Watch our comprehensive AMD Ryzen 9000 review, focused on productivity

AMD’s next-gen Ryzen CPUs are huge, and… well, they’re a bit of a mixed bag. The delayed launch of the first chips — the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X — showed strong single-core performance, but multi-core performance lagged behind Intel.

Now that the top-tier Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X models are out, Gordon has taken a deep dive into the series’ performance on the PCWorld YouTube channel.

This is a long video that covers all of the new chips with exhaustive comparisons to both the previous-generation Ryzen 7000 CPUs and Intel’s 14th-generation competition.

If you don’t have 80 minutes to drink in every single point made in this review, then check the video description on YouTube for handy timecodes to all of the benchmark and game tests — or simply scroll down, right below, to where I’ve compiled them for your convenience:

00:00 – Intro

02:10 – Testing methods

10:34 – Cinebench multithread results

13:49 – Cinebench single thread results

16:49 – Blender results

19:59 – Handbrake results

26:13 – Adobe Premiere Pro results

36:12 – DaVinci Resolve results

42:08 – Adobe Photoshop results

47:06 – Microsoft Office results

50:49 – Geekbench results

54:43 – 3DMark Steel Nomad results

56:55 – Cyberpunk 2077 results

58:43 – F1 2023 results

1:01:07 – Rainbow Six Siege results

1:04:21 – Total War: Warhammer III results

1:06:57 – Pricelist

1:19:43 – Final thoughts

At launch, the Ryzen 9000 series is a tough sell. If you’re considering these CPUs, you might already have an AM5-based system and they won’t offer a ton of performance on top of Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 chips, at least at the same level.

And the current/older AMD chips are offered at such deep discounts, it might be hard to resist going with the cheaper option and waiting for the following generation, or maybe just the X3D version of the chips with extra V-cache that should boost game performance.

For more expert insights into all the latest PC hardware, be sure to subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube.