For at least the past year, the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D has been the best CPU for high-end gaming, and it wasn’t particularly close. Thanks to its additional cache, high boost speed, and refinement over several generations of Ryzen chips that came before, it’s been an easy pick for anyone with the budget looking for the right balance of efficiency and speed.
AMD’s follow-up, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, is technically faster, but you’d be hard-pressed to tell them apart when you’re actually gaming. As a result, I don’t see any reason for existing 9800X3D owners to upgrade, but you might as well grab the 9850X3D instead if both are at full price. Regardless of which chip you buy, you’ll be extremely impressed with the performance and ease of use.
The Setup
Photograph: Brad Bourque
When you stack the specs for the chips next to each other, the only difference is a 5.6-GHz max boost clock, compared to the older chip’s 5.2-GHz boost. In reality, it’s likely these are actually the same underlying chip, with AMD “binning” them by testing cores for reliability and speed, then sorting them into SKUs based on how they perform. It’s a common practice, but usually we see it across several SKUs and wider ranges rather than just one small bump late in the release cycle.
The BIOS and chipset drivers weren’t publicly available during review time, so AMD also sent along an Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero, a very well equipped motherboard with plenty of dedicated heat sinks and features for overclocking. Also included was a 32-GB dual channel kit of 6000 MHz G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo memory, as well as a Samsung 9100 Pro SSD. The gaming results are using the Nvidia RTX 5080 FE that I reviewed on its release last year. The motherboard might be a little fancier than most folks need, but otherwise I think it represents a pretty reasonable system I’d put together given the CPU.