Once I got past the problem of Amazon sending me an AMD CPU box that had the actual CPU stolen out of it, I finally got ahold of this monster and replaced an elderly Skylake build. Let me tell you, Zen 4 CPUs are... incredible. It's just jaw-dropping how much these pure 16-core/32-thread beasts can do, especially with a proper PBO configuration. Unlike the current-gen Intel consumer parts, which seem to be focusing on packing in weird "efficiency" cores and uneven performance curves, a 7950X delivers consistent, constant, gargantuan throughput across all 32 threads.
I've done everything from gaming under Proton/WINE, language model merging/inference/quantization, and software development on this system in the 3 months I've had it. The 7950X has never stopped impressing me with how *incredibly* potent it is. There are workloads I used to rent AWS compute instances (at almost $2/hr!) to run, and I can take care of them in minutes on my home machine now. And gaming? Pfft! ZERO problems. Turn everything up to Ultra. I'm not going to have to think about CPU power for another 5 or 6 years, easy.
I was an AMD fanboy going back to the AMD 386-20, and I've owned more AMD CPUs than Intel over the decades. But the last time I owned an AMD CPU was in the mid-2000s, an Athlon FX-57 (the last, fastest, single-core Athlon 64). Ever since then, I've been waiting for AMD to ship a "good" architecture. That finally came with Zen 3, but by the time I was ready to buy... Zen 4 was here. And BOY AM I GLAD IT IS.
Long story short: if you're even *thinking* about buying the best of the consumer Zen 4 CPUs, you found it.
BTW, this is the better of them, between this one and the "3D" one, for applications that are going to stress all the cores simultaneously. The way the 3D thing works looks a little bit faster on benchmarks, but when you are really putting the thing to the test, you'll be glad you went with the real thing.
| Processor | 4.5 GHz |
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