Review AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D Review: AMD Retakes Gaming Crown with 3D V-Cache

[Admin]

We put AMD's new gaming-focused $699 16-core Ryen 9 7950X3D through our full gamut of tests to see if it comes out on top as the best CPU for gaming.

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D Review: AMD Retakes Gaming Crown with 3D V-Cache : Read more

 

[PlaneInTheSky]

• Steep pricing
  No support for DDR4 memory
  Reduced performance in some productivity apps

The cons just weigh too heavy for me to even consider the CPU or the AM5 platform.

I already have DDR4. AMD expects me to just throw this into the trash and buy expensive new DDR5 for a 1% difference in performance. It even bothers me from an e-waste perspective, let alone the financial cost.

The fact performance of X3D CPU is all over the place bothers me too. Yes it's fast in -some- games, but then you get less overall performance in several important applications. If I just used my PC for gaming, I would have bought a console, I don't like the idea of having to make a trade-off with X3D CPU.

Another thing is, and this is not AMD specific but PC specific. The biggest issue with gaming on PC has been stuttering because shaders need to be runtime compiled on PC. This CPU will not solve this. When PC gaming becomes a meme, #stutterstruggle, I don't think many people are going to be willing to invest in $600+ CPU. Solve this problem, PC gaming is currently in shambles.

 

[cknobman]

Every single media outlet beating the "DDR5 cost" dead horse over and over again.
When talking about ultimate gaming performance, which these 3D chips are designed for, saying the platform cost of DDR5 is a negative is stupid.
DDR4 is a dead end and should only be considered for budget builds and upgrades on older systems at this point.

Just let the "platform cost" argument go, otherwise test Intel with DDR4 and make proper comparisons showing what you get going with older and slower technology.

 

[PEnns]

Wow, AMD is for once forcing users to upgrade to new hardware.......and DDR5! How horrible!!

I heard that lame story so many times before, Intel does it every 2-3 years!!!

 

[drivinfast247]

The cons just weigh too heavy for me to even consider the CPU or the AM5 platform.

I already have DDR4. AMD expects me to just throw this into the trash and buy expensive new DDR5 for a 1% difference in performance. It even bothers me from an e-waste perspective, let alone the financial cost.

The fact performance of X3D CPU is all over the place bothers me too. Yes it's fast in -some- games, but then you get less overall performance in several important applications. If I just used my PC for gaming, I would have bought a console, I don't like the idea of having to make a trade-off with X3D CPU.

Another thing is, and this is not AMD specific but PC specific. The biggest issue with gaming on PC has been stuttering because shaders need to be runtime compiled on PC. This CPU will not solve this. When PC gaming becomes a meme, #stutterstruggle, I don't think many people are going to be willing to invest in $600+ CPU. Solve this problem, PC gaming is currently in shambles.

I don't think they're targeting you specifically. No need to upgrade if not needed. Don't forget there's other people whom may be building their first PC or upgrading from a very old platform and the performance increase will be astronomical.

Curious as to what games are struggling to run on PC and also what PCs are struggling to run games? Also, are those affected games also having issues on consoles?

My PC runs every game that I play without issues. And with the recent GPU upgrade I'll be happy for another year or so and will upgrade when needed.

 

[Elusive Ruse]

The cons just weigh too heavy for me to even consider the CPU or the AM5 platform.

I already have DDR4. AMD expects me to just throw this into the trash and buy expensive new DDR5 for a 1% difference in performance. It even bothers me from an e-waste perspective, let alone the financial cost.

The fact performance of X3D CPU is all over the place bothers me too. Yes it's fast in -some- games, but then you get less overall performance in several important applications. If I just used my PC for gaming, I would have bought a console, I don't like the idea of having to make a trade-off with X3D CPU.

Another thing is, and this is not AMD specific but PC specific. The biggest issue with gaming on PC has been stuttering because shaders need to be runtime compiled on PC. This CPU will not solve this. When PC gaming becomes a meme, #stutterstruggle, I don't think many people are going to be willing to invest in $600+ CPU. Solve this problem, PC gaming is currently in shambles.

