AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D: The best gaming CPU

AMD has dominated PC gaming CPU performance for more than two years. Its X3D chip delivers a performance boost that Intel can’t match, and the new $479 Ryzen 7 9800X3D goes even further, boosting not just gaming performance, but everyday tasks and creative workloads.

The first desktop Zen 5 CPU is Disappointing in terms of gameplaybut the 9800X3D, which was launched on November 7, has made some major improvements over the 9800X3D The already great Ryzen 7 7800X3D. I’ve been testing it over the past week and have seen a huge improvement in workload productivity, while gaming performance has also improved by about 8%.

Like the $449 7800X3D, the 9800X3D should be your next CPU if you primarily game on your PC.

The productivity improvements in the AMD 9800X3D are largely due to a redesign of the processor. AMD is using second-generation 3D V-Cache technology, whose cache now resides beneath the processor core. That’s a big difference, meaning the processor core can be cooled better and the cache is now less sensitive to high temperatures. This is a big reason why AMD was able to increase the base clock speed by 500MHz and add an additional 200MHz boost clock.

Together with the Zen 5 architecture, both clock speed increases help improve productivity performance. AMD is even supporting overclocking on the X3D chip for the first time, which means we’ll be seeing some more impressive results with this processor.

I’ve been testing AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D using a Gigabyte X870E Aorus Master motherboard, 32GB G.Skill DDR5-6000, and Nvidia’s RTX 4090. Thanks for the BIOS update.

I tested AMD’s new Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the existing 7800X3D, and Intel’s $589 Core i9-14900K and Core Ultra 9 285K across a variety of workloads, synthetic benchmarks, and games. All tests were run on Windows 11 (version 24H2) with virtualization-based security (VBS) and resizable BAR enabled.

All tests are performed at 1080p resolution to analyze raw CPU performance. like most people Other CPU reviewerswe don’t test at 1440p or 4K in games to ensure we show the differences between CPUs. Most games at higher resolutions are more demanding on the GPU than the CPU. But better CPUs can still perform at 4K, especially with upscaling technologies like DLSS or CPU-intensive games like Baldur’s Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacyand microsoft flight simulator.

AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D beats the 7800X3D in productivity and creator workloads. Not even close. In Geekbench 6, the 9800X3D is about 20% faster than the 7800X3D in both single-thread and multi-thread performance. In Cinebench 2024, single-thread tests were nearly 16% faster and multi-thread workloads were 27% faster.

Even in the Premiere Pro and Photoshop PugetBench tests, the 9800X3D lags far behind the 7800X3D, with performance improvements of 18% in PugetBench for Photoshop and only 10% in the Premiere Pro test.

These scores show the significant improvements AMD has made to the 9800X3D in both day-to-day tasks and creator workloads. It still trails Intel’s latest Core Ultra 9 285K by a wide margin in these workloads, but AMD has significantly closed the gap with the 7800X3D.

When it comes to gaming, AMD extends its lead, especially compared to Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K. Like many other reviewers, when I Tested Intel’s latest desktop CPUs Last month, I noticed a regression in gaming performance compared to the Core i9-14900K.

The 7800X3D already easily beats the 14900K and Core Ultra 9 285K, while the 9800X3D leaves Intel’s gaming CPUs further behind. In my testing, I found that the 9800X3D played games about 8% faster than the 7800X3D. That’s exactly what AMD promised when it released the 9800X3D, and in some games, even more.

exist Metro: leave, I found that the 9800X3D’s frame rate was nearly 14% higher than the 7800X3D’s. Cyberpunk 2077 It also increased by nearly 11%. To put that into perspective, the 9800X3D is 50% faster than Intel’s latest Core Ultra 9 285K Cyberpunk 2077 1080p. For Intel, this is a staggering gap and suggests there must be some sort of bug in this particular combination of gaming and CPU. But the 9800X3D is still 38% faster than Intel’s previous 14900K, so AMD has an impressive advantage regardless.

If you want to get more out of the 9800X3D in games, GIGABYTE provides the X3D Turbo mode on the Aorus Master, which improves single-thread performance by performing some bandwidth adjustments, unifying CPU core allocation and balancing some hardware power. . The result is lower overall performance for workloads that rely on multi-thread performance, but improved gaming performance, depending on the game.

I saw a 9% performance jump Metro: leaving With X3D Turbo mode enabled, only a 3% increase Cyberpunk 2077. Other games saw smaller increases, e.g. Shadow of the Tomb Raider The increase is close to 2%. 2023 forza racing, X3D Turbo mode has no impact on performance. However, if you enable this feature in the BIOS, you will definitely sacrifice multi-threading performance in the creator workload.

This extra performance does come at the cost of power consumption and cooling. During Cinebench 2024, I noticed that the 9800X3D’s CPU package temperature reached 88 degrees Celsius, which was higher than the 82C I saw on the 7800X3D during the same test. In this test, the 9800X3D also peaked at 160 watts, while the 7800X3D only managed 89 watts.

Both chips have a TDP of 120 watts, but it’s clear that the 9800X3D uses that power more often. period Black Myth: Wukong In the benchmark test, the 9800X3D used 131 watts, more than double the 63 watts the 7800X3D used in the same test. In creator workloads, the 9800X3D’s power consumption still lags well behind Intel’s power-hungry 14900K, which consumed more than 260 watts in the Cinebench test. Power consumption will also vary depending on the type of games you play.

Looking through the 9800X3D, I can clearly see that AMD has now established an even more impressive gap with Intel in gaming performance, while closing the performance gap in productivity and creator workloads. I think the smaller gap in the non-gaming space will now attract more creators who also play games to AMD.

Intel sacrificed gaming performance in exchange for the Core Ultra 9 285K’s efficiency, but many PC gamers simply don’t care about power efficiency unless it significantly reduces temperatures, allowing for better performance and less throttling. Intel’s sacrifice makes the 9800X3D the obvious choice if you want the best PC gaming performance; if you want the best productivity and creator performance and play games rarely or not at all, the Core Ultra 9 285K is an obvious choice.

If you’re like me and play a lot of PC games but also render 4K video and need great performance during productivity tasks, this is a tougher choice. Intel has always offered a good balance between creator workloads and gaming, but AMD has it beat in gaming and is closing the gap in productivity. If I mainly played games, I would choose the 9800X3D and even wait and see Rumored to be 16 cores Ryzen 9000 X3D chips may be arriving soon.