(Image credit: AMD/Getty)

AMD’s new Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 already earned a spot among our best CPUs for gaming , leveraging the company’s 3D V-Cache across both CCDs and topping the Zen 5 lineup. At $900, it’s the most expensive consumer CPU AMD currently offers, and with performance to match, with the chip often coming out on top in our CPU benchmark hierarchy .

Still, that price tag puts it in a unique but difficult position. It is hundreds of dollars more expensive than anything AMD or Intel currently offers, but also not in the same territory as AMD’s Threadripper CPUs. This makes the 9950X3D2 a unique proposition, and even though AMD claims it's a CPU aimed at creative professionals, we must know how fast it is in gaming.

That brings us to the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, the vanilla X3D chip that previously held the top spot in AMD’s lineup and has vertically stacked cache on only one of the CCDs.…