The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D should really be worrying Intel. I’ve just been putting it through its paces for this review, and I’m absolutely blown away by it. There really isn’t any desktop CPU work this chip can’t do, and it seemingly laughs at the competition while it’s doing it. Gaming? Big tick. Heavily multi-threaded productivity work? Massive tick. Heck, even its operating temperature and power draw are surprisingly low. The only factor counting against it is its sky-high price, but even that isn’t unreasonable for the performance on offer.

That doesn’t mean the latest flagship AMD CPU is the best chip for everyone, though. If your top priority is gaming, the acclaimed AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D offers the same performance for a lower price, and, let’s face it, this eight-core CPU covers the vast majority of people’s multi-threading needs as well. But if you do a lot of parallel number crunching, such as video encoding or 3D rendering, and you also want the best gaming performance, the 9950X3D is now going onto our best gaming CPU guide as the chip that can do it all. [site_jumplinks]

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