Published: August 14, 2024 | Author: Tom Logan

AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X Review

Conclusion

As always when there is a new product on the market we, in the review world, have an endless swathe of updates to do as the manufacturers gradually refine and bug fix. With the Ryzen 9 9000 series processors this is even more true than usual. We’ll get to that in a moment. For now let’s talk about what they do well.

Creativity

If you’re familiar with the previous couple of generations of Ryzen 9 processors, the 5900X/5950X and the 7900X/7950X, you’ll know how incredible they are at creative tasks. The combination of huge core counts and high clock speeds meant they performed very well indeed. The usual caveat regarding high core counts generating heat and thus limiting clock speeds also meant that they weren’t the gaming behemoths of their Intel counterparts.

Straight away we have a few jaw-dropping results from the newest additions to the AMD Ryzen range. The Ryzen 9 9900X is 91 seconds faster at rendering our Blender 4K image than the Ryzen 9 7900X. That’s a staggering amount of time saved. The Ryzen 9 9950X carries on this insane performance boost by being 68 seconds faster. Should you mainly use these high-end AMD CPUs for creative applications then you can almost stop reading here. It’s a drop in solution that will save you huge chunks of time from your finite lifespan. If you prefer to render in Maxon’s Cinema4D then they are 3000 and 2000 points better than their predecessors. Even in x265 the Ryzen 9 9950X is 5 FPS quicker than the already fast 7950X.

Gaming

The new Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9950X, on paper at least, eliminates the issues of their forebears. More efficiency allows for higher clock speeds, and as we all know games love megahertz. However, during our testing the Ryzen 9 processors didn’t obtain the scores we were expecting. We didn’t have any issues with the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 9000 series. It’s all rather weird. Then we heard from AMD.

Now AMDs piÃ¨ce de rÃ©sistance has always been that they, largely, are a drop in solution. You don’t need a new motherboard every time. Just a BIOS update, chipset drivers, and you’re off to the races. For those of us who have a heavily customised workflow the very last thing we want to do is reinstall everything when we upgrade. Apparently for the 9000 series Ryzen 9s AMD are recommending exactly that. A fresh Windows install. It’s all to do with one of their drivers being borked. We want to make it absolutely clear that this wasn’t a problem we found when testing the Ryzen 5 9600X or Ryzen 7 9700X.

Thus we tested in our regular manner, and got the results you saw. Once we were assured we had enough content and results for today’s review, we then went down the path of doing what AMD requested. A full refresh. It made zero difference. So thanks for that, AMD. They are not awful results, as our 3DMARK results attest. Clearly the processor can push information fast enough to our graphics card without issue.Â It’s all slightly weird.

Wrap Up

Following our experience with the previous iterations of the Ryzen 9 processors we weren’t expecting insane gaming performance but we definitely should have seen better than this. They’re creative processors above all else but something says that the drivers are not utilising the two CCX’s properly in gaming scenarios. Eventually we have to draw a line under a review and publish it. Sadly, as you’ve seen. Its disappointing.

Wait for a fix…? Sure. The drivers were clearly not ready then were they.

Ryzen 9 9900X : Â£429.99
Ryzen 9 9950X : Â£609.99

Its totally up to you if you buy and live in hope for a fix but new X870 and X870E motherboards are not even out till the end of September so we think waiting is the best option. We have a gut feeling the CPU’s should have been given more time for the drivers to mature and everything launch together like normal.