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The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition is a hugely powerful gaming and productivity CPU, thanks to its mammoth 192MB L3 cache, but reviews have revealed that it only offers a tiny performance advantage over the regular 9950X3D - something in the region of four to five percent, according to content creation benchmarks performed by Club386. That makes it all the more amusing that you can now get the vanilla 9950X3D for just $574 on Amazon, meaning the $899 9950X3D2 now costs 56 percent more!
You're always going to be paying extra for the privilege of the very fastest option available - just look at the RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 - but it's rare to see such a wide price gap open up so soon after launch when performance is so similar.
That goes double when at least some of the 9950X3D2's advantage can be chalked up to a higher TDP, with a 200W rating versus the 9950X3D's 170W. That means you could make up at least some of the difference by strapping on a giant 360mm or 420mm AiO and bumping up the 9950X3D's power curve in the BIOS - and you'd still end up with a cheaper setup than the 9950X3D2 paired with the cheapest AiO or tower cooler you could find.
There are no doubt some productivity and scientific computing workloads that the second V-Cache CCD could be better suited for, perhaps justifying the premium for scenarios where ultimate performance is key - and also you don't want a higher core count Threadripper CPU for some reason.
Gaming is another area where the new flagship is technically sometimes the fastest, but the processor doesn't hit that mark consistently enough to be worth the money even for deep-pocketed system builders. Gamers Nexus, for example, saw roughly five percent frame-rate improvements in Baldur's Gate 3 and Dragon's Dogma 2, but most other games like Cyberpunk 2077 saw equivalent scores for the old and new AMD flagships. There were even several games that saw the 9950X3D outperform its successor, as well as plenty of examples of the more affordable single-CCD 9800X3D and 9850X3D parts performing better.
Still, there are no doubt plenty of people that will simply want the fastest chip available, and the 9950X3D2 is just that. It'll also be interesting to see how the new top AMD option scales over time, as perhaps games designed with next-gen consoles in mind will be more likely to use a higher number of CPU cores.
What do you make of the 9950X3D2? Was it worth AMD's time to release it? Have you found a great use-case for it? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to fill out the Ryzen poll higher up on the page too.