IS IT AS GOOD AS IT IS ON PAPER?
HECK YES, this machine is a monster when it comes down to performance, and after are few niggles, we’re more than happy with how it turned out. Aesthetically too, especially with all of the RGB fans working, it’s a very slick rig. Sure, a few custom cables would help to tidy it up some more, but overall we love how this ended up looking.
With everything cleared up, the only remaining restriction was that we were running our RTX 4090 on only three 8-pin PCIe cables, and not the full four 8-pin PCIe cables that it could use. If you have the choice, we obviously recommend using all four, as it means that you are getting all of the necessary power to your GPU, and it won’t be restricted in any way, plus you could in theory try to overclock it. With only three, it limits the card to 450W, but with all four it goes up to 600W.
Regardless of this slight hindrance, our NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition card and the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D worked beautifully in unison. As you can see from our benchmark results compared to Guy’s 8K gaming monster build with the Intel Core i9-13900K and the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Gaming X Trio card (which has a slightly boosted clock speed over ours), the results were very close.
The most intriguing result for us was that our AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D card fell slightly short on the Cinebench results. That’s not to say that our results weren’t fantastic, though. Another very similar result was the 3D Mark Fire Strike Ultra scores, with our machine beating its competitor by 1 percent—look, a victory is a victory. When it comes to outright gaming, both of these systems perform fantastically, there is no denying that. It was tight between both systems, with Guy’s 8K gaming monster machine winning 4 out of the 6, but only marginally. We are talking about a difference of a few frames across the board.
So for us, is the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D worth the additional cost of around $130 more than the Intel Core i9-13900K? Not really. Yet, that’s throwing no shade at this Ryzen CPU—it’s one heck of a behemoth, and with some slight overclocking, we managed to boost our results by up to 5 to 10fps. This AMD machine is brilliant, but then again at just under $4K it really should be, so at least it performs as it should. Whichever side of the fence you choose, both chips have more than enough longevity, and you will certainly not be disappointed by the results from either processor.