AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D and 7900X3D Review
Conclusion
It’s not often we have to revise our system and thus retest a bunch of things, and we’re glad it’s not super often. We do, however, strongly feel that it’s for the best. We never understand these reviews that just compare one item against maybe two or three. What use is that? It’s like comparing every restaurant to your local one. A very niche audience. We understand that even with our many tests we’re going to be missing a few of your favourites, but eventually we have to draw a line in the sand and we thought the Ryzen 3000 series and Intel 12th Gen were good stopping points. Older than that and almost anything will be an upgrade.
With today’s review of the Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D we also took the time to save you time. AMD tell you that you have to update the chipset drivers to make full use of the technology and task scheduling that backs up their newest 3D V-Cache equipped processors, but we know that many of you will be nervous about performing such feats and thus might think “it’ll be okay”. As you could see from all the results labelled “Old Ryzen 79x0X3D”, if you don’t update your system back end then you won’t be getting all the benefits. Once you do though, oh boy do these things fly.
The first X3D equipped CPU we saw was the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and, whilst it was good, the underlying CPU was the red-headed stepchild of the Ryzen range. By fitting that technology to their flagship Ryzen 9 models in the 7000 range we knew that we were going to get something good. After all, the 7900X and 7950X are regularly found at the top of our graphs. Here, in X3D guise, they also dominate our gaming graphs too. Naturally they have lost a little bit at the absolute top-end of performance in those tests that don’t really utilise the 3D V-Cache technology – HEVC, Cinebench etc – but we think the payoff is absolutely worth it.
How worth it? Let’s take a single title as an example; Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. On the vanilla 7900X and 7950X we saw an average FPS of 188 and 192 respectively. With the Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D but not the chipset update that rose to 209 and 210. Update your system properly and you get 261 and 266!! That’s around an 80 FPS improvement merely from the 3D V-Cache technology. That’s not an outlier either, as you could see from our results pages. Every game saw a spike in average frames per second.
The AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D are the ultimate expression of their 7000 series processors, with crushing creative performance and even more impressive gaming performance, and are utterly worthy of our OC3D Enthusiast Award. The bar has been raised.
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