While the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X CPU officially comes with the TDP of 170W, it was tested it at 65W and performs as good as the 170W one in various games.
When AMD announced the Ryzen 9000 CPU series, it made very big claims about its performance in gaming.
However, when the reviews came, everyone was surprised. As per the reviews, the likes of AMD Ryzen 9950X doesn’t perform that great in games. With most reviewers finding it to be just 1% to max 8% faster than the previous-gen Ryzen 7950X CPU in gaming
While it did do good in some server and non-gaming workloads, it’s performance in gaming disappointed many.
However, someone felt, what if they ran this CPU at the TDP of just 65W. Just to see how it performs. Looks like we have gotten a detailed review for that.
Ryzen 9950X At 65W TDP
Our friends at Club386 tested the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X CPU at 65W in various workloads. They did so by setting the TDP limit to 65W in the BIOS.
The outcome of this was that the all-core frequency got reduced from about 5.0GHz to approx 3.0GHz. Even the average voltage got reduced from 1.229v to 0.915V when running at the 65W TDP.
In various non-gaming workloads, the did see massive reduction in performance. For example, it was 27% slower in one benchmark, 57% in another when multicore benchmarks were used. However, it performed almost similar in single core benchmarks.
However, the biggest surprise was in gaming. Take Cyberpunk 2077 for example. The Ryzen 9950X running at the TDP of 65W was just 4% slower at 1080p than the one running at the TDP of 170W.
We did some calculations and found that in the five games they tested, the 65W TDP CPU was, on average, just 2% slower than the 170 TDP CPU.
This while the total power usage seeing 9% reduction in gaming. Not only that, the load temps see a massive reduction too.
Conclusion
The outcome of this review might surprise many. But it has some background to it. When TechPowerUP reviewed the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, they found that it used just 104W in gaming (page 23). Which is quite efficient and lower than the official TDP of 170W. Not to forget, the likes of Intel Core i9-14900K uses 149W in the same gaming workloads.
Additionally, AMD has previously released the non-X versions of Ryzen CPUs in both Ryzen 5000 series and Ryzen 7000 series. These processors come with a max TDP of 65W too. Not only that, even they have shown similar performance in gaming.
So there is a background to all of it. However, AMD has never released a 16-core CPU with a TDP of 65W. So this review is a great confirmation about how most processors don’t scale that much with more power in gaming.
