AMD Ryzen 9 7950X

Insane multithreaded performance

- GUY COCKER

SO HERE WE ARE—after months of rumors about AMD’s Zen 4 and Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs, both arrive within weeks of each other. We’ll have to wait until next month for the arrival of Intel’s Core i9-13900K to put it through its paces, but the first top-of-the-line offering from AMD, the Ryzen 9 7950X, is here. Coming in at $699, it’s a premium CPU for sure, but at $100 less than the 5950X it effectively replaces, it’s also pretty good value for money.

These latest AMD chips require the new AM5 motherboard platform and DDR5 memory, unlike Intel’s Raptor Lake series, which can use both new motherboards and DDR5 RAM or older Alder Lake mobos and DDR4 if necessary. Unless you’re already using DDR5, that means an AMD upgrade will be the more expensive upgrade path, even if it’s faster and better equipped for the future.