Last week AMD began shipping the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D Zen 5 3D V-Cache desktop processors. We delivered Ryzen 9 9950X3D benchmarks and review for launch day but AMD sadly didn’t seed any review samples of the 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X3D processor. Being curious about its performance for Linux developers, enthusiasts, and technical computing workloads, I bought the $600 USD processor on launch day for delivering some Linux benchmarks. Here is a look at the Ryzen 9 9900X3D against the rest of the Ryzen 9000 series stack, the prior Ryzen 7000 series parts, and the Intel Core Ultra Arrow Lake competition under Ubuntu.
The Ryzen 9 9900X3D is a 12-core / 24-thread part with a total cache size of 140MB, down slightly from the 16-core 144MB Ryzen 9 9950X3D model. The Ryzen 9 9900X3D also has a max boost frequency of 5.5GHz compared to 5.7GHz with the 9950X3D. The Ryzen 9 9900X3D does have a 120 Watt TDP for those looking at a lower power alternative to the 9950X3D with its 170 Watt rating.
The Ryzen 9 9900X3D is priced at $599 USD compared to the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X3D at $699 USD. At just $100 more for four more Zen 5 cores makes the Ryzen 9 9900X3D pricing a bit tough, especially with the Ryzen 9 9900X (non-X3D) being listed as little as $409 USD as of writing. Though for those desperate for a new Zen 5 3D V-Cache desktop processor, the Ryzen 9 9900X3D availability does seem better than the 9950X3D with more consumers presumably going for that flagship model. I had no troubles ordering the Ryzen 9 9900X3D retail on launch day. Though several days later at a number of Internet retailers the 9900X3D is listed as out-of-stock but still with an MSRP list price.
Like the other Ryzen 9000 series processors, the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D was working out fine across tests on various modern Linux distributions. If you are running any sufficiently new Linux distribution you should be in good shape for support. If running the Linux 6.13 kernel or newer is also the added benefit of the 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver being merged.
For this launch testing of the Ryzen 9 9900X3D, it was tested alongside other recent AMD and Intel CPUs including:
– Ryzen 7 7800X3D
– Ryzen 7 9700X
– Ryzen 7 9800X3D
– Ryzen 9 7900
– Ryzen 9 7900X
– Ryzen 9 7900X3D
– Ryzen 9 7950X
– Ryzen 9 7950X3D
– Ryzen 9 9900X
– Ryzen 9 9950X
– Ryzen 9 9900X3D
– Ryzen 9 9950X3D
– Core Ultra 5 245K
– Core Ultra 9 285K
All of the tests were recently (re)carried out using Ubuntu 24.10 with the Linux 6.13.2 kernel. Let’s see how the Ryzen 9 9900X3D is performing under Linux.
