AMD Ryzen 9 5950X

Zak Storey climbs onto the closest thing the computing industry has to a unicorn, and straps in for the ride of his life.

SPECS

Socket: AM4

Architecture: Zen 3, 64-bit

Cores: 16 Threads: 32

Process: 7nm TSMC

Clock: 3.4GHz (4.9GHz turbo)

Cache: L1 1MB, L2 8MB, L3 64MB

Memory: 128MB max, two-channels, DDR4 3200MHz, non-ECC

PCIe: v4.0, 20 lanes (x16+x4 or 2x8+x4)

Thermal design power: 105W

iGPU: N/A

Cooler: N/A

Okay, let’s start with what might be a bit obvious. At the time of writing, you cannot buy this processor anywhere. Not in the US, or Canada, or the UK, or Europe, or Australia— at least not at its retail price.

Stocks generally have dwindled across the entire tech sector over these past few months, and sadly it’s the case with the 5950X. A combination of things have led to this moment: the pandemic has kept people at home playing with their hardware; while fabs that produce the silicon are stretched to breaking making chips for next-gen consoles, smart this that and the other, crypto GPUs, normal GPUs, deep-learning GPUs and more.