Ryzen 9 9950X

[...] A dual rtx3090 workstation with 200G of ram and zen5 9950x cpu. [...] The only reason I can tell it's on, is the very quiet hum of the slow speed water pump. [...] Fun fact, I bought my first rtx3090 4 years ago. A year ago I bought another one and they are still the same price used. [...]

I tend to run pretty close to the edge on hardware (9950x, 9070xt, gen5 nvme)... I've had a few issues with that in Linux... that said, I've been using Linux as the main OS on my desktop for a while now, and when I upgraded about a year ago, I ditched the Windows drive entirely. [...]

Last fall, seeing the writing on the wall, I pieced together an "AI" rig, 96GB ram, 2x RTX 3090, 9950X - not exactly top of the line, but it came in around CDN$3000 all in all, with most parts second hand. I don't think I could build that for CDN$10000 today. I've been using it pretty steadily for a variety of personal projects, and the only improvement (aside from the obvious "more VRAM") I feel pressed to make is a portable AC unit / some kind of a focused cooling solution. [...]

[...] late 90's to early 00's was pretty peak builder era. [...] I mean, I kind of did as 2x48gb was the most I could get in DDR5@6000 and only use 2 slots (or it would run much slower). [...] I bumped to a 3950X/5950X and now 9950X since... [...] My daughter's Ryzen 2400 to a 5000 series, and my own build from a 3600 - 3950X - 5950X... [...]

Concur that it's a great VSCode replacement! [...] It is not, IMO, a replacement for Jetbrains IDEs (PyCharm, Rustrover, for example). I do substitute it on my tablet sometimes, where those IDEs can be too sluggish. [...] (It can still bring a 9950x to its knees though...) Zed for lower-power ones. [...]

[...] In the end, on my CPU (AMD 9950x), changing to mm512permutex2varepi8 only sped up compression by 2%. [...]

[...] But the machine had so many other random crashes and errors reported in system logs saying "This is a hardware error not software" and stuff like that. [...] Just got an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and Gigabyte X870E AORUS PRO The Gen5 drive seems to be working at Gen5 speeds. [...]

Unless you buy some obsolete Epyc CPU with a small number of cores, which would be slower than even one up-to-date Ryzen 9 9950X (which can beat even 32-core older Epycs in compute-limited tasks that use vector instructions), 4 Ryzen boxes with 16 cores & 64 GB ECC memory each should be significantly cheaper (probably not exceeding $6000) and also faster than one box with an Epyc CPU and 256 GB, where the CPU alone could be more expensive than the complete Ryzen systems, if bought at retail prices. [...] In the distant past, I was using dual-socket Xeon or Opteron motherboards in those cases, because such MBs and CPUs were much cheaper than today. Then, by the time of Zen 1, when the Epyc CPUs were still very cheap, the upgrades have been to single-socket Epyc MBs. More recently, Epyc became much more expensive and Ryzen CPUs have much better performance per dollar, so the latest upgrades have been to Ryzen MBs. I look forward to the launch of Ryzen 9 9950X, which should double the throughput of the vector operations, 5 years after Ryzen 9 3950X (Zen 2) has done the same in 2019. [...] In this way, my average electrical power consumption is much less than if I used a beefy desktop, while the peak performance is much higher.

I frequently compile big software projects, using fast multi-core CPUs, like AMD 9950X, with which the compilation itself is really fast. [...] With any classic terminal, the text rendering in the terminal window becomes a bottleneck, slowing down the compilation very noticeably. [...] Even in normal interactive use, there are enough cases when the difference between the instant rendering of ghostty or kitty and the slowness of the classic terminals is noticeable. To see the difference between a slow terminal emulator, like you probably use, and a fast terminal emulator, you can do a "cat" from a text file of a few megabytes, and you will see the speed difference.

[...] I have a high end machine (9950x, 64 GB RAM, and a 5090) and Webstorm is PAINFULLY slow. I don't use any crazy plugins and I hit one or more of these issues almost every day: - Code analysis during git commit taking minutes - 10-15 seconds for the as-you-type suggestion box to pop up, I often end up just typing the full variable name myself - Typescript taking 10-30 seconds to refresh errors, even with the experimental tsgo rewrite - Freezing and displaying the "dump threads" message, weirdly also lagging out my Spotify - Easily consuming 10+ GB of memory (how?) My daily ritual is restarting Webstorm from how much memory it leaked overnight. Many of us still use Jetbrains products because we're willing to put up with a little lag for the multitude of really useful features you get, but they need to attack performance seriously or they're going to risk losing folks.

