AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D

AMD's X3D series, which are tuned versions of their normal CPUs with an extra physical cache in the chip, have for several generations now not only been great "bang for their buck," but also in many cases performed better than both Intel and AMD's top models when it comes to real gaming.

This hasn't changed. There's still 104MB of extra cache, but it's now under the chip, which offers a number of cooling benefits. This is a good idea as this generation of X3D chips can be overclocked. There are 8 cores with 16 threads, which may not sound like much, but will be more than enough for modern games that still struggle to fully utilise modern CPUs. It runs 500 MHz faster than the 7800X3D and has a boost clock that is 200 MHz higher. We never measured over 112.3 watts, despite the chip being rated to handle 120 watts. If you can better this, there really is even more overclocking potential to be found.

The chip ran at 41.3 degrees at idle and 55.0 degrees at full load. There were a few spikes at 60.5 degrees, but overall the heat dissipation is extremely limited. We're talking 20 degrees below what we normally see, so there is plenty of opportunity to use the 9800X3D in SFF designs as well.

It's important to note that it's very different with this CPU what you can achieve, how many cores run optimally, and how many run high from the start. I was lucky as all cores are running at 5.2 GHz to start with. Our test sample hit 5.418 GHz all by itself, but with all boost features on the MSI X870E Carbon Wi-Fi motherboard enabled and 32GB of G.SKILL Trident Z RAM running at 6000 MHz, and a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive too, it should be possible to hit 5.7 GHz. But at the time of writing, there are few examples of 6+ GHz with this CPU, with the best being by some dedicated overclockers who have hit 7.4 GHz consistently. That's pretty impressive.

The new architecture that the 9800X3D uses means that you don't have to take CPU multipliers and other things into account like in the old days, which makes overclocking CPU and RAM a lot easier. AMD themselves say that they support EXPO 8000 MHz, so you should already be able to get a lot out of it. In addition, the AM5 platform is used, so if you have an older motherboard with AM5, you don't have to buy a new one. In general, the price of competing motherboards has also skyrocketed.

Speaking of price, it's around £480. That's a good chunk cheaper than both AMD's and Intel's alternatives, but both have been reduced and the price difference between a Ryzen 7 X3D CPU and the flagship models is not what it used to be. That doesn't change the fact that this is a product where you really get a lot for your money.

When testing CPUs, you typically want to use 1080p so that it's not the graphics card that matters. Therefore, you will typically also look at 1% times, where you look at how many frames per second the lowest measured 1% is. This is the worst that the hardware can deliver, so to speak, and thus also a pretty good example of what can be achieved. We used an RX 7900XTX because it was one of two graphics cards with reference data and unfortunately no one could lend us an RTX 4090 card. This means there is some bias in our results as some games as well as synthetic tests are better at utilising RTX graphics cards as many have some degree of Ray-Tracing. However, our data is a mixture of several elements to better compare it to previous ones. We have also run the tests several times against Intel's new Ultra 285K CPU, their top model. Again, we have re-run the same tests several times as some of the results look strange. However, we suspect that poor Windows optimisation may have an influence.

The first strange result is Fire Strike Ultra, where Intel's counterpart takes a beating with a synthetic score that is 3,000 points higher. Here you have to go up to, for example, a 7950X CPU to find better. This makes sense, as more cores usually result in higher scores. However, Intel's 285K is beaten by quite a bit, and even recent tests like 3D Benchmarks Steel Nomad give the 9800X3D a score of 6,635, just enough to beat the competition. Much to my surprise, Intel's 24-core Ultra 285K was also beaten in AIDA's Checkmate test with a score of 12,547 versus 8,652. In all fairness, they did win the multicore test with 23,473 to 40,185, but lost the single core test with 2,106 to 2,055.

On the gaming side, there were varying degrees of victory, but almost always victory. As mentioned before, we tested primarily in 1080p to avoid a GPU bottleneck, but that doesn't explain a score of 227.50 FPS in Total War: Warhammer III, which was 25% higher than the 285K. It was even worse in Red Dead Redemption in 4K, where the FPS counter said 100.40 against 170.53 in AMD's favour. Assassin's Creed Valhalla was also a win for AMD, but not by many per cent. The biggest difference was in 1440p with a 9% difference topping at 167 FPS. It was even more disparaging in Far Cry 6, where we got the highest score ever: 231 FPS, or a difference to Intel's 285K of just under 69%. We tested a number of other games and with other engines, but overall the picture was the same.

In general, it's also a bit unfair, because Intel's 285K hasn't had a good start in life and in most of our tests is beaten by both the 14900K and even the 13900K. But the funny thing is that this is evident in raw data processing, such as with Cyberpunk 2077 when not using FidelityFX, DLSS, or other black magic. Here there was a 93% difference in 1080p, which is quite a lot. In all fairness, Dirt 5 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 gave a higher score at 285K, but we're talking a few FPS here. In Black Myth: Wukong, on the other hand, we hit 119 FPS, a difference of 45 FPS, or more than 60%.

It's affordable, it remains cool, it doesn't use much power, and it beats its main competitor from Intel. Yet, when we look at the old numbers for the 7800X3D, they're higher, but we're typically talking around 10%. A few games like Red Dead Redemption 2, however, gave significantly higher scores, while others were only a 5% improvement, thus proving that the 7800X3D is hard to beat. On the other hand, the 9800X3D has completely different options when it comes to overclocking.

If you're upgrading this year, you need a Ryzen 7 9800X3D. For once, it's easy to recommend a very specific product, as the price is low enough that it's something everyone should consider regardless of budget.