AMD's new Ryzen 7 5800X3D promises to be the world's fastest gaming CPU, and compared to the Ryzen 7 5800X, that appears to be the case.
AMD lifted the curtain on the Ryzen 7 5800X3D in January, making the bold claim that it was the “world’s fastest gaming processor.” It’s a big statement for a chip that, under the hood, is the same as the Ryzen 7 5800X — a processor that launched a year and a half ago.
The Ryzen 7 5800X is about a year and a half old, so prices have dropped a lot. At the time of writing, you can pick one up for about $340. We expect prices will stay below $350 for Ryzen 7 5800X, but even if they climb, you shouldn’t pay more than $400. In traditional CPU benchmarks like Cinebench, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D falls short of the Ryzen 7 5800X, as evidenced by ExtremeTech’s testing. Memory-sensitive applications still see a benefit on the 3D-stacked part, however. In tasks like H.264 encoding, the increased cache allows the Ryzen 7 5800X3D to even outpace Intel’s Core i9-12900K.
Those improvements aren’t always as stark. In frequency-sensitive games like Rainbow Six Extraction, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D managed only a 5% increase over the Ryzen 7 5800X. That’s still a lead, however. The Ryzen 7 5800X does. It runs faster out of the box — up to 4.7GHz on a single core — and you can easily nudge up to 5GHz on a single core with a little overclocking. If you want to push your hardware to its limits, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D isn’t for you. Although it’s still possible to overclock the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with a lot of extra work, it’s risky.
It may not seem like a big deal, but benchmarks show the extra cache can do wonders in games. In short, more cache means the processor doesn’t have to access the system RAM as often, which reduces the amount of time it takes for the CPU to receive and process instructions.