It has long been a staple part of our modern-day testbeds. AMD’s Ryzen 9 9900X toes the line between too power hungry, toasty, and not having enough multi-threaded grunt. Based off AMD’s Zen 5 architecture, on the AM5 socket, AMD’s packed this thing with 12 cores and 24 threads clocking along nicely at 5.6 GHz at max boost. All of that built out on TSMC’s 4nm FinFET process tech.
It’s that pricing that really delivers for us, though, and keeping it that low right now is a blessing in disguise. Yes, there’s some argument if gaming is your only focus that the Ryzen 7 9800X3D might have made more sense, particularly given the X3D cache, but we’ve found it to be often inconsistent with the titles it supports. Given the slightly lower clock speeds, and fewer cores, we’d rather have the consistency/jack of all trades philosophy that the 9900X provides instead. $382, www.amd.com