AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is officially here. Hardware specialist and PC Gamer hardware winner Dave has been testing it for some time and reckons it’s the “new king of gaming CPUs.” That’s what we expected, or at least that’s what we hoped for, considering that its predecessor, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, held the crown the longest. Now we see how far this can be pushed, and the answer is indeed far.
General Manager of Asus in China Tony Yu showed (By Wccftech) The 9800X3D clocks in at an impressive 6.9GHz at just over 100W and achieves – on point – over 1000 frames per second in CS2 and Valorant at max settings. It’s 1080p, of course, but these are esports titles and we like our frames more than we like our competitive gaming pixels.
The most significant conclusion, however, is not the frame rate obtained, although it is good; The most significant conclusion is the overclock to 6.9 GHz. For comparison, the 9800X3D has a standard boost clock of 4.7 GHz and a boost clock of 5.2 GHz, which is an enhance of 1.7 GHz over the boost clock.
What’s significant is that the 9800X3D is the first AMD processor with unlocked 3D V-Cache. In previous generation X3D processors, the V-Cache was located on top of the chips, which prevented adequate heat transfer for cooling during overclocking, so the chip was blocked. You can tweak them a bit by playing around with PBO, but you won’t get much out of them.
However, in the case of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the cores sit proudly on top of the V cache, leaving the IHS relatively flush with the silicon underneath. This means better heat transfer to cooling, which ultimately means the X3D CPU is finally unlocked for overclocking. Moreover, overall clock speeds, even without manual overclocking, can now enhance.
Considering we’ve never been able to properly overclock an X3D chip, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is truly the first time we’ve seen what X3D technology is capable of when it has no limits. Of course, it’s worth noting that this overclock was achieved using liquid nitrogen, although our own playing around with the overclocking capabilities of the fresh Ryzen chip allowed us to achieve this almost stable at 5.6 GHz and solid at 5.57 GHz. And that’s without getting into the intricacies of curve optimization, though of course at just 400MHz over the standard boost clock of 5.2GHz there’s not much to see in terms of frame rate increases and much more power required.
But still, judging by those overclocks, that’s a pretty impressive result, which says something for a chip that even without any overclocking at all still easily beats other non-X3D 9000 and Intel Arrow Lake series chips in terms of gaming performance.
Speaking of which, since we know that the Ryzen 7 9800X3D can overclock so well, there’s really no reason to choose Arrow Lake for gaming. Although I suppose there wouldn’t be a reason anyway, considering the Ryzen 7 9800X3D performs better, runs cooler, AND uses less energy. This last point is the one thing that Arrow Lake wanted before the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and has now taken away. Big phew.
Maybe not so much for Intel, but these are exhilarating times for all of us. X3D chip overclocked to 1.7 GHz, who would have thought?
