What's the fastest CPU for gaming on the market today? On our GPU hierarchy, we rate the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D as fastest. But, in AMD's product stack, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D is the top dog and it came out a barely-perceptible 4 fps behind the 7800X3D on our tests. In addition to gaming prowess, you get great multi-threaded performance thanks to the 7950X3D's 16 cores, 32 threads and 5.6-GHz boost clock (the 7800X3D has just 8 cores).
Normally $539, the 7950X3D is now $469 at Amazon, in a pre-Prime Day discount. That's the lowest price we've ever seen on it by $5.
In our GPU hierarchy, the 7950X3D comes in second place in 1080p gaming by a mere 4 fps and it is tied for first place with the 7800X3D in 1440p gaming. Note that the prices in the chart below are launch prices, not current prices.
The Ryzen 7950X3D fares so well thanks to its 140MB of L2 / L3 cache (128MB of L3 cache). That allows it to dominate at 1080p and 1440p resolutions where many games are CPU limited. Even if you have the top GPU on the market, an RTX 4090, you'll get more frames with the 7950X3D than with Intel's top processor, the Core i9-14900K.
If you want the best combination of gaming and multitasking you can get today, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D is your top choice and now it's at its lowest price ever.
