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AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is now officially among us. Dave, PC Gamer’s hardware lead and conqueror, has been testing it for a while now and thinks it’s the “new king of gaming CPUs.” We expected as much, or at least hoped, given its predecessor. Ryzen 7 7800X3DHe held the crown the longest. Now we see how far this can be taken and the answer is actually very far.

Asus is the GM of China Tony Yu showed (via Wccftech) The 9800X3D clocks up a whopping 6.9GHz at just over 100W, and at some points goes over 1,000fps at maximum settings in CS2 and Valorant. This is 1080p, of course, but these are esports games, and for competitive gaming we like our frames more than our pixels.

The main takeaway isn’t the resulting frame rates, although that’s nice; the main takeaway is the 6.9GHz overclock. For reference, the 9800X3D comes with a standard base clock of 4.7GHz and boost of 5.2GHz; So this means an increase of 1.7 GHz over the boost clock.

What’s important about this is that the 9800X3D is AMD’s first unlocked 3D V-Cache CPU. Previous generation X3D processors had V-Cache located on the chips to prevent sufficient heat transfer for cooling during overclocking, thus keeping the chip locked. You can overclock them a bit by messing around with PBO, but you won’t get much out of them.

But on the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the cores stand proudly above the V-Cache, leaving the IHS comparatively flush with the silicon underneath. This means better heat transfer for cooling; This ultimately means an X3D CPU unlocked for overclocking. Also, clock speeds in general can now go higher even without manual overclocking.

Considering we’ve never been able to properly overclock an It’s worth noting that this overclocking was achieved using liquid nitrogen, but we managed to achieve this by messing around with the overclocking capabilities of the new Ryzen chip on our own. almost It’s stable at 5.6GHz and rock solid at 5.57GHz. That’s without getting into any curve optimizer nonsense, but frankly with only 400MHz on top of the standard 5.2GHz boost clock you’re not seeing much in the way of frame rate increases and a lot more power is needed.

But still, considering these overclocks, that’s pretty impressive stuff; That’s saying something for a chip that already easily outperforms other non-X3D 9000 series chips and Intel Arrow Lake chips in gaming performance, even without any overclocking.

Speaking of which, now that we know the Ryzen 7 9800X3D can overclock so well, there’s really no reason to opt for Arrow Lake for gaming. Still, I guess there’s no reason anyway, considering Ryzen 7 9800X3D performs better, runs cooler, And consumes less power. This last point was all Arrow Lake was after before the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and now it’s taken it away. Very big.

Maybe not so much for Intel, but exciting times for the rest of us. Who would have thought of a 1.7 GHz overclocked X3D chip?

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