[...] I have a 5090 and a 9950X in a more traditional case and my temperatures are fine with air cooling alone. Not sure you'd get away with that in an aquarium case with poorer airflow, at least without it sounding like a hairdryer all day.

[...] I got my first 7900xt 20gb on a good sale shortly after they came out in an open box deal on ebay for $590. After another 7900xt 20gb popped up on facebook marketplace recently for $420, I sniped that and then got a microcenter deal on an asus proart board, 32gb of ddr5, and a 9950x for $1050. A couple more deals for used cases, an older 1tb nvme ssd I had lying around, and a nice PSU finished the build. [...]

[...] 3 years ago, I bought a 12900k secondhand because it was near the fastest single core and I basically never max out on multi core. Every time I think about upgrading, I check the benchmarks and decide it's not worth the hassle. Even now, almost 4 years after the 12900k's release, it's only 13% slower than the very fastest $$$ processors on single core (9950X). [...]

[...] A 9950x would probably be faster (especially for single thread,) but moving to AM5 would be a massive downgrade on IO. Can't really see spending $10K now for a TRX50 or WRX90 build... [...]

I generally agree you should buy fast machines, but the difference between my 5950x (bought in mid 2021. I checked) and the latest 9950x is not particularly large on synthetic benchmarks, and the real world difference for a software developer who is often IO bound in their workflow is going to be negligible If you have a bad machine get a good machine, but you’re not going to get a significant uplift going from a good machine that’s a few years old to the latest shiny

The 9950X is an excellent CPU at a reasonable price point and works perfectly fine with an ordinary air-cooled heat sink in an ordinary case without stupid numbers of fans. [...] source: my 9950X, happily running air cooled. [...]

The iGPU on my 9950X is perfectly capable of driving my Dell U4025QW 5k2k ultrawide. [...] It requires I use the DisplayPort out on Linux because I can't use HDMI 2.1. Because the motherboard has only 1 each of DisplayPort and HDMI this limits my second screen.

[...] I know more about software than hardware. [...] As a practical matter does this mean one needs to buy DDR5 ram now from MicroCenter for a build planned for next year? [...] I had been planning to build a new NAS to replace my aging TrueNas (nee FreeNAS). I was just thinking about possibly building another dev box after being very happy with this AMD 9950x performance.

I was able to get a bundle deal from Microcenter here in SoCal with the Ryzen 9950x, motherboard and 32GB of RAM for $699. They have since removed the RAM from all the bundles.

[...] When I've needed a server, I went for multi-CPU setups with older, cheaper CPUs. [...] I just built a Threadripper 9980 system with 192GB of RAM and good lord it was expensive. [...] That being said, there is a glaring gap between "consumer" hardware meant for gaming and "workstation" hardware meant for real performance. Have you looked into a 9960 Threadripper build? The CPU isn't TOO expensive, although the memory will be. But you'll get a significantly faster and better machine than something like a 9950X. [...]

Happy 9950X user here. [...] Not a gamer, according to internet and benchmarks the extra cost is only worth it for gaming workloads. [...]

[...] A full Ubuntu kernel takes quite a bit longer on my 5950X, which is admittedly quite a bit slower than a 9950X but still no laggard. I'll time it and update this comment later... ETA: After dropping caches it took 18m40s to build Ubuntu mainline 6.16.3 with gcc-14 on my 5950X, with packages for everything including linux-doc, linux-rust-lib, linux-source, etc. I'd expect the same operation to take about 11m on a 9950X. It's also not clear whether OP used Clang or GCC to build the kernel. [...]

Yep - I have a 9950X desktop. Building the kernel as part of NixOS builds almost every possible option as a module - for ARM64 that takes something like 15 minutes.

