AMD’s $899 Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 is wild—but that’s why I care

Earlier this week, when AMD revealed its price for the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2, I waded into a few comment sections. I expected to see a lot of scoffing (at minimum) about the $899 MSRP for this soon-to-be released halo chip—the first dual 3D V-Cache processor the company has produced.

The internet didn’t disappoint. One of the first comments I saw on Reddit: “AMD is out of their minds with that price.” Indeed, many people gasped over the price differential between the 9950X3D2 and AMD’s current flagship CPU, the 9950X3D ($699)—and clutched their pearls over the claim of 5 to 10 percent performance gain. Even an esteemed former colleague hopped on the bandwagon, his headline starting with the word “ouch.”

I don’t have this view. No, I’m excited for the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2. Long-time fans of The Full Nerd may be surprised by this opinion, but don’t be fooled by my habit of deal hunting. I like value, yes. And sometimes that’s measured in another way than money.

Just three years ago, AMD steered us away from the idea of 3D V-Cache on both chiplets. Gordon asked about it point-blank during an interview at CES 2023, and the answer was “In our own tests, we saw minimal benefit to putting it on both CCDs”—stating upfront that gaming benefited most from having the 3D V-Cache on a single die (in part because they could clock single thread speeds higher with an asymmetric design). 3D V-Cache on just one die kept costs down, too.

Now AMD has delivered what enthusiasts asked for, and it’s absolutely what PC building needs right now. We’ve gone years without head-turning developments. I’d argue AMD’s X3D processors were the last thing to really push the envelope.

So I’m here for this evolution. Maybe the 9950X3D2 will end up exactly as AMD described in 2023—not necessary for gamers, much higher priced. But it will also be the first processor in awhile where I eagerly await the technical minutiae of benchmark results, especially if the 5 to 10 percent boost in content creation tasks is consistent (or even understated by AMD). If the cost to see a dual 3D V-Cache CPU in the wild is 29 percent more than its predecessor, so be it. 

As Gordon always said, halo products don’t exist to put cash back into a person’s pocket. They can—AMD did spoil us with the debut Ryzen 7 1800X and its astonishingly low price for a mind-boggling number of cores and threads. But the real point is to showcase innovation. Tech that delivers the best performance by subverting expectations.

Pricing will always be an important aspect of evaluating a product, especially when deciding what to buy. But when 9950X3D2 launches on April 22, I won’t be focused on whether you should spend $899 on it. I’ll be talking about how it pulls off the technical stunt AMD originally refused to do publicly, good or bad.

That’s the value of this chip for me. It’s the rare component you can appreciate for how it furthers our interest. We need parts like it in the wild, products that show off novel new approaches to hardware instead of just contributing to the status quo. That way leads to stagnation.

I got into tech because I love the bleeding edge. This processor is that.

In this episode of The Full Nerd

In this episode of The Full Nerd, Adam Patrick Murray, Will Smith, and special guest Wendell of Level1Techs chat about Linux gaming, reviewing the Intel B70, and gaming on the B70. The first and foremost thing on our minds? Space. Specifically, Will being told to take down videos that discuss space coffee.

Also, I gave Adam side-eye (unseen) while listening to his take on the Artemis II’s livestreams. “Sometimes the bitrate from the camera on the outside is a little low.” Dude.

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Don’t miss out on our other shows too—you can catch episodes of Dual Boot Diaries, The Full Nerd: Extra Edition, and Expedition: Handheld through our channel!

And if you need more hardware talk during the rest of the week, come join our Discord community—it’s full of cool, laid-back nerds.

This week’s amusing nerd news

I definitely gravitated to lighter news this week—and fortunately, the tech industry delivered on uplifting developments. That includes both a McDonald’s gag gadget to save your multiplayer matches (and friendships) and the internet buzzing over a space toilet. Truly, this is the best of humanity.

• I could use this: I game on PC with my funky Azeron Cyborg + a mouse, but something like this McDonald’s doohickey would have saved me from interpersonal strife when I accidentally underestimated how fast I’d get booted for going afk in a comp match. (Also no, it’s not an April Fool’s joke. I think.)

• FINALLY: I use many browsers. My favorites? The ones that let me use vertical tabs, which meant Chrome often left me grumbling. But no longer. Vertical tabs are a go!

• Squish: Texture compression is the next target for optimizing games—and potentially squeezing more life out of older or memory-constrained graphics cards.

• What is time: How has it been ten years since the GTX 1080 Ti launched? RIP to the GOAT. 

• Yusss: Firefox is rare browser that stands apart from Chrome. It was great to hear that the company has multiple new features launching in the next couple of months.

• Welp: Researchers proved you can “break” a GPU in order to gain access to the whole PC. Fortunately, you have to be a target of someone real determined for this to be a worry. For now.

• What a headline: I’m not sure if I can repeat it here, but I did enjoy this intersection of space, science, and the human preoccupation with bathroom needs.

• The dedication: You know, sometimes you do things to prove you can. Using only poop as a weapon in a Dark Souls II playthrough falls under this banner. I respect it.

• Speaking of proving a point: Look, I liked Windows 3.1 perfectly well at the time. But not so much where I’d run it on a 9900X and 5060 Ti. But to each their own.

• Important work: Micro Center committed a grave PC sin to inform us of our real options when building a PC in dark times. Unfortunately, it turns out single-channel RAM still tanks performance in some games.

So the funny part about last week was doing a low-key April Fool’s joke, only for it to go awry. Oops. But hope you all enjoyed Episode 0 of The Full Nerd Newsletter: The Podcast. And the actual newsletter that eventually reached inboxes this past Wednesday.

Catch you all next week!

Alaina

This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Mah Ung, founder and host of The Full Nerd, and executive editor of hardware at PCWorld.