 It's a really big day for all PC gamers and content creators and everybody who loves high performance processors. It was only two years ago that AMD doubled the core counts of Intel's competing mainstream products, like for real this time. And then just when it seemed like Intel had finally clawed their way back into the fight, AMD sent us this for review. The Ryzen 9 3950X is a desktop processor that not only has 16 true multi-threaded processing cores, it even has a higher boost clock than any of its predecessors. Guys, I haven't been this excited for a consumer CPU since I got my first quad core in 2006. I am almost as excited about it as I am about this segue to our sponsor, Team Group. SSDs are cool, but RGB SSDs are even cooler. The T-Force Delta Max SSD features a large mirror-like luminous surface area for that sweet RGB goodness. Grab it at the link below and check out their early thank-miss sale. When AMD announced this thing back at E3 2019, the biggest question everyone had was how? I mean, we knew that they were doing it with two separate 2CCX dies, just like the Ryzen 9 3900X, except that that processor not only had two cores per die disabled, it also ran pretty toasty. Surely then, with 16 instead of 12 cores and the highest boost clocks out of the entire Ryzen family, it couldn't possibly perform the way that AMD was claiming that it could, except it does, almost to the point where AMD is killing other more lucrative parts of their own product lineup, nevermind the competition. Because here's the thing, at $750, it's not cheap, but it's also taking the position that was formally held by AMD's Threadripper series of CPUs and with only a few trade-offs. So first up, you lose 40 CPU PCI Express lanes, bringing the total to 24, with four of those being used to communicate with the chipset. So if you need a ton of PCI Express expansion, Threadripper might still hold some appeal for you. But remember too, guys, PCI Express Gen 4 means that the link between the CPU and the chipset is effectively twice as wide as first and second gen Ryzen. That means less congestion on that link, even if you are using mostly PCI Express Gen 3 devices downstream, so. Second, you lose quad channel memory and the extra memory capacity that Threadripper offers. Although the 3950X can still handle up to 128 gigs of RAM, so most people will probably be fine, especially given that the supported memory speed is far higher, and as we all know, that's super important for AMD Ryzen. The icing on the cake here then, is that you no longer have to contend with switching NUMA versus Yuma nodes for a given workload. Oh, and the motherboards are much less expensive to get into too, so all in all, the 3950X is a faster CPU compared to first and second generation Threadripper, and as a gamer or even a prosumer, you're giving up very little of value unless you're into multi-way GPU setups or huge NVMe storage arrays. If you are into those things, by the way, get subscribed so you don't miss our review of the next gen Threadrippers. Now though, is the moment you've all been waiting for. Graphs, glorious graphs, hot piles of numbers. It's been a long week. We used a number of different platforms this time around, so here's what we came up with. There's more AMD than Intel here, because frankly speaking, Intel doesn't really have a lot to compare against it, and we just wanna do a shout out here for Puget for providing us access to a Core i9-9960X, which Intel wouldn't send us for comparison, presumably to avoid direct 16-core to 16-core graphs. And wow, I can see why they did that, because this thing is a productivity monster. Remember guys, we're just looking at bars on a graph here, so it's easy to lose track, but these are Threadrippers and Core i9s that we are comparing it to, and the 3950X is on top in virtually every test we threw at it, thanks to its high core count and high core clocks compared especially to Intel's HDDT platform. Now pay particular attention to the benchmarks that measure time here. We are shaving literally minutes off of the 3900X, which already trounced Intel's 9900K, and then comparing directly to the 9900K, the 3950X finished our handbrake transcode in nearly half the time. What's more impressive here is that the single threaded and lightly threaded results are also quite competitive with everything else in our test suite. Last gen Threadripper guys is looking noticeably last gen right about now, especially because Threadripper's main disadvantage came into play when its professional users wanted to take a break at the end of the day and play some games. Here, the 3950X shines though. As advertised, it is consistently as fast or faster than any of AMD's lower core count chips, which means that we're looking at the processor that somehow combines the best of high core counts and high frequencies. Guys, this is the closest that AMD has come yet to decisively dethroning Intel in gaming. And it's so close in some cases that if I was sitting over at Intel watching this, I would probably need a new pair of underpants at this point. By the way, LTTstore.com. But then all of this must come at a price, mustn't it? And not just one that hits your wallet, right? Wrong. So we were expecting the 3950X to be a blazing inferno, but under synthetic load, we are nearly 10 degrees cooler than the 3900X. And that thing's down four cores. Now, as we can see, it does dip slightly below base clocks under these conditions, but so too does the 3900X. And if we were hoping for the power consumption to reveal some horrible secret, tough luck there too. The 3950X also manages to draw four watts less than the 3900. I'm like, what blood sacrifice did Team Red make to do this? When we look a bit closer, we see that no blood sacrifice was required. In fact, the 3950X achieves this through some very, very careful power management. It actually runs at a V-core of less than one volt under load in Prime95 and only just more than that in Cinebench R20. It's actually only in lightly threaded workloads that the voltage really ramps up. And there, well, it doesn't affect total chip power consumption as much because there's so many fewer cores that are actually drawing power. So the thing is, while AMD recommends that you run out and buy a beefy cooler for the 3950X, unless you're overclocking, I'm not so sure because this thing is easier to cool than a Ryzen 7. When we ran it with a memory overclock and the BIOS performance enhancements enabled to relax precision boost restrictions, yeah, it did draw more power and it got hotter. But again, not by a huge amount. V-core only went up by about 10% and we're still within 10 degrees of stock under load. Not to mention that the performance improvement this got us in multi-threaded workloads put us well above our stock results and even got us on par or better than our stock Core i9-9900K in terms of gaming. So what then? Is this just really good binning we're paying for? Kind of like Intel's 9900KS that they recently released. Please hold on to that gaming crown, we need it. Probably. I mean, there's a reason that AMD decided to hold off until now to release this chip after all. But now that it is here, it seems like if you've always liked high-end desktop CPUs for their huge core counts, but hated their outlandish prices and expensive motherboards, you finally have the processor that you always dreamed of. Honestly, guys, this thing is incredible. It's crazy fast. It works on reasonably priced boards and it even has ECC memory support if you wanna use it in a budget workstation. This thing is so good that if AMD wants to have any hope of us recommending a third-gen Threadripper, they're gonna have to pull a serious rabbit out of their hat. By the way, guys, if you liked this video, but hate the price tag, check out our recent upload on editing 4K video on a budget. It is amazing what kind of options that AMD has in the lower end of their lineup as well. Speaking of amazing, this segue. You love it. Squarespace gives you the tools you need to build and grow your online presence. They've got a ton of templates spanning a large variety of categories. So whether you need a website for your blog or for your wedding or for your business, Squarespace has you covered. You can get a domain quickly through Squarespace if you need one, or you can port over an existing one and every Squarespace site includes e-commerce features so you can manage your orders and inventory through Squarespace. Get started with a free 14-day trial and head to squarespace.com forward slash LTT to get 10% off your first purchase. We're gonna have that linked below. So thanks so much for watching, guys. And let's all just take a moment and be excited together. Yeah! Woo!