AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core, 32-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor

My current PC came with a 12-core AMD 3900X with a base speed of 3.8 GHz and max clock speed of 4.6 GHz. This new 5950X has a base clock speed of 3.4 GHZ and max rated speed of 4.9 GHz.

This chip is a massive beast. It will make your ram and ssd feel slow with how quickly it tears through workloads. I use it for statistical analysis and for encoding video and the integer performance is absolutely incredible. Works out of the box on Ubuntu 20.10 without any issues. This thing is the best chip you can get on a micro atx and its absolutely incredible. Could probably benefit from a lot more L3 because its just too fast for even the fastest ram kits out there.

Dont forget to update mother board firmware before install

I bought this to get the most out of my AM4 socket instead of Ryzen 7 3700X. The system is now visibly faster and all my multi-threaded code flies like never before. It also allowed me to overclock my ram with DOCP that didnt work and cause crashes on my previous CPU. I also saw it going to 5.2 GHz on a single core a few times. Best upgrade I made so far. It is a bit hot, but I can generally keep it under 80 on air even under heavy load.

From playing a game at max settings, to running a memory debugger and an SQL Database inside of a virtual machine and NOT EVEN going above 25% usage while doing all of that, this thing is a beast. THE beast.

I have Excel sheets with over 30k lines per sheet of data that is queried, sorted, lookups. It was slowing my PC to a crawl. The extra cores and threads, along with the speed of this CPU have helped a ton. I decided it is best to get this CPU as it is the best you can get for an AM4 setup. I am not going to upgrade everything just to get the new AM5. So, maxing everything out on my AM4 should set me up for years, and it was cheap.

Finally arrived on the 18th day. Absolute beast. Latest bios update released the day I received it solved a memory issue which otherwise would have made this useless on Gigabyte X570 Ultra motherboard. Make sure you have atleast F31J bios on this motherboard installed with all the lastest software (Ryzen Master and Gigabyte utilites you use) before installing. If using Clock tuner Ryzen (CTR) disable and uninstall, not supported yet. Not sure how I got lucky to snag one but I did. Amazon shipped it from Brazil to fulfill the order. Slow, late but delivered so props to them. RX 6800 XT? Not much luck on that front.

Use the QVL list for best experiences

System: MSI Tomahawk B550 MB, 128 GB RAM, 2TB NVME SSD workstation - not a gaming rig. Unexpectedly required BIOS update to be happy with the RAM (May 2021) but afterwards runs smoothly. Overclocked CPU and RAM using MSI standard options. System has been chugging away on a CPU-heavy data analysis exercise for more than two days straight, running at <80C with an air-cooled system. Runs circles around an equivalently specd five-year-old XEON server-class machine (20 cores, 40 threads, 128 GB RAM) at my office.

After almost 15 years with only Intel, I moved to this beast and it is stunning.