AMDRyzen 9 5900X 12-core, 24-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor

I bought this because Linus Torvalds was using it as his daily driver in late 2020.Look, let's be real here- if you're reading this review in 2024, you're looking for a reasonably-priced CPU, you're looking for something that can do work and some play... and your hardware is probably ancient, or you're trying to save money. If you're seriously considering buying an AM4 CPU in 2024, with no real upgrade path, I feel you, but be aware that you're making a long-term purchase and you will be stuck with this CPU for years, or have to spend real money. I wish AMD would make more AM4 CPUs using some of their new AM5 technology- I can live without PCIE 5.0, personally. But they don't appear to care about that.That said, I bought this during the worst of "cannot buy computer for love or money" in mid-2021, and I have zero regrets. If electricity isn't too expensive where you live, and you are ready and willing to water-cool, this CPU is still quite brilliant for what it was meant to do.Gaming? It's fine. Not the best by today's standards, but it's completely fine for most games.But that is not what you buy this CPU for. if you want to play games *and* get seriously-crunchy stuff done for work, like compiling code, doing MatLab stuff, running Filter Forge in Photoshop, doing renders, etc.... this still a pretty great CPU.If you're not living under a rock, you know that the new Ryzen 7 chips are coming this year, and they look pretty good: for $300 more (for the CPU alone), you get more performance and significant improvements in power draw and cooling. I'll be upgrading when I think the value proposition is right. But it's hard to justify when this thing just... keeps going, and I'm lazy; building a whole new rig means spending real money and then getting it built just right, tweaking the BIOS and all that... and I don't do that until it makes sense.So this remains my beast of burden. Workload after workload, day after day, this has been reliable and fast. It wasn't cheap when I bought it, but I don't have any regrets.But. If you're looking at this thing, be prepared.You really *must* water-cool it. You'll want at least a 240mm AIO. Preferably 360mm, so that you can keep fan speeds low. I'm using a pump with a big reservoir so that I can hardly hear it.It eats electricity.It's going to heat up your room, just idling.It wants the fastest RAM you can give it, configured correctly in your BIOS to use the best timings.It needs a decent motherboard and power supply.At today's prices, to get the most out of this, you're looking at somewhere around $800 for a power supply, DDR4 RAM, motherboard and this thing. Add in at least one or two M.2 drives and a decent GPU, and you're looking at $1500.Don't go cheap on this CPU. If you need to work, then you need to give it enough memory, power and cooling to do what it's good at. If you do that... well, I haven't felt the need to even think about upgrading yet. AMD's 9700 might convince me, maybe, when it's not $500, but I'm hoping to see another 12-core CPU with decent single-core performance and serious oomph when they reveal their whole lineup this year.If you need cheap, don't buy this. Go for the 5800X3D. It's great for gaming, it has 8 cores, and you can build a cheaper rig that doesn't need as much cooling, memory or power.

This is an absolute beast of a CPU.I bought this to upgrade my B450 system from a Ryzen 5 2600.First thing I did was check my boards compatibility with this chip, luckily, the BIOS was quite a lot newer than when support was added, so I didn't need to do any updates. If you do though, make sure you do it before you install this CPU.I, really, didn't think I'd feel that big of a performance improvement. Boy was I wrong...I put the CPU into "eco mode" through the BIOS (it was under AMD Overclocking on my ASUS Prime B450 board), as I'm only using a Noctua NH-U12S as a cooler. I plan to eventually get a more capable cooler, but this is working just fine, CPU is peaking out at 65C in eco mode with the single tower Noctua, pretty impressive if you ask me.My Ryzen 5 2600 ran around the same temps under load, and idled in the 40s, this idles a bit higher, but it doesn't really get much warmer than idle from what I can tell, at least with my system configuration.While I was removing my previous CPU it was actually "stuck" to the cooler. It actually popped right out of the socket... at first I was a bit worried that I may have accidentally broken something but... i apparently got very lucky. No pins were damaged on the old CPU, and it booted up fine in another system I tested it in.New CPU installation was very easy, just line up the triangle to the corner on the socket with a triangle, after opening the clamp bar of course. The clamp bar easily went back into place, and held the new CPU just fine. *Whew*At first I thought I may have damaged the motherboard, but... I took this as a chance to do a good cleaning of the inside of my case, and when I put the system back together... I forgot to plug in the GPU power cable *doh*. After plugging that back in, the system rebooted about 1000 times (got to love ASUS boards!), and then asked me if I wanted to overwrite the fTPM settings. I did, I run Linux and I don't use the fTPM. If you're running Windows 11, you may want to go through whatever procedure you need to go through to save this. You'll need it. You need to do this while your old CPU is installed though, or you'll have to go through the whole process of putting it back in if you don't! Luckily, I didn't need to, but be aware of this.After wiping the fTPM settings and a few thousand more reboots (exaggerating a bit, it was probably 10 total, ASUS boards really like to do that), I was presented with a screen that said a new CPU was detected, and that all BIOS settings were cleared. Cool! So far so good!I spent some time going through and reenabling my RAM speed profile (got to make full use of the 128GB of 3200MHz RAM I installed yesterday!), turning virtualization back on, and enabling eco mode (I didn't want to get a new cooler right now if I could get away with it). Enabling eco mode did bring the CPU temp down about 10 degrees in the BIOS, and from reading around the internet, doesn't really seem to impact performance *that* much. Easier than fiddling with undervolting settings I'd say...After finally getting booted back up into my OS... I was actually kind of impressed already. Just from the increase in boot speed alone I already knew this was going to be good. It wasn't *slow* on my 2600 at all, it's still a very capable chip, but wow, this blows it out of the water.I've been working on a rust project lately, it compiles in about... 45-55 seconds on my 2600... I did the same project compile on the 5900X? 6 seconds. Even in eco mode. Wow oh mighty. The power of 6 more cores and a dozen more threads.I also run a Windows VM for several income producing applications (y'know, we all got to work, otherwise we can't buy these fancy new pieces of sand we send lightning through), and wow. Oh boy wow. Like I said, the 2600 wasn't *slow* by any stretch of the imagination, but the responsiveness and speed now is just absolutely incredible. The VM boots so much faster, every application is up and running almost instantly... and that's with only 6 cores dedicated to it...If you've got an older AM4 system. Buy this. Buy this before they stop making them. Buy this, and upgrade your BIOS if you need to. Just get it. Seriously. This is a monumental leap in performance that will *absolutely* extend the life of your AM4 system by several years. This is *far* cheaper than building a new AM5/DDR5 system, and you will be absolutely blown away by the performance increase.For $350 as of the time of this writing... it's worth every penny. Best performance upgrade I've ever made, for sure.