CCD Clock Balance
I promised I would look at the core clocks between CCD0 (with 3D V-Cache) and CCD1 (without), so here I am to make good on that.
Looking at the Max column in my screenshot, you can see that CCD0 cores (0-7) with the X3D cache had a lower absolute peak clockspeed in my testing, coming out at 5547 MHz. CCD1 cores (8-15) peaked about 175MHz faster at 5722 MHz. This represents a closer match in absolute clock speed between the two CCDs than I have previously seen in the 7950X3D.
However, under an all-core workload such as the one where my picture was taken, the situation is actually slightly reversed. Looking at the current clockspeed values when all 16 cores are saturated, the CCD0 cores actually have a slight clockspeed advantage at 5239 MHz compared to the CCD1 cores at 5189 MHz. Is that enough to make a difference? Almost certainly not, but it is good to see much closer raw clockspeed parity between the two CCDs.
Pricing
The Ryzen 9 9900X3D and 9950X3D are slated to go on sale (tomorrow) on March 12th, 2025. The 9900X3D will be $599, and the 9950X3D will be $699, identical to the launch MSRP for the 7900X3D and 7950X3D. When I got wind of the pricing, honestly I was a bit shocked. I had guessed they would be more expensive. Whether chips are actually available at those prices remains to be seen. The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D had a launch MSRP of $480, but has proven to be extremely popular and is often sold out on many retailers. When it is available, it often sells for significantly over MSRP. Right now Newegg is selling it for $593 and Amazon for $540.
Final Words
The Ryzen 9 9950X3D is AMD’s latest attempt at a CPU that is good at everything. 16 high performance cores for HEDT-light performance in productivity tasks, combined with the 3D V-Cache for gaming prowess.
Like the 7950X3D before it, the 9950X3D is somewhat of a complicated product, especially for gamers, as the heterogenous architecture is less straightforward than its 9800X3D little brother. But aside from that complexity, it is hard to argue that the 9950X3D is anything less than the fastest desktop CPU money can buy.
With all of this said, if AMD gave us the option to have 3D V-Cache on both CCDs so that we could avoid having one set of lower cache and one set of higher cache cores, I think a lot of folks would be interested.
‘With all of this said, if AMD gave us the option to have 3D V-Cache on both CCDs so that we could avoid having one set of lower cache and one set of higher cache cores, I think a lot of folks would be interested.’
I’d be interested in a theoretical dual v-cache 9950x3d up to about the $1000 mark. AMD could easily position such a product in a new halo tier at such a price.
> “And as a final note, when Ubuntu was being tested a USB gigabit ethernet adapter was used since the onboard 5 Gbit NIC was not supported out of the box on Ubuntu and I connected the USB adapter for simplicity.”.
You need kernel 6.13 for the Realtek 8126 support built-in, which Ubuntu 24.04.2 lacks.
See also: https://github.com/awesometic/realtek-r8126-dkms?tab=readme-ov-file
Rob,
Thanks! I saw that, just wasn’t worth it since I wasn’t doing any NIC throughput testing. I don’t have a 5 Gbit switch anyways :)
“You need kernel 6.13 for the Realtek 8126 support built-in, which Ubuntu 24.04.2 lacks.”
“See also: https://github.com/awesometic/realtek-r8126-dkms?tab=readme-ov-file”
Which means FreeBSD will have support in about 3-5 years. :)