Ah cut the crap will you?

My PC from 14 years ago still browses the internet just fine. It still does Spotify, Netflix, indie gaming, etc.

At some point your average PC became "good enough" for most tasks.

This is starting to happen with PC gaming too. While AAA developers still bother to spend years making "uber graphics", most developers have long stopped with this rat race because better graphics rarely translates to better sales.

You have no intention of upgrading to anything, you have admitted it before. All you do here is dump on new tech because for some reason you cannot deal with change. You have an axe to grind when it comes to AMD and anything that puts your fossil of a setup into perspective.

 

[Elusive Ruse]

Every single media outlet beating the "DDR5 cost" dead horse over and over again.
When talking about ultimate gaming performance, which these 3D chips are designed for, saying the platform cost of DDR5 is a negative is stupid.
DDR4 is a dead end and should only be considered for budget builds and upgrades on older systems at this point.

Just let the "platform cost" argument go, otherwise test Intel with DDR4 and make proper comparisons showing what you get going with older and slower technology.

Especially considering that Intel's 13th gen would take a massive performance plunge if paired with DDR4.

It is intellectually disingenuous to put lack of DDR4 support as a con here, if only for the reason that it has already been established that AM5 doesn't support it. Is Tom's Hardware going to put "Lack of DDR4 support" as a con for every CPU that comes out from now on?

 

[lmcnabney]

Excellent article.

I noted that Paul mentioned AMD's specification to use water-cooling on the X3D lineup. After noting the low power usage of these chips I am curious as to why. Has the chip been tested using a more typical air cooled tower fan (with both standard, PBO, and PBO-UV) to determine if water-cooling is even necessary?

 

[Lazar4ee]

If you ignore AMD CPU it is actually quite an AD for RTX 4090 beast

 

[Elusive Ruse]

Excellent article.

I noted that Paul mentioned AMD's specification to use water-cooling on the X3D lineup. After noting the low power usage of these chips I am curious as to why. Has the chip been tested using a more typical air cooled tower fan (with both standard, PBO, and PBO-UV) to determine if water-cooling is even necessary?

According to AMD, V-cache is sensitive to heat; that's why they decreased the TjMax to 89c and reduced the TDP as well. I assume that's also why they instructed reviewers to use water-cooling.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

13% faster in games at 1920x1080 comparing stock to stock for 20% more money (or 25% if using the current discount)...that's proper gamer logic for sure.

If anything it's an advertisement for the 5800x3d. 16% slower at 1920x1080 yet only 44% of the price, plus the platform cost is far cheaper and all you sacrifice is PCIe 5.0.

 

[jeremyj_83]

I already have DDR4. AMD expects me to just throw this into the trash and buy expensive new DDR5 for a 1% difference in performance.

DDR4 was first used in 2014 with the Haswell-E HEDT CPUs for consumers and Haswell based server CPUs. At this point in time DDR4 isn't able to give us the needed bandwidth to keep your CPU cores fed with data. We needed to move to DDR5 just to keep up with the bandwidth requirements. Using servers as an example we went from DDR4-3200 > DDR5-4800. That accounted for a 50% increase in bandwidth per DIMM (38.4GB/sec vs 25.6GB/sec). The absolute bandwidth increase of 13GB/sec is the same as going from DDR3-1600 > DDR4-3200. For reference DDR3-1600 was released in 2007 and used in servers at the latest in 2011 and DDR4-3200 was first used in servers in 2019. That means in 1 generation (highest DDR4 > lowest DDR5) we get a bandwidth jump that took 8+ years previously. That doesn't even count the other advances that you get with DDR5. Overall it was time for CPUs to go to DDR5 and remove their DDR4 baggage. Intel didn't want to go straight DDR5 with Alder Lake and kept that the same with Raptor Lake. You can be assured that Meteor Lake will be strictly DDR5 when that comes out. In the end technology pushes forward. The ewaste is an issue, however, if you dispose of computers correctly they will be recycled and used in newer things.

