AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D processors have broken cover, publicly strutting their stuff on Geekbench. This leak marks the first glimpse of performance for either CPU outside of AMD’s initial announcement slides. Oddly, the chips are coming up poor.
Ryzen 9 9950X3D earned a multi-core score of 20,465 with single-core coming in at 3,363. Meanwhile, 9900X3D followed closely behind with respective scores of 19,227 and 3,274. Comparing these to our own 7950X3D benchmarks in Geekbench 6 and this amounts to welcome 10% uplift in the latter category but practically nothing in the former.
While I remain skeptical of AMD’s claimed 4% bump per its announcement slides, I certainly expected more than this. Digging a little depeper into the Geekbench listing, I’m curious as to why the benchmarker in question paired Ryzen 9 9950X3D with RAM running at 4,800MT/s. This combined with what is likely pre-release firmware leads me to believe this isn’t the CPU’s final form.
As a reminder, Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D don’t move the needle in terms of core or thread count. However, they do offer all the architectural improvements of AMD’s Zen 5 architecture combined with refinements to its 3D V-Cache technology, as seen in Ryzen 7 9800X3D. The latter improvement leaves room for these CPUs to reach higher clocks, up to 5.7GHz on the 9950X3D and 5.5GHz on the 9900X3D.
AMD plans to launch Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D at some point during Q1 2025, leaving March as the last possible for month for release. Motherboard manufacturers are already preparing their models to support the processors, deploying new BIOS updates ahead of their arrival. The brand has kept quiet on final pricing, but recent rumours suggest they’ll mirror their predecessors in cost.
I presume AMD will wait until after the launch of its Radeon RX 9000 Series graphics cards to set Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D loose into the space. It’ll afford the processors the undivided attention of potential buyers and the brand doesn’t exactly need to rush out new models given how well existing offerings are selling at the moment.
