Just last week, AMD made an announcement for its upcoming Ryzen 9000X3D series, and today it is now revealed: the debut will feature just one model, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, launching November 7, 2024.
Ryzen 7 9800X3D
While the Ryzen 9000 in general is seen as underwhelming compared to prior generations, the new X3D chip with Zen 5 under the hood does bring more goodies than their standard counterparts. The biggest upgrade is the re-arrangement of the chip structure which, for the first time ever, enables full overclocking support for the X3D series.
Here’s how it works. In the past, the 3D V-Cache is stacked on top of the cores, which introduces one major drawback – thermals. The cache layer acts as an additional layer that prevents heat from getting transferred to the IHS (integrated heat spreader) as effectively, and this results in hotter cores despite consuming the same amounts of power as the standard counterpart.
For the 9800X3D’s new second-generation 3D V-Cache, AMD has physically flipped the structure to give the cores direct access to IHS, and this resulted in +500MHz in base clock, and +200MHz in boost clocks over Ryzen 7 7800X3D. With that, you also get full overclocking capabilities, with more thermal headroom to work with.
This newfound performance gains along with Zen 5 itself will net 8% increase in gaming performance across the board according to AMD’s first party benchmark results, though the actual result can vary from game-to-game depending on how reliant they are to the extra cache available. Comparing to Intel’s current best, the Core Ultra 9 285K (though reviews suggests that it might be worse than 14th Gen to some degree), AMD claims a 20% lead on average.
So, to round it up – the Ryzen 7 9800X3D will feature the same amount of cores and threads as its predecessor, the same TDP, while gaining 200MHz more boost clock and slightly more combined cache (96MB vs 104MB). It’ll be expensive, however – one of these will set you back for $479, which is $30 more than the 7800X3D’s original MSRP.
Pokdepinion: That is surprisingly expensive for an 8-core chip – but I guess AMD gets to command that price given how fast 3D V-Cache is for gaming-specific workloads. 5800X3D still rocks, though!
