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The Ryzen 9 7950X is the latest and greatest offering from AMD. The chip was launched as part of the Ryzen 7000 lineup. It directly competes with the Core i9 13900K for the performance crown.
AMD has slashed the price of the Ryzen 9 7950X, making it more affordable than the competition. Thus, many gamers might be looking at this high-end chip for their next rig.
AMD recently sent us the Ryzen 9 7950X processor for review. We ran it through its paces to test whether the chip is worth gamers' money this holiday season.
Pre-delivery
The Ryzen 9 7950X is currently the best-in-class offering from AMD. This processor is based on the latest Zen 4 architecture. It packs 16 cores and 32 threads, making it a beast on paper.
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The chip has a base clock of 4.5 GHz and can boost up to 5.7 GHz under load. It has a TDP of 170W.
The Ryzen 9 7950X was launched for an MSRP of $699, making it one of the costliest chips money can buy.
Overall, it looks like a promising chip.
AMD Ryzen 9 7950X vs the competition
The Ryzen 9 7950X competes against Intel's Core i9 13900K and the upcoming Core i9 13900KS, which will support 6 GHz clock speeds out of the box. The 13900K is a powerhouse, just like the 7950X.
The Team Blue processor packs 24 cores (8 performance+16 efficient) and 32 threads. It can boost up to 5.8 GHz, which is 100 MHz higher than that of the AMD competitor.
We at Sportskeeda still haven't received our 13900K sample. Thus, we cannot directly compare the chips. However, looking at the performance metrics and other reviews published on the internet, we can conclude that the 7950X has some serious competition.
Unboxing experience
The Ryzen 7000 series processors follow a similar packaging design throughout the lineup.
The Ryzen 9 7950X's box, however, is much larger than the other chips. AMD has put a lot of work behind its packaging. The cover is held with magnets. It opens up seamlessly to reveal the processor inside.
The chip is well-protected inside a clamshell. We also get some paperwork inside. However, the rest of the box is just a sponge block.
Overall, the Ryzen 9 7950X's unboxing experience is polished. It reflects the premium price point of the chip.
AM5 socket and DDR5 support
With the new Ryzen 7000 lineup, AMD has introduced a new socket: AM5. This marks the company's shift from pin grid array (PGA) to land grid array (LGA), something Intel has been doing for almost a decade now.
The new socket comes with 1718 pins and can deliver a total of 230W to the installed chip.
With Zen 4, AMD has shifted to supporting DDR5 memory solely, unlike Intel. Team Blue supports both DDR4 and DDR5 RAM modules with their LGA 1700 sockets. However, AMD has cut off older memory standards to ensure consistent performance.
A closer look at the Zen 4 chip design
The Zen 4 chips look like nothing Intel or AMD has come up with in the past. They pack an integrated heat spreader (IHS) with eight legs that attach it to the underlying PCB.
In between these legs, AMD has carefully placed the SMDs. These are generally placed on the back of the chip in Intel's designs.
This move allows AMD to keep the IHS similar in size to the AM4 chips. Thus, AM4 coolers can be used with AM5 sockets effortlessly.
Behind the chip, one can see the gold pads for contact with the pins on the motherboard.
Overall, an LGA Ryzen chip is welcome. This reduces the risk of pin bending or damage, which is common with older AM4 processors.
Test bench
Before we dive into the benchmark results, let's look at the test bench used in the review.
Synthetic benchmarks
We ran multiple synthetic benchmarks that pushed the processor to its maximum and tested its productivity performance. The Ryzen 9 7950X performed quite well in all of the benchmarks.
However, we do not yet have the performance numbers of the competitors to compare it against since this is the first CPU review on this website.
In the Cinebench R23 single-threaded benchmark, the processor scored 2,011 points when tested with the fan speeds set to default. The chip, however, scored 2,039 points when the fan speeds were ramped up to 100%.
With the fan speeds set to the default curve, the Ryzen 9 7950X scored a whopping 37,556 points on the Cinebench multi-core benchmark. The score is derived mainly because of the high thread count of the chip.
