AMD Ryzen 9000 CPUs: 8 must-know details before you buy

After a brief delay, AMD’s Ryzen 9000 hit shelves earlier this month—but to everyone’s surprise, the first processors came with caveats. Despite offering plenty to like, the $279 Ryzen 5 9600X, $359 Ryzen 7 9700X, $499 Ryzen 7 9900X, and $649 Ryzen 9 9950X also sported uneven performance improvements.

The reasons for those benchmark results are nuanced, however. We at PCWorld even delayed the release of our deep-dive review to better tease out those fine-grain details. (You can watch us explain why in this YouTube video...