The king of gaming processors, AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D, might not be on sale by itself, but it's definitely a deal when it's paired with a free 360mm All-In-One liquid cooler from MSI. Little combo deals like this are an excellent way to get started on a new build, or even just buy that 9800X3D CPU you've been looking at and then get some money back by selling the cooler if you don't need it.
You can grab hold of this combo deal at Newegg, where AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D is paired with an MSI MAG Coreliquid A13 360mm AIO cooler for just $459. As I've mentioned, there isn't anything special about the price of the 9800X3D, but it's an excellent deal if you consider the combined price of buying both components separately. By itself, the MSI MAG Coreliquid A13 360 is listed at $109.99 at Newegg.
AMD has dominated the gaming CPU space and boosted the market share of AMD CPUs in the Steam Hardware survey. The 9800X3D, which uses a massive 3D V-cache to enhance performance in gaming applications, is currently one of the most popular CPUs on the market, and for very good reason.
If you're playing CPU-intensive esports titles such as Counter-Strike 2, Rainbow 6: Siege, or Valorant, then that's where you can really see the difference in a gaming CPU like the 9800X3D, running at lower resolutions to enhance frame rates to insane levels for less graphical latency. The benefits fall off as you creep towards 4K gaming, where the graphics card takes over as the primary source for enhancing frame rates and graphical fidelity.
The Ryzen 7 9800X3D uses AMD's successful 3D V-cache technology, which provides the 9800X3D with its pure gaming prowess. The large cache boosts performance, and along with design changes to the CPU, such as moving the cache chiplet underneath the die to alleviate the thermal insulation of previous designs, the compute die is now closer to the cooler. With this increased thermal headroom comes 500 MHz higher base clocks and 200 MHz higher boosts than the previous-gen Zen 4-powered Ryzen 7 7800X3D.
In our 13-game average with resolutions set to 1920 x 1080 pixels, the 9800X3D topped the charts. Outperforming the 7800X3D, which it succeeded.
You can find more details and benchmarking results on AMD's Ryzen 7 processor in our detailed review of the 9800X3D. With an 8% performance gain on the previous generation 7800X3D, it dominates the competition from Intel in gaming benchmarks.
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