AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X Review

Test Setup

We're using the ASUS Crosshair VIII Formula for our testing today as it's proven to be very capable, it's the motherboard we've used for our previous AM4 CPU testing, and perhaps most importantly we have a BIOS that supports these processors to their fullest so we can give them some real world situations and get genuine results.

AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
ASUS ROG X570 Crosshair VIII Formula
G.Skill Trident Z 3600 MHz
Corsair MP500 M.2 - OS Drive
Aorus PCIE4 NVME - Storage Speed Tests
Nvidia RTX 2080Ti
Corsair HX1000i
Corsair H150i
Corsair ML Fans

Overclocking

The AMD PBO technology is a real highlight as you move into processors with this many cores on board. Even the most demanding applications rarely use all the threads simultaneously so forcing them all to be overclocked all the time just canes your electricity bill and the abilities of your CPU cooler. The PBO2 technology gives you all the performance of a manual overclock, as you'll soon see, but without the insane power and temperature considerations that come from running any CPUs with a core count in the double digits.

Manual Overclocking

As we'll show you later the 5000 series both generate a lot of heat, even with our Corsair AIO, and so whilst we've run a handful of overclocked tests today the majority of our results will be with the system in stock or PBO state. However, there is extra performance if you've got the time and resources to extract the most from your new purchase.