AMD Ryzen 9 9900X processor AM5, 12 cores, up to 5.6 GHz, Tray 100-000000662

Games usually load only some of a processor's cores and leave the rest idle. With 12 cores and 24 threads, the Ryzen 9 9900X has enough headroom for a game, stream encoding, a chat app and a browser to run side by side without getting in each other's way. The base clock is 4.4 GHz and under load it rises to 5.6 GHz, which helps games and applications that rely on single-core speed.

The processor has 76 MB of cache in total, 64 MB of it L3. Cache is fast memory inside the processor: the more data fits there, the less often the cores have to wait for slower system memory. In games that means steadier frame rates; when compiling or rendering it means less waiting. The 4 nm manufacturing process helps keep power draw and heat under control.

The Ryzen 9 9900X goes into a motherboard with an AM5 socket and works with DDR5 memory only. The memory controller is dual-channel and supports up to 192 GB, with 3600 and 5600 MHz listed by the manufacturer as supported speeds. Both standard and ECC memory are supported, although ECC also needs a motherboard that supports it. The high capacity ceiling matters to anyone working with virtual machines or large project files.

The thermal design power is 120 W, and as this is the Tray version, no cooler is included. That leaves you free to pick cooling to suit your case and noise preferences: a solid tower cooler or an AIO liquid cooler with AM5 mounting, rated for at least 120 W. Thermal paste usually comes with the cooler, but it is worth checking in advance.

The processor includes AMD Radeon integrated graphics clocked at 2200 MHz. With it, the PC boots and runs the desktop without a separate graphics card, which is handy during a build, when troubleshooting or in an office machine. Gaming still calls for a discrete card. Supported instruction sets include AVX-512, AVX 2.0 and AES, which speed up scientific computing, media processing and encryption.

Gamers who stream and do not want encoding to eat into game performance; content creators who edit video or render 3D and need more cores than a typical gaming processor offers; and PC builders who choose their own cooler and motherboard and want the AM5 platform with DDR5 and support for large amounts of memory.