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Today I’m reviewing the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, the company’s new flagship flagship desktop CPU, which has 16 cores and 32 threads. Like its six-core CPUs, AMD’s 16-core model, the Ryzen 9 3950X, has also had a major impact on the level of performance in content creation and multi-threaded workloads available to owners. of conventional desktop computers.
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
In fact, it offers similar performance to Intel’s high-end desktop Core i9-10980XE and is also faster than AMD’s first and second generation Threadripper CPUs in many tests. Today, however, the Ryzen 9 5950X looks set to become the ultimate mainstream desktop CPU. As we’ve seen in my Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 7 5800X, and Ryzen 9 5900X reviews, the new Zen 3 architecture has resulted in massive performance gains across the board and AMD now matches or better than Intel in most games. too. The latter cannot be said for the Ryzen 3000 series, which still lagged behind Intel in some scenarios.
If the same goes for the new 16 cores, then the Ryzen 9 5950X could be the one processor to dominate them all, without compromising on gaming performance and devastating content creation power as well.
Starting with specs, the Ryzen 9 5950X is a beast, hitting the highest peak boost frequency of 4.9GHz of any Ryzen CPU. However, the all-core boost in multi-threaded workloads dropped to just 3.85 GHz. This is to keep the monster within the 105W TDP threshold. This means that a manual overclock could yield significant multi-threaded performance gains, but also that in situations where fewer high-frequency cores are beneficial, it can deliver less performance. But this is the Zen 3 architecture, so anything is possible, and a lot will depend on its cooling, as well as the CPUs responding well to high-performance coolers and liquid cooling.
You get the full 64MB L3 cache as both eight-core CCXs are active and the 512KB per core L2 cache bringing the total to 8MB. There is no fridge in the box and you will have to spend around $ 799 to get one. This is roughly the same as Intel’s Core i9-10980XE, which I have also included in the graphics.
Test systems
My test systems now use Nvidia’s RTX 3080 graphics card, the latest Windows 2009 update of October 2020, plus the latest drivers, Windows updates, security fixes and BIOS versions as of 1 November 2020. All of this is essential as they include the latest security and performance fixes. improvements, so I would be very wary of any benchmarks that do not specify these aspects of their test systems. In short, your results may be invalid and not representative of real-world performance. I have retested all the graphics processors so that all the results are comparable and what you can expect from a new system.
I’d like to thank Watercooling UK, Barrow and Corsair for supplying the water-cooled parts of my test systems, Corsair for supplying the memory and power supplies as well, MSI for supplying the motherboards, Nvidia the graphics cards, AMD and Intel The CPUs the latter also supplies the M.2 SSDs.
AMD test system:
Motherboards: MSI MEG X570 Unify, Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master (Ryzen 5000)
Intel test system:
Motherboard: MSI MEG Z390 Ace, MSI MEG Z490 Ace
Common components
Overclocking
I overclock each processor whenever possible so enthusiasts can see how much extra performance they can get from doing this and you can see these results in the graphics. I’ve achieved 4.6GHzx all-core overclocking with the Ryzen 5 3600XT before now, but the Ryzen 5 5600X managed an impressive 4.7GHz, matching its stock speed peak boost frequency.
Ryzen 9 5950X – 4.6 GHz, 1.268 V
Ryzen 5 5600X – 4.7 GHz, 1.25 V
Ryzen 9 5900X – 4.6 GHz, 1.25 V
Ryzen 7 5800X – 4.6 GHz, 1.25 V
The overclocks for the other CPUs I have listed are:
Ryzen 9 3950X – 4.3 GHz, Ryzen 7 3800X: 4.3 GHz, AMD Ryzen 9 3900X: 4.3 GHz (all at 1.275 V)
Intel Core i9-10900K: 5.1 GHz, 1.3 V Intel Core i9-9900K: 5 GHz, 1.3 V
HandBrake doesn’t scale indefinitely with cores, but that didn’t stop it from reaching the top of the chart at stock speed and when overclocked, only with the Ryzen 9 5900X for company. It was also significantly faster here than the Ryzen 9 3950X and the standard speed Core i9-10980XE, but the latter matched the best score of the new AMD CPU when overclocked, the only place it does.
