AMD RYZEN 9 5950X
Team Red unseats Intelntel and takes the crown
OKAY, LET’S START with what might be a bit obvious. At the time of writing, you cannot buy this processor anywhere. Not in the US, or Canada, or the UK, or Europe, or Australia—at least not at its retail price. There are a few popping up on eBay and similar sites every now and then, and some scalpers are selling them for $400+ on top of the original retail price, but outside of that, if you want the latest and greatest Ryzen processor for the price it was intended, well, you can’t.
We’ve waxed lyrical about how stocks have dwindled across the entire tech sector over these last few months, and sadly it’s the case with the 5950X. A combination of things have led to this moment. The pandemic is an obvious one, as more folk stay at home; fab time is now limited as more and more companies vie for their products to be manufactured first; then there’s the fact we’ve got a new generation of consoles taking up valuable chips, new cars with all manner of tech inside, new GPUs, and of course crypto-mining is on the uptick again as well (thanks Elon). The list is endless, but regardless of which thing has done the most in that long string of events, the outcome is the same: There isn’t any stock, and there hasn’t been since shortly after the 5000 series launched. And that’s a shame, because this processor is unlike anything we’ve seen before.
LONG LIVE THE KING
We’ve had the luxury of using this thing now for three weeks as our daily driver, and the sheer performance it has is just insane. Take Cinebench R15 as a prime example. Retesting this processor after a BIOS update led us to achieve an impressive 4,312 points in multi core, and a staggering 269 points in single core. That’s just crazy. The Core i9-10900K, long regarded as the king of single-core IPC, achieved just 228 points in single thread, and 2,608 when it came to multicore operations. Admittedly that’s a 10core, 20-thread processor, versus the 5950X’s clearly supercharged 16 cores, but you can’t ignore that kind of figure.
Couple that pure brute strength performance with a redesigned cache layout and better memory operations and latency, and what you’re left with is a Ryzen processor that is a true tyrant of a chip. In fact, that might be an understatement. No matter what you throw at this thing, it’s going to come out on top. The only areas where it’s really held back are in programs where more memory bandwidth (quad channel and beyond) is king, and in that field, the only competition it has is its own siblings, the third-gen Threadrippers.
We were there at the launch in San Fran when Ryzen first debuted in 2017, and it was amazing to see. However, it was flawed—it had memory problems, BIOS issues, and a slow single core. The big selling points were the multicore performance, and the price. The second generation appeared in 2018, improving on the memory latency and single-core performance, but it still wasn’t super-slick. Then the third gen came along in 2019, and with it we saw PCIe 4.0 for the first time, and even better single-core performance, but the chips were hot, power hungry even under the best liquid-cooled solutions, and Intel was still slightly better for IPC. Now though? This is the pinnacle of what we’ve seen so far. The Ryzen 9 5950X is perfectly balanced. Its performance is staggering—memory issues are a thing of the past, temperatures remain under 70 C even under intense load, and for the first time really since its inception, it’s finally unseated Intel as the gaming chip of choice. Its only flaw is a lack of stock.
The Ryzen 9 5950X is awesome, it’s powerful, and yet it’s absent. Maybe we’ll see it come summer and fall, but for now, it’s like a leaf on the wind—all you can do is watch how it soars.