🥇AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D Reviews — The Fastest Gaming CPU, But the Difference from Ryzen 7 9800X3D is Minimal

Industry reviewers have published test results for the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D processor. Sales of the chip will begin on January 29. Its price is set at $499, which is $30 more expensive than the Ryzen 7 9800X3D model. The difference between the chips lies solely in the increased maximum clock frequency of 5.6 GHz for the Ryzen 7 9850X3D compared to 5.2 GHz for the Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

The Ryzen 7 9850X3D still offers eight cores based on the Zen 5 architecture and 16 threads, as well as 64 MB of additional 3D V-Cache, resulting in a total L3 cache size of 96 MB. The increase in maximum clock frequency to 5600 MHz has not brought any significant improvement in performance.

According to TechPowerUp, the performance of the Ryzen 7 9850X3D in applications has slightly improved compared to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D — approximately by 2.2% on average. When examining individual tests, the most significant gains are observed in single-threaded workloads, where the actual performance boost is around 5–7%. In multi-threaded applications, performance is nearly identical to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

Gaming performance of the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is impressive — it outperforms all other processors on the market, including the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Although the difference with the latter is small, at best 2.5% and just 0.5% at 4K resolution, according to TechPowerUp.

This is supported by TechPowerUp's findings. well-known enthusiast and CEO of Thermal Grizzly Roman "der8auer" Hartung agrees. In his gaming tests, the difference between the two processors was at most 4%. Roman notes that along with the performance increase, the processor's power consumption has also risen, especially in graphically demanding games like Cyberpunk 2077. There, the increase was 25% — from about 97W for the Ryzen 7 9800X3D to 121W for the new model. Meanwhile, in some scenarios, the difference in power consumption between the two processors was within 1%.