 

[Elusive Ruse]

13% faster in games at 1920x1080 comparing stock to stock for 20% more money (or 25% if using the current discount)...that's proper gamer logic for sure.

If anything it's an advertisement for the 5800x3d. 16% slower at 1920x1080 yet only 44% of the price, plus the platform cost is far cheaper and all you sacrifice is PCIe 5.0.

I suspect the 7800X3D is gonna be king, that's why they won't release it at the same time as the more expensive options. Any potential buyer should wait for 7800X3D benchmarks before making a decision.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

I suspect the 7800X3D is gonna be king, that's why they won't release it at the same time as the more expensive options. Any potential buyer should wait for 7800X3D benchmarks before making a decision.

I'm not so sure. The 7800x3d has a 700mhz lower boost clock than the 7950x3d so it's quite likely the gains may only be in the single digits vs a 5800x3d. And with it costing $450 vs a 13700k $400, I think it's a bust, especially in mixed workloads.

 

[GuptaStu]

Can somebody correct the core count on page one of the article? Shouldn't it be 8, 12, and 16?

 

[waltc3]

I'll be going with AM5 after the 7800X3d is released in another month. Haven't decided which one to buy, however. The advantage of AM5 is that it has years of CPU & system ram & bios development ahead of it, whereas the AM4 platform I'm currently using is at an end in terms of further development. I'm not in a huge hurry, though. I may wait a year for AM5 bios maturity and some new motherboard offerings.

What I don't care for with AM5 is the current crop of motherboards--for instance, my x570 Aorus Master is a much better motherboard than the x670e Aorus Master--which doesn't support nearly as many features as the x570 Master (like a back-panel CMOS clear button (!) and it has no hardware DAC or earphone amp & doesn't offer dual, manually switched bioses!) Adding insult to injury, it costs > ~$140 more while delivering much less! The x670e supports more NVMe drives, and it's 8 layers instead of 6, but that doesn't make up for the other deficits. To get what I had in my current mboard I'd have to go to a $699 Xtreme! Ridiculous. No way am I reverting to opening up the case to set a Clear CMOS jumper, and I'm not spending ~$700+ on a motherboard! The $360 for the x570 Master was a lot, too, but it was justified by the hardware that appealed to me. So I'll see what happens on the motherboard front.

 

[logainofhades]

I'll be going with AM5 after the 7800X3d is released in another month. Haven't decided which one to buy, however. The advantage of AM5 is that it has years of CPU & system ram & bios development ahead of it, whereas the AM4 platform I'm currently using is at an end in terms of further development. I'm not in a huge hurry, though. I may wait a year for AM5 bios maturity and some new motherboard offerings.

What I don't care for with AM5 is the current crop of motherboards--for instance, my x570 Aorus Master is a much better motherboard than the x670e Aorus Master--which doesn't support nearly as many features as the x570 Master (like a back-panel CMOS clear button (!) and it has no hardware DAC or earphone amp & doesn't offer dual, manually switched bioses!) Adding insult to injury, it costs > ~$140 more while delivering much less! The x670e supports more NVMe drives, and it's 8 layers instead of 6, but that doesn't make up for the other deficits. To get what I had in my current mboard I'd have to go to a $699 Xtreme! Ridiculous. No way am I reverting to opening up the case to set a Clear CMOS jumper, and I'm not spending ~$700+ on a motherboard! The $360 for the x570 Master was a lot, too, but it was justified by the hardware that appealed to me. So I'll see what happens on the motherboard front.

You are forgetting the cost of pci-e Gen 5, on top of the ridiculous inflation we are experiencing.

 

[Elusive Ruse]

I'm not so sure. The 7800x3d has a 700mhz lower boost clock than the 7950x3d so it's quite likely the gains may only be in the single digits vs a 5800x3d. And with it costing $450 vs a 13700k $400, I think it's a bust, especially in mixed workloads.

