In total I ran nearly 400 benchmarks across all the CPUs. When taking the geometric mean of all the raw performance results, the Ryzen 9 9950X came out to being 17.8% faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X. The Ryzen 9 9900X meanwhile was 21.5% faster than the Ryzen 9 7900X across this wide mix of workloads. The Ryzen 9 9950X was 33% faster than the Intel Core i9 14900K performance overall and even the Ryzen 9 9900X was 18% faster than the Core i9 14900K. For those still on AM4, the Ryzen 9 9950X was delivering 1.87x the performance of the Ryzen 9 5950X processor. These are some great gains found with the Ryzen 9 9900 series.

With the Intel Core benchmarks it's also worth mentioning that the testing was prior to the newly-released Intel 0x129 microcode update and I'll have more benchmarks with that change soon. As of writing the Core i9 14900K is retailing for around $550 USD while the Ryzen 9 9950X is set to retail for around 18% more but delivering 33% greater performance on a geo mean basis overall. The Ryzen 9 9900X meanwhile at $499 is around $50 less than the i9-14900K while overall delivering 18% better performance. A slam dunk in performance, value, and power efficiency with the AMD Ryzen 9 9900 series compared to the competition.

Somehow I feel all those negative reviews from techtubers aren't really adequate.

Still not sure whether I will upgrade to 9900x or 9700x from my 3700x

I'm recently:

• Doing a lot of av1 software encoding at low presets
• Not trusting yet of rocm future

So going harder on the stronger CPU rather than an expensive the GPU seems to be the answer for me. If I gamble on proper rocm support for some AI workloads and fail at least I could run some casual stuff using the CPU device.