The GIMP-based image editing test tends to favor AMD CPUs, so it wasn’t a surprise to see that their latest models ranked at the top of the chart and the Ryzen 9 5950X was the top of the list it offered. a huge advantage over the Core i9-10980XE. .
With only a 12 percent difference between the slowest and fastest results in Premiere Pro, the Ryzen 9 5950X’s superior result here doesn’t lend itself to being worth buying one CPU over the other when using GPU acceleration. for exports. This is not to say that it will not help with other parts of the video production process and I will investigate those in future tests, but for exports, which in 4K have been time-consuming tasks in the past, 2020. The update that added the GPU acceleration has taken things away from the CPU enormously, so now even eight-core CPUs can handle low 4K export times.
As expected, with a maximum boost close to 5 GHz at times, the Ryzen 9 5950X topped the table once again with a score of 647. There is no greater contrast between it and the Core i9-10980XE than this graph and it is clearly an area Intel really needs to focus on, especially above 10 cores.
Multi-threaded performance is stellar in Cinebench, with the Ryzen 9 5950X gaining nearly 1,000 points over its predecessor and beating the Core i9-10980XE by nearly 1,500 points. The Intel CPU made up a lot of ground once it was overclocked, but with massive power consumption and doing the same with the AMD CPU, it advanced almost 2,000 points, almost topping 12,000. For reference, an AMD Threadripper 3960X only managed 13,765 in my tests last year.
Gaming performance was not as stellar as the other Ryzen 5000 series CPUs in Wolfenstein, with a lower 99th percentile minimum, but the average frame rate of 255fps was closer and faster than that of the Core i9- 10900K and both figures were miles ahead of the Core. i9-10980XE.
Metro Exodus saw similar numbers to the other Zen 3 CPUs and Intel only made marginal gains here with the Core i9-10900K, while the Core i9-10980XE was significantly slower than both.
Far Cry New Dawn has seen big strides for AMD with the 5000 series and the same thing happened with the Ryzen 9 5950X. It was the fastest AMD CPU, upping the Core i9-10900K to stock speed and offering a higher average frame rate once both were overclocked. Again, the Core i9-10980XE is nowhere to be seen, and while overclocking helped, it was still well below top results.
While focusing exclusively on power efficiency has never been a top concern for PC enthusiasts, the fact that the Ryzen 9 5950X is near the top of the graph and the Ryzen 9 5950X is at the bottom is quite telling. . At stock speed, the two CPUs are more than 100W different despite the AMD chip improving it each test, sometimes by large margins. Once overclocked, things are still in AMD’s favor even though those 16 cores scream at 4.6GHz and power consumption spikes to 385W, but the Core i9-10980XE drew more than 600W and produced massive amounts of heat.
Conclusions
In addition to the slower Zen 3 results than typical in Wolfenstein Youngblood, the Ryzen 9 5950X is essentially the ultimate mainstream desktop CPU. It’s fast in games where it matches the Core i9-10900K in most cases and miles faster than the Core i9-10980XE as well. So that’s the gaming side and here is a more complete package than the Intel 18-core and also the Ryzen 9 3950X, which was often much slower than Intel’s best in gaming.
AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X ios is currently the most powerful mainstream desktop CPU, but it can be used in 400o … [+]
When it comes to content creation, there are significant gains over its predecessor, big advantages over the Core i9-10980XE, and all for negligible power numbers too, especially compared to the Core i9-10980XE. It’s clear, then, that the Ryzen 9 5950X is made for those who don’t want to shell out unnecessarily for a high-end desktop Threadripper system, but still want the best that the mainstream desktop has to offer. In fact, with content creation scores approaching those of the Threadripper 3960X in some cases, the Ryzen 9 5950X is clearly an astonishingly powerful CPU when it comes to multithreaded workloads. It’s also the clearest evidence yet that Intel needs to rethink its entire product stack. Its current 12-18 core lineup is woefully lacking and power hungry.
With excellent power efficiency, excellent single-threaded performance, stellar gaming performance, and devastating multi-threaded content creation power to match, if you need a CPU that is the best at just about everything, you don’t need to look any further. of the Ryzen 9 5950X.