Considering you have a 5950X I'm inclined to agree with you; yet from my perspective as someone on much older Zen architecture it would make sense to take the leap.

 

[jeremyj_83]

I'm not so sure. The 7800x3d has a 700mhz lower boost clock than the 7950x3d so it's quite likely the gains may only be in the single digits vs a 5800x3d. And with it costing $450 vs a 13700k $400, I think it's a bust, especially in mixed workloads.

The 7950X3D also has 2 CCDs. The CCD with the highest boost clock doesn't have the V-Cache. The CCD with V-Cache only boosts to 5.25GHz whereas the non V-Cache CCD boosts to 5.75GHz. The 7800X3D with only one CCD will have a 5.0GHz boost so the clock difference will only be at most 250MHz and not 700MHz. It will be interesting to see how it performs but my guess is the difference will be minimal compared to the 7950X3D in games while being ahead of the 5800X3D.

 

[chalabam]

Windows 98 requirements demanded 120 mb of HDD.
It could be installed on this processor cache, and there would remain 8 mb free.

 

[jeremyj_83]

Windows 98 requirements demanded 120 mb of HDD.
It could be installed on this processor cache, and there would remain 8 mb free.

Yes and no. The 128MB of L3 is spread over 2 CCDs with one having 32MB and the other 96MB.

 

[chalabam]

Months ago, I wrote a function that ran too slow, so I did the old trick of tabulating the function to avoid the calculation.

I tough I was so smart until I noticed that the table would take 4 Mb of ram, so it would not fit on the cache, and would run too slow, so I had to use other ways.

If I had this 128Mb cache monster, I would not had noticed the problem, and would had made xxxxxx code.
All this cache will be wasted by programmers with too fancy processors, like they do with Chrome, Windows, and a lot of software that wastes resources, just because they exist.

 

[salgado18]

Months ago, I wrote a function that ran too slow, so I did the old trick of tabulating the function to avoid the calculation.

I tough I was so smart until I noticed that the table would take 4 Mb of ram, so it would not fit on the cache, and would run too slow, so I had to use other ways.

If I had this 128Mb cache monster, I would not had noticed the problem, and would had made <Mod Edit> code.
All this cache will be wasted by programmers with too fancy processors, like they do with Chrome, Windows, and a lot of software that wastes resources, just because they exist.

That's your specific case. Some use cases could even need more than that, but the speed gains would be enormous. Developers who get lazy because their machines are powerful come back to reality pretty quickly when the client tries to run their code on a dual-core mobile Kaby Lake with 8GB of RAM.

 

[Fates_Demise]

The cons just weigh too heavy for me to even consider the CPU or the AM5 platform.

I already have DDR4. AMD expects me to just throw this into the trash and buy expensive new DDR5 for a 1% difference in performance. It even bothers me from an e-waste perspective, let alone the financial cost.

The fact performance of X3D CPU is all over the place bothers me too. Yes it's fast in -some- games, but then you get less overall performance in several important applications. If I just used my PC for gaming, I would have bought a console, I don't like the idea of having to make a trade-off with X3D CPU.

Another thing is, and this is not AMD specific but PC specific. The biggest issue with gaming on PC has been stuttering because shaders need to be runtime compiled on PC. This CPU will not solve this. When PC gaming becomes a meme, #stutterstruggle, I don't think many people are going to be willing to invest in $600+ CPU. Solve this problem, PC gaming is currently in shambles.

Not sure why you think amd expects you to upgrade. They don't, upgrades are almost never worth it for cpus within 2 generations of each other. And even less worth it for gaming generally, games are very rarely cpu intensive to the point of needing a top end chip.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

I already have DDR4. AMD expects me to just throw this into the trash and buy expensive new DDR5 for a 1% difference in performance. It even bothers me from an e-waste perspective, let alone the financial cost.

You can always just sell the DDR4 ram to offset the cost of getting a new system.