With the fans pushed to 100%, we achieved 37,642 points in the multi-core benchmark.
The Ryzen 9 7950X also impressed us in the Blender benchmark. The individual scores for each of the benchmarks are listed below:
- Monster: 291.01
- Junkshop: 171.45
- Classroom: 139.90
The V-Ray render benchmark measures the rendering prowess of the chip. The 7950X broke the 30,000-point margin in this benchmark, proving that it is a great option for video editing and 3D modeling workloads.
The 7-zip benchmark is a test of data compression. The processor scored a massive 213,227 MIPS in this benchmark, making it one of the fastest options on the market.
The Y-cruncher benchmark counts constants like pi and others to billions of digits after the decimal mark. This tests the computing performance of the 7950X. The chip computed up to five billion places after the decimal point within 74.534 seconds under stock PBO.
We also got impressive results in Geekbench 5. The processor scored a whopping 2242 points in the single-core benchmark and 22,881 points in the multi-core test.
While it is hard to digest synthetic benchmarks without context, the numbers achieved by the 7950X put it among the fastest processors on the market.
Gaming benchmarks
The Ryzen 9 7950X is a solid gaming processor. It can push a ton of frames when paired with a decent graphics card.
Since this is the first processor we are reviewing, we do not have framerates to compare the results we got on the 7950X. However, the processor handled the RTX 4090 quite well. Almost every game we tested was GPU bound at 1440p.
Thermal efficiency and clock speeds
The new Ryzen processors reach 90 degrees regardless of the cooler being used. When stressed with the Prime95 torture test, the 7950X maintained a stable 90+ degrees without throttling.
The Ryzen 7000 chips keep boosting to higher frequencies and draw more power than they are rated for if they have thermal headroom. However, our chip boosted to 5,360 GHz but quickly scaled down to around 4,860 MHz and stabilized.
Even the high-end Galahad 360 AIO cooler, running at 100% fan speed, failed to maintain the 7950X at its highest clock speeds. Users who opt for this processor must spend a premium on their cooling.
Overall, the design of the Ryzen chips does not make them very thermally efficient chips. Users must invest big time in cooling, or the chip will never perform to its fullest.
Power efficiency
As mentioned earlier, the Ryzen 9 7950X scales beyond its 170W rated power draw. The AM5 socket can deliver up to 230W, which is the maximum the 16-core chip can scale to.
Our review unit hit a maximum of 236W and then scaled down and stabilized around the 216W margin.
The processor is not efficient. It's one of the most power-hungry chips out there. However, it draws lesser power than the Core i9 13900K, as reports say.
Integrated graphics performance
AMD has packed an iGPU with every Ryzen 7000 series chip starting this generation. Until the Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000 lineup, only accelerated processing units (APUs), namely the Ryzen 5 5600G and the Ryzen 7 5700G, used to pack integrated graphics processors.
The 7950X packs a dual-core RDNA 2-based iGPU, the same architecture that powers the Radeon 6000 series GPUs. It has a base clock of 400 MHz and can scale up to 2,200 MHz under load.
The 7950X packs multiple RDNA 2 features like hardware encoding, support for the latest video codecs, driver support, and more.
However, users should note that the iGPUs packed with the X-class processors are not powerful. In the games that we tested, the processor could barely hit 60 FPS in the lowest settings of some of the least demanding esports titles.
Value
The Ryzen 9 7950X is one of the costliest processors today. It was initially launched for a hefty $699 price tag. However, following low demand volumes, AMD has revised the pricing. These days, it can be bought for around $573. This makes the high-end Ryzen chip around $50 cheaper than the Core i9 13900K.
In our testing, we found the Ryzen 9 7950X to be a gaming and productivity powerhouse. It is a solid option for anyone looking to buy a high-end chip for their gaming rig.
Conclusion
Product: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X
Release date: September 2022
Core and thread count: 16-cores and 32-threads
Socket: AM5
Box contents: Ryzen 9 7950X processor, paperwork
Memory support: up to DDR5-5200
