The Ryzen 7 9800X3D Is Out Now, But Is It Any Good?
Image Credit: AMD
AMD has officially released its halo gaming CPU, following in the footsteps of heavy-hitters like the 5800X3D and 7800X3D. This is a big deal for AMD fans who love playing video games, but there might be some merit in this hot chip for those who do more professional jobs with their hardware too.
It’s All About That Cache
Image Credit: AMD
Like other X3D CPUs, the 9800X3D is largely the same as its non-X3D family members, AMD has simply slapped a huge chunk of L3 cache onto the die, using its space-efficient 3D cache technology. That’s 96 MB of L3 cache, for 104MB total cache.
Video games benefit significantly from having lots of cache memory thanks to the nature of their code, but if course if you mainly use your computer for applications that’s aren’t cache sensitive or run well enough on the standard 32MB of cache other CPUs typically come with today, then the 9800X3D probably isn’t for you.
The Other Specs Are Decent
Apart from its giant cache party trick, this Zen 5 CPU packs relatively old-school CPU cores. Unlike Intel, AMD has decided to stick with homogeneous cores, and you still get two threads per core.
The peak boost clock is 5.2Ghz, but the base clock isn’t far off at 4.7Ghz. This is a hungry chip with a 120W TDP, but perhaps that’s par for the course these days.
While the 9800X3D has been killing it in the gaming benchmarks, it’s not worth it for current 7800X3D or even 5800X3D owners to upgrade, but this is the first overclockable CPU in this series, and overclock it does. Some daring fellows have already pushed it all the way to 6.9Ghz, which is an astounding figure.
With a list price under $500 and the AM5 platform promising many years of support, we think AMD probably has another winner on its hands for hardcore gamers.
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