There are peaks in long-term CPU value. [...] The first comparable replacements for it is the i7-12700 (but the i5-12400 is a good buy). [...] Past all that, the author is right about the AMD Ryzen 9950x. [...] I used one in a friend's custom build (biz, local llm) and it'll be in use in 2035.

[...] I just bought myself a Ryzen 9950x deal from a local Microcenter. [...]

I bought one too. It's bananas how powerful the R9 9950X is. [...]

I'm waiting to get my hamds on Threadripper Pro 9995WX, which is Turbo at 5.4GHz. Currently I'm using Ryzen™ 9 9950X, Turbo at 5.7 GHz. It's a 7% difference.

[...] Replaced with 9950x. I was surprised by how big of a difference the CPU update had on frame rates. [...]

FYI, going from some Radeon I had from 6 years ago to a 9950x made a huge impact on game frame rate: choppy to smoother-than-i-can-percieve. [...] Totally worth it compared to say, GPU costs

correct, I just spent $4k on an "AI" machine to do stuff. 96GB ram, ryzen 9 9950x 16 core, 4TB nvme, 24tb hdd, rtx 4090. If this thing was available six months ago I would have bought it instead!

I've found compile times on large C++ code bases to be the only thing I really notice improving. I recently upgraded my work machine from a 2017 i7 to a shiny new Ryzen 9 9950x and my clean compile times went from 3.5 minutes to 15 seconds haha. When I compile with an M2 Max, it's about 30s, so decent for a laptop, but also it was 2x the price of my new desktop workstation.

[...] However the GPUs are useless for FP64 computations, unless you are a big corporation that can afford the huge prices of the "datacenter" GPUs. For ML/AI, GPUs are the normal choice, except when you cannot afford those with enough memory, when you may still want to fall back to cheap CPUs, as argued in the parent article. A $1500 Ryzen 9 9950X system will have a double price in comparison with a mini-PC, but it will be 3 to 4 times faster in any program whose performance is dominated by the speed of the array operations. [...] AMD Strix Point (a HX 370 does 192 FP32 FMA per clock cycle, while a 9950X does 512 FP32 FMA per clock cycle and its clock frequency is much higher; it should be noted that these values are similar to those for integrated GPUs; the best iGPUs have a double number of ALUs, but their clock frequency is much lower, slightly more than half of that of a CPU). In comparison with a low-power Intel CPU or older AMD CPU, the speed advantage of 9950X would be even greater.

I also intend to jump from a 5900X to a 9950X, because I am interested in floating-point computations and 9950X brings the greatest increase in FP throughput since 5 years ago, in 2019, when Ryzen 9 3950X provided double throughput in comparison with the Coffee Lake Refresh of the previous year. A 9950X contains 256 FP64 FMA units per socket, in comparison with the 128 FP64 FMA units of 3950X to 7950X. However, according to the AMD site, 9950X behaves as badly as 7950X when using 4 DIMMs. [...]

10 out of 10! I bought a portable AC for mine 🤣 ryzen 9 9950x with a rtx 5070ti - it's like a hurricane in there with the Noctua NH D15 G2 dual tower cooler running. I run it with the front panel off ❄️

I could never get the Ryzen 9 9950X that I ordered working with the AMD motherboard that I bought, the MOBO seemed to work but the system would never power on after a couple of times of it working, so I ended up going back to a 13th gen Intel i7-13700 (from an i5-13600k).

It has been a great CPU, for several years now! I'm about due to build a new daily driver with a Ryzen 9 9950X. I was just waiting for the initial flurry of BIOS updates to settle down first.

[...] I literally just finished the same set up, with a 9950X CPU and 192G RAM at 4,800 MT/s. [...]

It's really hard to push DDR5 past 6000MT/s on 4+ DIMMs it seems. I had to get everything top spec to fit 4 channels of 6000MT/s on my 9950x (asus proArt motherboard and the top tier trident neo RAM sticks) -- otherwise it's reportedly unstable.

[...] Battlefield 6 was a few minutes on my 9950X, higher again on lower core count CPUs. [...]

UI is sluggish You absolutely need to pass through a GPU so that DWM.exe is properly accelerated; otherwise, it falls back to the software-accelerated WARP and the performance tanks to 15 FPS. [...] It's what I do on my home lab which runs a 9950X. [...]