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. [...]

[...] 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 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. [...]

[...] 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). [...]

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

I like it too, but I am more interested in the EPYC CPUs that are cheap enough to be affordable by individuals and small businesses. For Zen 5, only a month ago AMD has finally launched the EPYC 8005 series "Sorano" CPUs, which use a smaller socket (with 384-bit memory interface and 104 PCIe lanes) and which includes some models that have a performance per dollar competitive with the 9950X champion (unlike the big EPYCs, which have a much lower performance per dollar, which is compensated only for big companies, where such big CPUs enable economies, by offering a much higher computing density, which reduces the expenses for infrastructure). [...] With Zen 6, AMD also starts with the most expensive SKUs, but perhaps the delay until launching the cheaper variants will not be so long as it was with Zen 5.

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

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. [...]

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. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

[...] 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.

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

[...] 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 9950x will absolutely demolish an M3 or M4 Macbook Pro in any possible test, especially multicore testing. And I don't care how "performant" or "efficient" you think it is, those M series chips will be thermally throttled like anything else packaged into a laptop. Oh, and the vastly superior dekstop rig will also come out cheaper, even with a quality monitor and keyboard.

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!

[...] 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. [...]

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.

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 may have observed this regarding performance. (RR + Pycharm) Perhaps the classic software move of: "[My] computers have gotten faster, but JB IDEs are still slow/unresponsive, so they are probably getting slower / more resource intensive". They will bring a 9950x with nothing else running to a crawl. [...]

[...] 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.

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.

[...] Besides the fact that the operating system may allocate some memory for each thread, when you launch a multi-threaded application that is able to use all available threads, for instance the compilation of a big software project, it frequently will allocate some working memory in an amount proportional with the amount of working threads. [...] This corresponds to having 64 GB for a desktop CPU with 32 threads, like Ryzen 9 9950X. For the compilation example, I have seen software projects, like Chrome/Chromium and its derivatives, where if you do not have enough memory, proportional to the number of hardware threads, e.g. [...]

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. [...]

Please try running this on a "desktop" CPU as well, like a Ryzen 9950X. [...] The Epyc CPU cores are slow per core, so trading less cores for fewer faster ones actually works out well. So if you are wanting fast CI/CD builds you are much better off using desktop CPU cores vs enterprise server cpus like this. [...]

[...] What's the point in a consumer board + a Ryzen 9950X and a big normal PC case if I can't put more than two old-school HDDs in there? [...]

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. [...]

[...] Here is the corrected link for the 9950X review with allmod instead of def for equal comparison (I couldn't find the def chart in the server review)

[...] Note the following: the 9950x does not come with a stock cooler. AMD recommends water cooling for the 9950x. [...] I'd expect that a 9950x under sustained load paired with a "165W" cooler would not only not boost, but would throttle to below base clocks. [...] With additional cooling to ensure it never reaches Tjmax, this also will result in better CPU performance, a tangible benefit. Had the author monitored his systems, he would have observed high temperature and throttling. [...]

[...] The 9950X pulls somewhere around 220W at 5ghz all cores and with how power scales, 170W at the advertised 4.3 GHz seems more than plausible. [...]

[...] The picture with the thermal paste shows that paste was squeezed out from the entire perimeter of the CPU, so the cooler is making contact with the whole CPU. [...] Noctua lists the NH-U9S cooler as being compatible with the 9950X, and claims it has "medium turbo/overclocking headroom", see . [...]

The small coolers used by them are not recommended by Noctua for 9950X Noctua's CPU compatibility page lists the NH-U9s as "medium turbo/overclocking headroom" for the 9950X [0]. I don't think it's fair to suggest their cooler choice is the problem here. [0]

[...] For example, my old M2 Pro macbook has more than twice the memory bandwidth than the current best desktop CPU, the zen5 9950x. [...] 3) AMD and Intel heavily bias on the costly side of the watts vs performance curve. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

Something I find weird is that this article compares a 9950x with two different laptop CPUs and concludes that performance has increased massively in the past few years. If you compare the 9950x with its two Desktop predecessors (released 2 and 4 years before), you see about a 6% increase from the 7950x and a 45% increase from the 5950x. [...] I think it makes sense to consider the performance and offer an upgrade when you see a 50% or so cumulative improvement. [...] However, there is always a question as to whether your use case will be able to use all 16/32 cores/threads in a 9950X CPU. [...]