AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D Review: New Gaming Champ Beats Pricier CPUs

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D Power Consumption and Efficiency

Image 1 of 11

AMD's Ryzen chips have excellent power and efficiency metrics, but the Ryzen 9 7000X3D chips are even more efficient because of their constrained power metrics. AMD has spec'd a higher 120W TDP rating for the 7800X3D, but it appears to be running closer to the 65W TDP envelope, which has a maximum of 88W of power consumption, during normal use. You can see this measured in more detail on the following page. This means the chip is basically operating in Eco Mode, which confers massive power consumption and efficiency benefits.

Ryzen’s Eco Mode allows you to downshift AMD processors into lower TDP envelopes with a single click in the BIOS or Ryzen Master software, thus yielding lower power consumption and heat. This also improves efficiency tremendously. We can see those same benefits reflected in the Handbrake renders-per-watt efficiency metric for the X3D chips. Again, the X3D chips top this chart by vast margins, but the Ryzen 7 7800X3D leads overall due to the benefits of its power-sipping single-chiplet design.

Our highest average power measurement for the Ryzen 7 7800X3D was 86W, showing that it runs well below the rated 120W TDP. 

Image 1 of 2

Here we take a slightly different look at power consumption by calculating the cumulative energy required to perform x264 and x265 HandBrake workloads, respectively. We plot this 'task energy' value in Kilojoules on the left side of the chart.

These workloads are comprised of a fixed amount of work, so we can plot the task energy against the time required to finish the job (bottom axis), thus generating a really useful power chart. Bear in mind that faster compute times, and lower task energy requirements, are ideal. That means processors that fall the closest to the bottom left corner of the chart are the best. 

After the trends we've seen with all of the 3D V-Cache-equipped chips, these results have become predictable — but that doesn't mean they're any less impressive than before. AMD's pairing of the 5nm, 6nm, and 7nm processes into one package creates challenges that, on the one hand, require lower voltage and power thresholds that reduces performance. However, on the other hand, that also leads to a massive win in the power efficiency department. 

Ryzen 7 7800X3D Test Setup

• Ryzen 7 7800X3D: Corsair H115i 280mm water cooler, default power limits, DDR5-5200 (Coupled Mode), Core Parking explicitly disabled
• Ryzen 7 7800X3D Expo: Corsair H115i 280mm water cooler, default power limits, DDR5-6000 EXPO (Coupled Mode), Core Parking explicitly disabled
• Ryzen 7 7800X3D PBO/UV: Corsair H115i 280mm water cooler, Precision Boost Overdrive (Advanced/Motherboard), Scalar 10X, -10 Curve Optimizer, DDR5-6000 EXPO (Coupled Mode), Core Parking explicitly disabled, Silicon lottery and cooling performance impact overhead -- YMMV

Like the rest of its Ryzen 7000X3D siblings, the Ryzen 9 7800X3D doesn't support overclocking via the CPU multiplier, meaning you can't change the core clocks directly. AMD also doesn't allow direct CPU voltage adjustments.

However, there are a few other options, and they can deliver some performance improvement with minimal effort. For example, AMD has added support for altering the power limits (PPT, TDC, EDC) through the auto-overclocking Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) feature, which you can enable with a single click. You can also now undervolt the X3D chips using the Curve Optimizer that can be accessed either via the BIOS or Ryzen Master, with the latter also having a built-in auto-tuning feature that takes an hour to derive an optimum value.

These overclocking features weren’t supported on the previous-gen X3D models, and combining them (PBO+UV) provides the best overall performance. We have plenty of testing with PBO+UV settings on the following pages. Notably, the PBO+UV configuration delivers similar gaming performance to PBO but also larger gains in productivity applications, particularly in lightly threaded fare.

We're told that most Ryzen 7 7800X3D models will be able to maintain a -10 to -15 Curve Optimizer offset, and our chip managed a -10 setting quite easily. As you'll see in our tests, that didn't amount to huge performance gains in gaming, though. As always with overclocking, your mileage may vary, but we saw the biggest overclocking gains in our application benchmarks. That's because undervolting reduces the voltage margin of the chip to improve performance, so it is most effective when the chip hits voltage limitations. Games *typically* aren't heavy all-core workloads that saturate the cores enough to hit voltage limits, so improvements are more limited than what you would see with heavily-threaded fare, like Cinebench.  

The Ryzen 7 7800X3D also supports overclocking the memory and Infinity Fabric. We used a DDR5-6000 EXPO profile for our overclocking testing, as this represents the sweet spot for Zen 4 processors. However, as we saw with the previous-gen Ryzen 7 5800X3D, memory overclocking does very little to improve performance. We demonstrated this in our 7950X3D review, and engaging the EXPO profile alone only gave us single-digit percentage improvements in gaming. However, using it with PBO and/or undervolting yields the best gains, so we used an EXPO memory profile in tandem with undervolting and PBO for our overclocked config.

We test Intel processors with the power limits fully removed for our standard measurements, so those chips run beyond the 'recommended' power settings but remain within warranty. We used DDR5 for both the Raptor Lake and Zen 4 processors.

Microsoft has advised gamers to disable several security features to boost gaming performance. As such, we disabled secure boot, virtualization support, and fTPM/PTT on all systems for maximum performance. You can find further hardware details in the table below. 

• MORE: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D vs Intel Core i9-13900K vs Core i7-13700K
• MORE: Best CPU for gaming
• MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy
• MORE: Intel vs AMD
• MORE: How to Overclock a CPU