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AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X3D is geared for blasting through CPU-limited games while still having the heft to handle the heaviest of productivity workloads. It packs 16 Zen 4 cores and the company’s second-gen 3D V-Cache tech, which unlocks 128MB of L3 cache, a combination that delivers the fastest gaming performance available on the market.
Like AMD’s inaugural X3D chip, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D (see issue 335, p82), the extra L3 cache comes courtesy of a 3D-stacked SRAM chiplet fused atop the processor. AMD also has a new thread-targeting technique that applies gains more evenly across a broad range of games.
The first-gen 3D V-Cache chip suffered in some
