Motherboard: X870 Steel Legend

My motherboard is the ASRock X870 Steel Legend, a solid mid ranged board.  It has an AM5 socket and DDR5 support, PCIe 5.0, and USB-C connectivity,  so it has what it needs, but not all the bells and whistles. I bought it for $230, and it’s been solid, reliable, and handles everything I need without any fuss.

CPU: Ryzen 9 9550X3D

I bought the CPU for $670 on amazon, a very hefty price tag. The CPU has been amazing, and has proven to be very capable at anything I have thrown at it like high-FPS gaming and 3d rendering. So it is a very powerful CPU, but for the majority of people I would call it overkill for things like watching videos and even gaming. While it does shine at high settings, just not enough to justify the price tag for me.

Ryzen 9 9550X3D Specs:

Socket:  AM5

Clockspeed: 4.3 GHz

16 cores (all performance) / 32 threads

L1 Instruction Cache: 16 cores x 32 KB 

L1 Data Cache: 16 cores x 48 KB

L2 Cache: 16 cores x 1024 KB

L3 Cache: 128 mb

Passmark Rating:

Very good thread rating.

My Thoughts:

The CPU has been awesome to use, running smoothly through basically any task and will definitely be a solid choice for a long time. It handles gaming, video editing, streaming, and multitasking very well. But I would not recommend this CPU for the average person, most people will barely every or never use this CPU to its full potential, and would have a very similar experience with a less powerful one. I believe this is an amazingly capable CPU but I would argue it is too much for most people.

This review is part of a classroom project