The AMD Ryzen 3950X is the 16-core variant of AMD's upcoming Ryzen 3000 generation of mainstream CPUs and it's an absolute monster. With 16 cores, 32 threads, and a boost clock speed as high as 4.7GHz on select cores, it could be the most powerful gaming and multittasking CPU ever made when it releases this September. But it's already making waves, with overclockers who pushed it to a 5GHz all-core boost clock, having managed to break several world records with it.
The Zen 2-based chip uses the same 7nm chiplet architecture paired with a 14nm I/O on the same die as other Ryzen 3000 CPUs, but this design uses dual chiplets, allowing for the full 16 cores of Ryzen 3000 power. With masses of additional cache fixing traditional Ryzen memory-latency issues, the 3950X is already more powerful in almost any task than $1,000+ CPUs like the Intel 7960X, but with a big overclock, it's the most powerful CPU ever.
Using a voltage of 1.068v across all 16 cores, overclockers took the Ryzen 3950X to 5GHz on all cores. It was paired with G.Skill Trident Z Royal memory running at 4,533MHz and based on an MSI MEG X570 Godlike motherboard.
This lead to new records being broken in Cinebench and Geekbench. The Ryzen 9 3950X with the hefty overclock managed a score of 5,434 in Cinebench R15 — beating out the 9960X by more than 100 points, as per WCCFTech. In Cinebench R20 it beat the previous record holder, an overclocked i9-7960X by more than 1,300 points. And in Geekbench 4, it scored 65,499 — a more than 4,500 point increase over a 7960X.
This is with LN2, so is far from an everyday overclock, but shows there is some headroom to play with on these big Ryzen chips and we should see amazing performance from the whole stack when overclockers get to work on them.
