Li 360mm aio to cool this beast of a CPU and during gaming/streaming the CPU averages a 57c! My old 5900k using a 260mm aio averaged 67c! I cant relate to people saying it runs hot lol! I mean itll spike here n there during heavier tasks but thats always been normal with Ryzen. Your average temp is what you should pay attention to for long sessions. Just make sure you have an adequete cooler and dont cheap out on it. I am very happy with the overall upgrade and having the 9950x powering the entire system! This is honestly the 1st time I have ever upgraded my pc and I was actually happy with the performance increase lol. If your on AM4/ddr4 and wondering if you should take the leap into AM5.. the answer is just do it! Hope this helps someone!