With the retail launch of its Ryzen 9000-series of processors, AMD chose to stagger the releases, with the more affordable Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X hitting shelves last week. Now it's the turn of the top-end chips and first up is the $499 Ryzen 9 9900X.
Let me begin by confessing my bias for AMD's 12-core processors, as I really rate the Ryzen 9 7900X and 7900. The latter has been a solid workhorse of a chip, powering my primary AM5 test PC, running games and content creation apps with ease. Sure, the full-fat 16-core models top the charts when it comes to multithreaded performance and you can't beat the X3D chips, with their extra L3 cache, for gaming but the Ryzen 9 7900 really is a fantastic all-round CPU.
