[Hardware] AMD RYZEN 7 7800X3D The best gaming processor AMD has ever produced.

[Blackfire]

• There is a very strong argument to be made for the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D being the best gaming CPU around right now. It's certainly the best gaming chip that AMD has ever made, but it's also capably outperforming Intel's top CPU when it comes to gaming frame rates, and is doing so for a lot less cash.
• Ryzen 9 7950X3D(opens in new tab) was the first of the new 3D V-Cache chips to hit our test bench, and it offers a mix of high-end gaming performance and a full 16-cores of Zen 4 processing. But its hybrid design, which offered one eight-core chiplet (or CCD) with the extra 64MB of L3 cache fused on top of it and another CCD without, demanded some extra hoops for the operating system to jump through, and also sacrificed some of a standard 16-core chip's raw multithreaded performance.

• The Ryzen 7 7800X3D, however, is as straightforward as AMD's 3D V-Cache gets. There's one eight-core chiplet with extra cache, and no messing around with provisioning or applications scratching their heads to figure out which of the big CPU's CCDs it ought to be using at any one time.

  So, does that make it a better dedicated gaming chip? Well, it's not necessarily faster—which highlights how well AMD actually delivered on the 7950X3D's hybrid design—but it makes far more sense as the CPU at the heart of your next gaming PC.

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• Simply put, if you want the absolute highest gaming frame rates, and care not a jot for the CPU-intensive distractions of rendering or encoding, then AMD's latest chip is the processor for you. It wears its gaming predilections on its sleeve, and delivers performance that could make a Core i9 blush.

  No jack of all trades, but certainly a master of one, and that's gaming.

  It's seriously efficient, too, and that combination of gaming power and low electrical power makes this new 3D V-Cache processor a tantalising choice for your gaming rig. Now that AMD's AM5 platform has matured we're finding more affordable motherboard options every day, and DDR5 memory, and PCIe 4.0 SSDs seem to be constantly dropping in price as well.

  The value argument for Intel's Raptor Lake platform is starting to look ever thinner when you can build an impressively future-proof PC from AMD's affordable options.

 

• At $450 it's more expensive than the more versatile Core i5 13400F(opens in new tab), but until Intel can get a handle on its chips' power demands AMD's best gaming CPU is by far the most elegant. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D is no jack of all trades, but it is certainly a master of one, and that's gaming.

• The Zen 4 architecture(opens in new tab) inside the new 7800X3D is a known quantity by now. It's mostly a derivative spec of the old Zen 3 design, but here built on the TSMC 5nm process for the CCD and 6nm for the I/O die. The bigger news at launch was the addition of PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support from the get-go, that and a new socket with a funky new heatsink design.

  There's a little more L2 cache in the Zen 4 CPU make-up, giving 1MB of L2 for each core, and some front end optimisations, which along with the higher clock speeds of the main range has delivered a welcome bump in Ryzen processor performance. Even if the core counts have remained the same.

 

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  But the 7800X3D goes further in one way, while taking a step back in the other. This is a resolutely eight-core CPU in the same vein as the Ryzen 7 7700(opens in new tab) and Ryzen 7 7700X(opens in new tab), so this 16-thread design alone is not new for a Zen 4 chip. But the extra 64MB L3 cache mounted on top of the eight-core CCD is.

  The compromise is—as with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D(opens in new tab) which kicked this whole cache-heavy enterprise off—about clock speeds. 

  Where the 7700X can deliver up to 5.4GHz and the 7950X(opens in new tab) up to 5.7GHz, the 7800X3D is resolutely stuck at just 5GHz. Yeah, we're at a point where I can say 'just' about hitting 5GHz regularly out of the box.

  The Ryzen 7 7800X3D is still a 120W chip, however, which puts it in a higher bracket than the 105W 7700X. Though, having run through all my testing now, that TDP number is starting to feel a little delusive considering just how efficient the chip is in operation. Even while delivering effectively the highest gaming performance of any chip we've tested.

[https://www.pcgamer.com/amd-ryzen-7-7800x3d-review-benchmarks-performance/]