GAMING CPUS

More cores, using less power, for more frames per second

- Jacob Ridley

It's a strange spot we're in. Intel has been able to lay claim to the fastest processors for gaming for over a decade. The company's chips aren't always the best value, or the most exciting, but generally they've been the fastest. That's not the case any more. If anything, Intel is further from that than it's been since I've been covering this stuff, and a long while before that.

Nowadays, there's one choice among PC gamers: AMD. The red team has employed chiplets in its processors since Zen 2, first launched in 2019, and improved on this design ever since.

The latest and greatest Zen 5 X3D processors are a clever evolution of that initial design. By layering a die replete with cache directly underneath (previously it was on top of) the chiplet that contains the processing cores, AMD has turned its latest Ryzen chips into gaming monsters, as we shall see.

Ryzen 9 9950X3D

The monster

The Ryzen 9 9950X3D is the undisputed champion of CPUs right now. With 16 cores, it has plenty of threads available to chomp through tasks such as encoding, encryption and video editing. More than that, and more importantly for PC gamers, it has a high single-core boost speed of 5.7GHz and 128MB L3 cache close at hand. Games benefit a lot from all that cache. In our testing, we see frame rates often well in excess of the Ryzen 9 9950X, which has just 64MB of L3 cache but is otherwise identical to the X3D chip. Playing at a high resolution or in a more GPU-limited game, the gap closes up considerably, but the price premium for the X3D model isn't that much greater. It's worth the investment.

So, if you're looking to build a gaming PC that has no equal, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D is the CPU to go for.