AMD launches new Ryzen 9000X3D CPUs for PCs that play games and work hard

AMD's batch of CES announcements this year includes just two new products for desktop PC users: the new Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D. Both will be available at some point in the first quarter of 2025. Both processors include additional CPU cores compared to the 9800X3D that launched in November. The 9900X3D includes 12 Zen 5 CPU cores with a maximum clock speed of 5.5 GHz, and the 9950X3D includes 16 cores with a maximum clock speed of 5.7 GHz. Both include 64MB of extra L3 cache compared to the regular 9900X and 9950X, for a total cache of 144MB and 140MB, respectively; games in particular tend to benefit disproportionately from this extra cache memory. But the 9950X3D and 9900X3D aren't being targeted at people who build PCs primarily to game—the company says their game performance is usually within 1 percent of the 9800X3D. These processors are for people who want peak game performance when they're playing something but also need lots of CPU cores for chewing on CPU-heavy workloads during the workday. AMD estimates that the Ryzen 9 9950X3D is about 8 percent faster than the 7950X3D when playing games and about 13 percent faster in professional content creation apps. These modest gains are more or less in line with the small performance bump we've seen in other Ryzen 9000-series desktop CPUs. Like the older 7950X3D and 7900X3D, these two CPUs include one CPU chiplet with the stacked 3D V-Cache and one CPU chiplet without the cache (that cache is also stacked underneath the CPU cores rather than on top of them to make them easier to cool, a change also made to the 9800X3D). AMD's drivers and Windows' CPU scheduler will attempt to "park" the cores without cache when games are playing to prevent games from inadvertently running on the "slower" cores.

This core parking system hasn't always worked consistently, but hopefully, the new Ryzen 9000 CPUs will benefit from improvements AMD has made over the lifetime of the Ryzen 7000X3D chips (YouTuber JayzTwoCents has a detailed and recent video about the problems some people have encountered and steps you can take to fix them). AMD hasn't announced pricing for either new CPU yet, but the 9800X3D launched at $479, $30 more than the 7800X3D when it launched. Expect the new chips to be slightly pricier than the $599 and $699 launch prices for the 7900X3D and 7950X3D.