1. You don’t necessarily need to worry about affinity, but if you want to get X3D performance in every game then yes some sort of affinity software is required. Not all games work with gamebar, even manually adding them to the game detection, and some games that do will still have issues because it turns off the parking if the load on CCD0 gets too high.

I personally use CapframeX for affinity as process lasso causes some games to crash (like BG3).

2. High performance mode disables core parking, which breaks the software. You need to use balanced.

3. The built in AMD solution is only really sufficient if you don’t want to use intensive software while gaming, and it won’t work for all games even then.

4. If you want to be using the extra 8 cores for productivity while gaming, you’ll need to use affinity instead of gamebar. Parked cores run no code, and running multithreaded workloads while gaming will immediately trigger the “disable parking if load is high” rule and allow the game to leave the VCache die which hurts performance. If your workload is gaming plus MT in the background, you will need to use affinity controls 100% of the time.

5. It’s an amazing CPU, I really love it. It is flawed though, the gamebar solution is incredibly half-arsed from AMD. I don’t think they could’ve gone for a lower effort, more fragile method than just “when gamebar says a game is open, turn off half the cores”. I’m fine with manually doing affinity because I honestly enjoy the tinkering, it’s fun to benchmark whether games (and indeed other applications) prefer clocks or cache. When using affinity, it’s the best CPU in the world for mixed gaming/productivity.

6. For your workloads, the 7950X3D makes more sense. It’s a monstrous CPU for MT, and if you get benefit from more MT I wouldn’t settle for the 7800X3D.

One other thing, I’d recommend getting 64GB now if you can afford it. 4 dimm support is atrocious, so if you ever need to upgrade ram you’ll want to instead take out the 32GB and put in 2x32GB. The price jump to 64GB is relatively pretty small.

Won’t performance suffer in general since the IO die need to handle 2 CCDs doing heavy tasks simultaneously? correct me if I’m wrong.

You need process lasso for some programs that windows is baffled by. Most things will work without it, but a good chunk of programs will use the wrong cores, or stuff will be parked for no good reason.

I was contemplating before between 7800X3D and 7950X3D.

Decided to take the 7800X3D and not worry about it for gaming. My 5900X still great for my prod works.

7950X3D is the best for your case. It’s amazing CPU.

With 7950X3D, don’t forget when gaming, set Xbox Game Bar to ‘Remember this is a game’ for the game you’re playing.

I really reccomend the Prefer Frequency in BIOS and using process lasso. The game bar works sometimes but it sometimes doesn’t and it’s really easy to set and forget with process lasso. This method basically ensures everything will be put on the frequency die (background, browser, productivity apps, whatever) and you manually put games on the Cache cores which is more intuitive than hoping the game bar works imo.

There’s only one thing that doesn’t get mentioned often and I think it’s a bug. When you use PBO, CPU affinity seems to stop working correctly kind of annoying but you’re not missing much from PBO on these chips anyways.

I own a Process Lasso license, have not felt the need to install Process Lasso on my machine.

I do, however, from time to time use vcache-tray. I just find it overall easier to set up. Pick a process that is running, then click Cache or Frequency radio button, then apply.

Another brute force solution that can improve stability and gaming consistency out of the box is to lower the max clock of CCD1 cores in BIOS so that CCD0 cores always clock higher. Without any special service running, Windows will often pin high load work to the “faster” cores which is one reason why 7950X3D benchmarks are all over the place. This means a zero or 1 percent hit in heavy MT, and maybe a 5-6% hit in procs that scale perfectly with frequency and were natively being assigned to CCD1 cores hitting 5.6 or 5.7GHz instead of 5.3 on CCD0. Re: that 6%: YAGNI tbh

Process Lasso + CPPC Prefer Frequency is the ultimate setup. Yes, it requires manual control of all games, but not all games benefit from the extra cache anyway and you’d be better off running them on the frequency cores to claw back around 7-10% gains from clock speed advantage. Everything defaults to these frequency cores thanks to the BIOS setting, and you just use Process Lasso to corral games onto the extra cache CCD and you get the same or better performance as using the built in automated setup, minus the headache of core parking. I can stream and game at the same time with no performance loss, watch streams in the background, anything I want. And when it’s time for productivity workloads, I have 16 real cores to rely on. It’s a overall incredible chip and once setup with your Process Lasso rules, you’re golden.

What everyone here has neglected to mention is, that the 7800X3D is not bad at productivity tasks, it’s just not THE FASTEST at productivity tasks compared to some other CPUs. If producing output as fast as possible is your primary concern then maybe look at something else. If the time to produce output is not your primary concern, and you’re happy with it maybe taking 20% longer go with a 7800X3D, then you won’t have to worry about juggling core/affinity etc for gaming.

TLDR, 7800X3D is good at productivity tasks, but there are other options that are faster.

Productivity is productivity… The 7950 is an awesome piece of kit but I’d seriously consider going Intel for way less tinkering and more productivity. The small performance hit you may take will be made up by getting ish done.

Process lasso is very simple. Its just like task manager and right click the program and assign cores once, it will remember it. There is of course more that can be done with it but unless you are tweaking for fun It is really not necessary. You can watch a 5 minute video if you are unsure and see how simple it really is.

Honestly don’t even think you should be considering ANY of the X3D processors if workstations tasks are a big must from this computer. Just get the 7950X, save some money, and take the small hit to gaming performance.