Incoming wall of text, skip to bottom for tldr.

Yes, it's a barely noticeable 0-6% bump over the 9950X3D in gaming.

Yes, it's a mediocre 10-25% bump over the 9950X3D in most productivity tasks.

Yes, you're paying $200 (30%) more for these mild performance increase.

BUT, that doesn't mean it sucks like everyone seems to be espousing at the moment. Just because you don't have a use case for something or don't understand/can't conceive of a use case doesn't mean it sucks. There's a reason AMD didn't give review chips to places like Gamers Nexus or LTT but did give them to places like Phoronix. Why waste silicon on people who you know will review it negatively entirely because it doesn't fit their use case despite it never being intended for their use case?

So, you're probably asking; who is this chip for then?

Me. It's for me. It's perfect for my use case, I'm absolutely elated it launched, and here's why:

My wife and I share a desk. It's a sit-stand frame with an 8' 2" (\~2.5m) * 25" (\~64cm) * 1.5" (\~4cm) butcher block top and Ikea Alex drawers under the desk on either side of the outside of the frame legs. She has a 34" ultrawide, I have a 32" main with three 27" tertiaries, and there's a 55" TV wall mounted above our monitors. There is no room for a tower on the desktop without creating a cubicle vibe which both of us would absolutely loathe. Given the drawers on either side of the legs the towers can't go there. Two towers under the desk in the center would be a mess of cables in addition to eating up any and all leg room.

As a result of this we have our current systems in an Enthoo 719, an absolute unit of a dual system (ATX+ITX) chassis, centered under the desk sideways. This works out for leg room but has a caveat; the case is so large that between it, the stand it's on to get it off the carpet for airflow, and the cable tray mounted to the bottom of the desktop the desk can only be lowered to about 31" (\~79cm). This is an ergonomic nightmare that leaves the bottom face of the desktop about 3.5" (\~9cm) above the top face of the drawers and has both of our chairs maxed out in height yet still too short for proper ergonomics/comfort.

So, it's about time for us to upgrade our systems (i5-8600K/GTX 2070/16GB DDR4 @ 3200 & i5-9600K/6700XTX/32GB DDR4 @ 3200) and I decided that despite the insane RAM prices I can't wait any more; I am absolutely DONE with this monster of a case and the accompanying wrist, neck, and back pain. Yet, I still don't have room for two builds. Sure, I could probably make two SFF builds work, but that's a nightmare with modern graphics cards and I've done enough SFF builds in the past to know how rigid and planned they have to be. I also don't exactly want to drop $5,000-$6,000 on two new builds, so what options am I left with?

Virtualization. All the "negative" things that make the 9950X3D2 "suck" or "pointless" are positive things for dual-user virtualization. Cross-CCD latency? Who cares? One CCD per VM, no more latency. Price? Let's break it down; the 9950X3D2 is $900 while the 9800X3D (essentially one 9950X3D2 CCD) is $480. That's $60 more for (2) 9800X3D's not counting the fact you also need to purchase a second motherboard and power supply. So comparatively I'm actually saving \~$400 while getting the exact same amount of compute.

Yes, the 9950X3D is on sale right now for $574 but that would basically be a 9800X3D and a 9700X and based on the GN benchmarks that 3D V-cache can be a 20-70% difference depending on the game. Phoronix shows an average 30-40% (9700X vs 9800X3D/9950X vs 9950X3D2) across most "productivity" tasks so even though it's significantly cheaper it would be shortchanging one VM on performance by a substantial margin.

The biggest drawback to this setup is the lack of PCIe lanes. There are a total of 28 with 24 usable hence most top end motherboards only offering (3) PCIe slots. Even for most people running a dual system one chip setup like this that's completely fine as you typically only need two graphics cards, one per OS/VM. I however have a capture card (definitely not for recording HDCP media) as well as a second graphics card to pass through when I spin up a Windows VM to use software like Fusion360 that's not quite there yet on Linux. This leaves me short at least one slot or more if I want to use things like network or USB cards and it also somewhat limits graphics card selection as they typically run in 8x/4x/4x when all slots are populated.

However, drawback aside, the biggest benefit in this whole two CCDs, two systems, one chip setup is that the compute of both CCDs is actually usable. If one of us isn't using their computer the other has access to the full 16 cores instead of 8 cores just sitting which would have been the case if we went with two separate 9800X3D builds like I was a c*nt hair away from pulling the trigger on before the 9950X3D2 was officially announced.

That's it, /endrant, that's my story. The 9950X3D2 is a good chip and saved me money. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

tldr; running two virtualized systems on a 9950X3D2 means the $899 MSRP actually saves you money versus two separate systems of equivalent performance while negating the performance disparity of the same setup on the cheaper 9950X3D.