AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D Review: Devastating Gaming Performance

AMD’s $480 Ryzen 7 9800X3D comes armed with eight cores and 16 threads paired with a new version of the company’s game-boosting 3D V-Cache tech that delivers impressive performance, taking the throne as the fastest gaming CPU on the market in convincing fashion. AMD claims the chip is 20% better than Intel’s latest flagship and 8% faster than the prior-gen Ryzen 7 7800X3D. However, our benchmarks show it beats Intel’s current-gen flagship Core 9 285K by an almost unrealistic 35% on average in our test suite. It even beats Intel’s fastest competing gaming chip, the Core i9-14900K, by an equally incredible 30% on average in our test suite. Naturally, the gains will vary by title due to the vagaries of the 3D V-Cache tech. Still, we recorded incredible performance that firmly cements the Ryzen 9 9800X3D as the best CPU for gaming.

AMD accomplished this feat by leveraging its tried-and-true 3D V-Cache technology, which uses a beefy, vertically-stacked 64MB L3 cache chiplet to boost gaming performance. To improve performance further, AMD moved the cache chiplet from the top of the processor to the bottom. This yields substantially higher thermal headroom, enabling higher clock rates while the additional cache unlocks the Zen 5 architecture’s peak gaming performance. As we’re accustomed to with gaming-optimized X3D processors, not all games will benefit from the tech, and a few are even slightly slower (1 to 2%) than the previous-gen model. Still, the chip also vastly improves 1% low frame rates even in those titles. The higher 1% lows will also help when you’re GPU-limited, like when gaming with higher resolutions.

AMD has also now enabled full overclocking for the 9800X3D, which we’ve put to the test, allowing you to scrape out more performance in both gaming and productivity work. Speaking of which, the new design also helps to remove some of the heavy penalties in productivity work that you’ll often pay for using a gaming-optimized X3D processor, allowing the 9800X3D to match, and at times even exceed, a comparable eight-core Ryzen 9000 CPU in several productivity workloads.