There are some practical benefits to this $899 chip, but not many.
AMD is releasing its Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition processor on April 22. The processor will cost $899, though this could go up or down based on supply and demand.
To recap, it’s a version of the existing 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X3D (MSRP $699, street price around $660) where both of the processor’s 8-core Zen 5 CPU chiplets have 64MB of extra L3 cache stacked beneath them. Normally, one of the chiplets has extra cache and one does not. This gives the CPU a whopping 208MB of cache, a number that is very large. But you don’t need a large CPU review to understand the differences between this chip and the regular 9950X3D that we reviewed over a year ago.
In our general-purpose CPU benchmarks, video encoding tests, and gaming tests, the 9950X3D2 is consistently just a smidge faster than the regular 9950X3D. Despite its 200 W default TDP—30 W higher than the regular 9950X3D’s 170 W—we also found the 9950X3D2 to consume around the same amount of power while gaming and slightly less power while encoding video. These are nice things. And that AMD has managed to improve performance a little without blowing the power budget is a testament to the work AMD has done to eliminate the downsides of 3D V-Cache since introducing the concept a few years ago.
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