AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D review: The world's fastest gaming processor, again

-Fran- said:

Yeah... If this was replacing the 9800X3D at its MSRP, then it would've been a nice "plus" for it, but charging more?

Nah. Big pass. Given the age and all that, this CPU should have slotted at $450 MSRP and bring the 9800X3D to $420 MSRP.

EDIT: I forgot to mention/ask, isn't the current street median price of the 9800X3D like $450?

Like Leo from KitGuru's review succintly summarised: "WHY?".

Regards.

This is no different than the Intel KS series, like the 14900ks. It's just the highest binned chips that people want, instead of trying to win the silicon lottery. These will likely be capable of the best overclocks. The price difference is negligible if you're chasing the best clocks.

While I understand the need to evaluate the changes at the leading edge for TH, in these days I'd say there is more value in trying to gauge what can be done with the material available at economical prices.

1080p gaming benchmarks in the 400-800FPS range may differentiate that leading edge, but there is next to zero value for most gamers between those two marks: 90FPS rendered is quite acceptable, I'd say, a mark constantly passed even by your lowest entrants.

Today there may now much more value in trying to evaluate how low and old you can get on the CPU/RAM side, without dropping below acceptable gaming performance.

And while I was lucky enough to score two RTX 5070ti as well as various Ryzen 7000 16-cores, with and without V-cache last year, I fail to see a significant difference in how one 5070ti games on an older 5950X vs another on a 7945X3D at the resolutions I actually use, not 1080p, but 4k@144 max or 3440x1440@165 max, depending on the screen.

And that 5950X still sells for less than €300, while a 5800X3D sells for way more than it delivers in extra gaming performance at those resolutions. And if you happen to still have DDR4-3200 lying around or within your economical reach, that's perhaps the better choice.

Going with V-cache is rarely wrong, when the price difference is modest. Selling a kidney for that leading edge, just doesn't seem to pay enough in real-life gaming return.

Now I know that 16-core Zens aren't the best gaming CPUs. But much of that is really just based on some OS making bad scheduling decisions, because 16-core Zens always have at least one CCD of a much better bin than any 8-core Zen. That means higher max clocks and lower power consumption if you stick with that CCD.

The challenge is to ensure that games that suffer from intra-CCD latencies more than they profit from additinal cores are kept on a single CCD. On Windows you can perhaps most easily do that with Project Lasso.

And at €100 difference between a worse binned 5800X (<€200) and a 5950X (<€300), I'd say it becomes an easy choice to simply go for the extra cores and higher top clocks: some games still like clocks more than cache and then gaming may not be all you do on your PC. Cores not used may require less power than worse bins, just in case you worry about that.

A 9850X3D is really just the 9950X3D without the non-V-cache CCD in terms of binning. And the small performance differences show the diminishing returns when GPUs are the bottleneck in many, not all cases.

NGL I kinda want one, only because the extra clock speed and the x3d v-cache should prove useful for WoW, in cpu limited situations.

gggplaya said:

This is no different than the Intel KS series, like the 14900ks. It's just the highest binned chips that people want, instead of trying to win the silicon lottery. These will likely be capable of the best overclocks. The price difference is negligible if you're chasing the best clocks.

I'm not saying they shouldn't do that.

At the end of the day, it comes down to price. In this case, AMD failed the "value" proposition since they think a ~4% improvement is worth an extra $20 (MSRP) and ~$50 (street prices).

Also, we're all collectively assuming this is "higher binned", but in reality the increase in power correlates very negatively to the increase in performance, so I'm not even sure if this is a "better bin" or just a re-skin of the same exact dies. A rebrand, if you like.

Regards.

-Fran- said:

Also, we're all collectively assuming this is "higher binned", but in reality the increase in power correlates very negatively to the increase in performance, so I'm not even sure if this is a "better bin" or just a re-skin of the same exact dies. A rebrand, if you like.

Somewhere between those, I'd say, both high above the CMOS knee at top clocks, dictated by what comes off the line and they can't sell for more as EPYCs, perhaps also with some tuning in processes and masks.

OK, but what's about overclocking? Potential, results? Who buys this CPU for stock clock, stock JEDEC RAM?

Also, no full screen for the diagrams? Or it is a Firefox thing?