AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D: the best gaming CPU

AMD has dominated PC gaming CPU performance for more than two years. Its X3D chips have provided a boost that Intel has been unable to match, and its new $479 Ryzen 7 9800X3D goes a step further to not only improve gaming performance but also day-to-day tasks and creative workloads.

The first desktop Zen 5 CPUs were disappointing in gaming, but the 9800X3D, which arrives on November 7th, makes some big improvements over the already-great Ryzen 7 7800X3D. I’ve been testing it over the past week, and I’ve found big improvements to productivity workloads, alongside around an 8 percent jump in gaming performance.

Just like the $449 7800X3D, if you mostly play games on your PC, then the 9800X3D should be your next CPU.

AMD’s productivity improvements with the 9800X3D are largely thanks to a redesign of the processor. AMD is using a second generation of its 3D V-Cache technology that sees the cache now sit below the processor cores. It’s a big difference that means the processor cores have better access to cooling and the cache is now less sensitive to high temperatures. That’s the big reason AMD has been able to ramp up the base clock speed by 500MHz and add an additional 200MHz to the boost clock.

Both of these clock speed increases have helped boost productivity performance, alongside the Zen 5 architecture. For the first time on an X3D chip, AMD is even supporting overclocking, which should mean we’ll see some even more impressive results from this processor.

I’ve been testing AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D with a Gigabyte X870E Aorus Master motherboard, 32GB of G.Skill DDR5-6000, and Nvidia’s RTX 4090. This is one of the latest AM5 motherboards, but the 9800X3D will work with existing AM5 boards thanks to BIOS updates.

I’ve tested a variety of workloads, synthetic benchmarks, and games across AMD’s new Ryzen 7 9800X3D, its existing 7800X3D, and Intel’s $589 Core i9-14900K and Core Ultra 9 285K. All the 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 other CPU reviewers, we don’t test at 1440p or 4K in games to ensure we’re demonstrating the differences between CPUs. Most games demand more from the GPU at higher resolutions, instead of the CPU. But a better CPU can still help out at 4K, especially for upscaling technologies like DLSS or in CPU-heavy titles like Baldur’s Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy, and Microsoft Flight Simulator.

AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D blows the 7800X3D away in productivity and creator workloads. It’s not even close. In Geekbench 6, the 9800X3D is around 20 percent faster than the 7800X3D in both single-threaded and multithreaded performance. In Cinebench 2024, it’s nearly 16 percent faster for the single-thread test and a massive 27 percent faster on the multithreaded workload.

Even in Premiere Pro and Photoshop PugetBench tests, the 9800X3D leaves the 7800X3D behind, with an 18 percent increase in performance in PugetBench for Photoshop and just shy of 10 percent in the Premiere Pro test.

These scores demonstrate the big improvements AMD has made to the 9800X3D for day-to-day tasks and creator workloads. It’s still largely behind Intel’s latest Core Ultra 9 285K in these workloads, but AMD has significantly closed the gap the 7800X3D had.

Over on the gaming side, AMD has extended its lead, especially against Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K. Like many other reviewers, when I tested Intel’s latest desktop CPU last month, I found that it was a step back in gaming performance compared to the Core i9-14900K.

The 7800X3D already comfortably beat the 14900K and Core Ultra 9 285K, and the 9800X3D leaves Intel’s gaming CPU efforts even further behind. During my tests, I’ve found that the 9800X3D is around 8 percent faster in games than the 7800X3D. That’s exactly what AMD promised when it announced the 9800X3D, and in some games, it’s even higher.

In Metro Exodus, I saw frame rates with the 9800X3D that were nearly 14 percent higher than the 7800X3D. Cyberpunk 2077 also improved by nearly 11 percent. To put that in perspective, the 9800X3D is 50 percent faster than Intel’s latest Core Ultra 9 285K in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p. It’s an astonishing gap for Intel that suggests there must be some kind of bug with that particular combination of game and CPU. But the 9800X3D is still 38 percent faster than Intel’s previous 14900K, so AMD has an impressive advantage here either way.

If you want to squeeze even more performance out of the 9800X3D in games, Gigabyte offers an X3D turbo mode on the Aorus Master, which boosts single-thread performance by performing some bandwidth tuning, unifying CPU core distribution, and balancing some of the hardware power. The result is lower overall performance in workloads that rely on multithreaded performance but some increases in game performance, depending on the game.

I saw a 9 percent jump in performance in Metro Exodus with X3D turbo mode enabled, with just a 3 percent increase in Cyberpunk 2077. Other games saw a smaller increase, like Shadow of the Tomb Raider seeing a boost of nearly 2 percent. In 2023’s Forza Motorsport, the X3D turbo mode had no effect on performance. You definitely sacrifice multithreaded performance in creator workloads if you have this enabled in the BIOS, though.

This extra performance does come at a slight cost to power draw and thermals. During Cinebench 2024, I noticed the 9800X3D hit a CPU package temperature of 88 degrees Celsius, more than the 82C I saw on the 7800X3D during the same test. The 9800X3D also used 160 watts at its peak during this test, whereas the 7800X3D only hit 89 watts. 

Both chips have a 120-watt TDP, but it’s clear that the 9800X3D is using this more often than not. During the Black Myth: Wukong benchmark, the 9800X3D was using 131 watts, more than double the 63 watts that the 7800X3D was using for the same test. The 9800X3D power draw is still far behind Intel’s power-hungry 14900K during creator workloads, which pulls more than 260 watts during Cinebench tests. Power draw will also vary depending on the types of games you’re playing.

What’s clear to me with this 9800X3D is that AMD has now established an even more impressive gap over Intel in gaming performance, while shrinking the performance differences in productivity and creator workloads. I think this smaller gap on the non-gaming side will now tempt more creators who also play games over to AMD. 

Intel sacrificed gaming performance in favor of efficiency with its Core Ultra 9 285K, but many PC gamers simply don’t care about power efficiency unless it results in significantly cooler temperatures and, therefore, better performance and less throttling. Intel’s sacrifices make the 9800X3D an obvious purchase if you want the best PC gaming performance, and the Core Ultra 9 285K is an obvious choice if you want the best in productivity and creator performance and play games very little or not at all. 

If, like me, you’re someone who plays a lot of PC games but also renders 4K videos and needs great performance in productivity tasks, then it’s a tougher choice. Intel has always offered a good balance between creator workloads and gaming, but AMD beats it in gaming and is closing the gap on the productivity side. If I were mostly gaming, I would pick the 9800X3D or even wait to see what a rumored 16-core Ryzen 9000 X3D chip could deliver very soon.