Review on 💪 16-Core, 32-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X by Jay Kenville

First of all, yes this processor was very hard to come by. No date was announced when it would go on sale, a broken search link made it impossible to find the product page without knowing exactly what to look for, and finally when the listing came up it said you could can't order if you don't go to the list of sellers and specially selected Revain. Very strange. To make matters worse, the product page showed minimal information on launch day, so it wasn't known if Revain would be offering a playset or not. Then when they updated the page with the missing information, they added the information directly from AMD, implying that the game bundle was included. Well, guess what, it's not. I submitted a support ticket to Revain regarding this and they said they didn't receive any game pack codes from AMD and that I should ask them about it. Yes of course. And the FAQ on the AMD Rewards page specifically states that retailers need to redistribute codes. So me and others who managed to win one of these on launch day were out of luck. I'm tempted to deduct a star for that, but I don't want to deprive the processor of anything. Okay, enough whining about low stock levels, weird ordering process and misleading information about the game suite. The good news is that this processor is every bit as good as the reviews say. So after a full day of testing I can say this is an insanely fast computing monster that runs cool, stable and relatively quiet on my MSI MEG X570 Unify motherboard with Noctua NH-D15 air cooler and 64GB (2x32GB) Corsair Vengeance LPX . DDR4 3200 C16 memory (CMK64GX4M2E3200C16) overclocked to 3600-18-22-22-42. Other important parts of my system build are the Phanteks Enthoo Luxe case, Seasonic FOCUS GX-850 (SSR-850FX) 80+ Gold PSU, EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card (08G-P4-2081-KR) and 1TB Samsung . SM961 NVMe SSD with Win10 Pro 1909. You can safely ignore AMD's water cooling recommendation as long as you get a good air cooler and ensure good airflow in your case. Power consumption is surprisingly low for such a powerful processor. Of course it will draw more power than low-end and mid-range processors, but it's still an extremely efficient processor. Gaming performance is excellent. Maybe not as good as the best Intel gaming processors, but close enough if you're not playing games. On the other hand, this thing rules the roost in video encoding. That's great. I combine both options, so this processor is the perfect balance for me.