First off, yes, this CPU was very hard to get. No time announced for when it would go on sale, broken search linking preventing the product page from being found without knowing exactly what to search for, and finally when the listing did go live it said you couldn't order it unless you went to the list of sellers and specifically selected Amazon. Very strange. To make matters worse, the product page only showed the minimal info on launch day so there was no way of knowing if Amazon was going to offer the game bundle or not. Then when they got around to updating the page with the missing info, they added the info direct from AMD implying the game bundle was included. Well, guess what, it's not. I opened a ticket with Amazon support about it and was told they received no game bundle codes from AMD and I should go ask them about it. Um, yeah, sure. And the FAQ on the AMD rewards site specifically says it's on the retailers to distribute the codes. So I and the others who managed to score one of these on launch day are out of luck there. I'm tempted to deduct a star for that but I don't want to take anything away from the CPU itself.
Alright, enough complaints about the low stock, strange order process, and misleading game bundle info. The good news is this CPU is every bit as good as the reviews say it is. So far after a solid day of testing I can say it's a crazy fast compute monster that runs cool, stable, and relatively quiet on my MSI MEG X570 Unify motherboard with a Noctua NH-D15 air cooler and 64GB (2x32GB) of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3200 C16 memory (CMK64GX4M2E3200C16) overclocked to 3600-18-22-22-42. The other important bits in my system build are a Phanteks Enthoo Luxe case, Seasonic FOCUS GX-850 (SSR-850FX) 80+ Gold power supply, EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 (08G-P4-2081-KR) video card, and 1TB Samsung SM961 NVMe SSD running Win10 Pro 1909. You can safely ignore AMD's water cooling recommendation as long as you get a good air cooler and ensure good air flow in your case. Power consumption is amazingly low for such a powerful CPU. Sure, it's going to pull more total power than low and most mid-range CPUs but this is still an extremely efficient processor. Gaming performance is excellent. Maybe not quite as good as Intel's best gaming CPUs but close enough provided you don't game for a living. On the other hand, this thing rules the roost in video encoding. It's amazing. I do a mix of both so this CPU is the perfect balance for me.
| Processor | 4.7 GHz ryzen_9_3950x |
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