Is the Ryzen 9 9950x still a strong workstation CPU I was curious whether the future upgrade path would be good because I heard rumors about AM6 being released in 2027 or if there is another CPU that I would go with for like a lot of work and some heavy gaming, maybe like an Intel CPU would be good, I want this PC to last more than 6-7 years and want to do work such as 3d rendering, machine learning, video editing, multitasking, etc. What CPU would you guys recommend and if the 9 9950x would be a viable option for the future?
Is the 9 9950x a good workstation CPU and solid for heavy gaming?
Is it future-proof?
Are there any other better options to go with?
I want this primarily for work and some heavy gaming on the side
Long: it’s not clear yet whether zen 6 will be on AM5 or not. For gaming intel is not the best choice right now. You could wait it out for the 9950x3d that is expected soon but waiting any longer is foolish.
The 9950X is a great CPU. The AMD platform has two main weaknesses:
Poor idle power.
Poor I/O (compare PCIe/NVMe specs vs Intel)
But if you want the best gaming performance, these are usually acceptable trade-offs. Can’t predict the future, but I would not be surprised if the 900 series chipset improved I/O.
9950X can be had for $567 USD today.
9950X3D is rumoured to have a MSRP of $700. But expect a month or two of less-than-ideal reliability as they will work out the bugs.
Realistically, the 9950X will be more than enough for good gaming perf, but if you want the best of the best, then waiting for the 9950X3D may be worth it. I wouldn’t do that, personally.
Have been running 9950x since september 2024 (https://pcpartpicker.com/b/Q6Gqqs). It’s just the best processor i’ve ever had. Kernel rebuild takes 40 seconds, full k8s - same. I’m sure it will last for many years.
Hmm, piqued my curiosity. Looks like the US$ 567 @BlackCat mentioned’s pre-tax. So if you’re buying in a United States jurisdiction with less than 5% sales tax I guess below US$ 600 is a possibility.
The table here suggests there’s a decent chance of <5% sales tax in six out of 50 states. About 10 million people live in those six states, which is ~2.9% of the United States’ population and ~1.2% of the combined US + EU population.
So, yeah, 9950X for less than €600/US$ 600 pretty much isn’t happening.
Nah, AMD gives you more PCIe lanes. What AMD tends to skimp out on is motherboard ports. Intel regularly gives you ten USB even on their mid-end boards, while for AMD you have to go high-end to get the same number. But AMD boards are also cheaper, so you pay more or less the same.
I had an Intel i9-14900 before this for about 5 months before it burned itself out and became highly unstable. Luckily I had the Microcenter extended warranty and the did me good allowing me to exchange it full credit which I used to build this new dream rig haha…
The 9950X runs much cooler and quieter. In windows I throttle the GPU to 350 out of 450 max watts (nvidia-smi -pl 350) and still get plenty FPS.
Most of the time the power supply fan is off, but all the fans do start cranking when I run some kinda make -j $(nproc) all core load.
The x670e mobo is plenty fine and definitely make use of the single PCIe 5.0 NVMe slot with a T700, T705, or I think samsung has a new one too. Go at least 2TB for max speed and you won’t regret it.
We have two good threads on tuning RAM for max performance or you can try your luck and roll the dice in the silicon lottery for the verboten 4x48GB DDR5 DIMMs and see if you can hit 6000MHz with 192GB RAM lol…
I got the 3090TI 24GB VRAM used for $600 about a year ago. Wish I had pulled the trigger on the second before prices went nuts.
If you are not doing AI workloads, the new AMD 9070 XT cards might be plenty at a decent price in this insane market.