AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D Review: Devastating Gaming Performance

AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D Power Consumption and Efficiency

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Here we can see that the Ryzen 7 9800X3D doesn't draw as much power as the Intel comparables, thus resulting in a cooler and quieter system with more forgiving PSU, motherboard, and cooling requirements.

Note that AMD's chips generally have a higher idle power draw. I've measured this on a few motherboards, so this might be applicable across the AM5 ecosystem. AMD's AM5 chips can draw up to ~35W of power during idle compared to 12W with Intel's Core Ultra, a significant disadvantage. This is certainly something AMD should look to address with future firmware updates, as there's little reason for a modern CPU architecture to idle at such high power levels.

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The final two charts take a slightly different look at power consumption by plotting the cumulative energy required for an x265 HandBrake and Blender workload. We plot this 'task energy' value in Kilojoules on the left side of the chart, with performance charted on the x-axis.

These workloads consist of a fixed amount of work, so we can plot the task energy against the performance during the job (bottom axis), thus generating a useful power chart. Faster compute performance and lower task energy are ideal. That means processors closest to the bottom right corner of the chart are the best.

Test Setup

All testing was conducted with Microsoft Windows 24H2, and all drivers and applications were updated to the latest versions. To speed up the testing process, we use XMP/EXPO as the default memory profiles for all tested configurations. The memory speeds used for each chip are shown in the table below.

We generated all the gaming results for the Ryzen 9000 processors with the new 1.2.0.2a AGESA. Due to time constraints, we haven't yet fully retested all of the Ryzen 9000 processors in our productivity test suite with the new 1.2.0.2a AGESA — for all but the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, our productivity benchmarks are with the 1.2.0.2 revision.

Microsoft has advised gamers to turn off several security features to boost gaming performance. For maximum performance, we disabled Virtualization Based Security (VBS) on all systems. Be aware that, due to hardware acceleration, some processor architectures handle virtualization better than others. This can provide a performance advantage in gaming with VBS enabled. We're working to quantify the performance differences and may adjust our VBS policy in the future. The table below provides further hardware details.

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