Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is the fastest gaming chip on the market by a large, almost unbelievable margin, easily beating Intel's competing processors. Yes, the $480 price tag is expensive, leaving room for like-priced alternatives with a more balanced performance profile in productivity applications. However, many of those competing chips come from within AMD's own stable — Ryzen 9000 has improved quite a bit with the recent firmware and Windows updates — and the fact is that AMD offers the fastest gaming performance in the world, so it can charge for it.
AMD has significantly improved performance in productivity workloads, too, helping to eliminate some of the trade-offs of selecting a gaming-optimized X3D chip. It has also fully opened up the overclocking bells and whistles, giving enthusiasts more options for tuning. You should keep your expectations in check for big gains from PBO, but this simple largely-automated feature does help in some applications.
AMD will have no problem selling the Ryzen 9 9800X3D at its price point, and Intel doesn't appear to have a chip that can compete in gaming in the near future, once again ceding the gaming crown to AMD for the indeterminate future.
Below, we have the geometric mean of our gaming test suite at 1080p and a cumulative measure of performance in single- and multi-threaded applications. These are cumulative measurements, so outliers in specific titles can impact the values. The Ryzen X3D chips use 3D V-Cache tech, which doesn’t accelerate all titles equally, and the Zen 3 and 4 versions come with performance penalties in productivity applications. Be sure to check our individual game and productivity benchmarks in the preceding sections to make an informed decision based on your intended workloads.
We conducted our gaming tests with an Nvidia RTX 4090, so performance deltas will shrink with lesser cards and higher resolution and fidelity settings. And conversely, when the RTX 5090 comes out, deltas could actually increase — we'll likely find out how much early next year.
As we said earlier, the competition isn't even close — the $480 Ryzen 7 9800X3D delivers outstanding gaming performance, beating Intel's fastest gaming chip, the $440 Core i9-14900K, by 30% in our test suite. Meanwhile, the 9800X3D is 35% faster than the current-gen Intel flagship, the $620 Core Ultra 9 285K, which hasn't managed to match, let alone exceed, Intel's previous-gen flagship. The stock Ryzen 7 9800X3D's 1% low frame rates (a good smoothness indicator) also deliver an exceptionally smooth gaming experience, which will benefit gamers even in GPU-limited scenarios.
The Core i9-14900K is a closer competitor for the 98000X3D due to its lower $440 price tag, and it does provide better performance in productivity workloads at its price point than the 9800X3D, beating it by 41% and 10% in multi- and single-threaded workloads, respectively. If you’re more interested in productivity work in this price range, the 14900K is a solid contender, albeit one that typically draws more power (except at idle).
Another benefit for AMD's CPU is that you won’t have to kit the 9800X3D out with expensive supporting componentry to extract the best of 3D V-Cache. The chip is relatively tame in terms of power and thermal requirements, exhibiting great power and efficiency metrics in our tests, and even cheap DDR5-5600 memory kits deliver within a few percentage points of performance of faster DDR5-6000 kits — the X3D chips simply don’t need EXPO memory to run at near-peak performance. That stands in stark contrast to splurging on a pricey CUDIMM kit for Arrow Lake and only scraping out ~2% more gaming performance.
The Ryzen 7 9800X3D does have a $30 higher introductory price tag than its predecessor, but you get what you pay for. Our FPS-per-dollar chart shows the Ryzen 7 9800X3D beats all Intel chips except the Core i7-14700K in terms of value. If you’re scraping together a system on a budget, you can always opt for a prior-gen 600-series motherboard, too.
Given that the Ryzen 7 9800X3D provides the fastest gaming performance overall, we expect that this chip will find no shortage of enthusiasts ready to fork over their hard-earned dollars. We also expect AMD to launch the larger dual-CCD X3D models in the coming months, so it might be best to hold off if you’re looking for something with a bit more threaded horsepower. With the move to put the 3D V-Cache die under the processing core, we could even see something like a 9950X3D with double the stacked cache — and if that happens, it might end up being the no-holds-barred performance champion for the current generation, regardless of workload.
But for now, if you want the best gaming chip on the market, there simply is no better option than the Ryzen 7 9800X3D.
- MORE: Best CPUs for Gaming
- MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy
- MORE: AMD vs Intel
US govt says Cisco gear often targeted in China's Salt Typhoon attacks on 8 telecommunications providers — issues Cisco-specific advice to patch networks to fend off attacks
Legendary video game developer imagines a future where GPUs don't need PCs — John Carmack envisions a GPU with Linux onboard, so you would just add power and a display
Black Friday is over, but this 34-inch curved QD OLED WQHD gaming monitor is still available for $569
