Ryzen 9850X3D review: AMD’s bragging-rights gaming CPU gets more to brag about

Performance and power consumption

The first thing to notice about the 9850X3D is that its multi-core performance is essentially indistinguishable from that of the 9800X3D. If anything, the 9800X3D seems to perform slightly better in our Handbrake video encoding tests, which could come down to anything or nothing – maybe it’s a real difference between the chips, maybe it’s the silicon lottery, maybe it’s something else. Overall, it’s mostly a wash.

The 9850X3D do significantly improves the single-core performance of the 9800X3D, narrowing the gap with the Ryzen 9900X3D and 9950X3D (which both have regular Zen 5 cores without 3D V-Cache) and the 9700X (which does not have 3D V-Cache at all).

There is a world where AMD can get this extra performance “for free” without changing anything to the architecture or manufacturing process. AMD could have “rounded up” the silicon lottery winners, or the reliability of the manufacturing process could have improved enough to allow AMD to achieve better numbers that weren’t as consistently achievable a year ago.

But it appears that AMD improved the 9850X3D’s single-core performance primarily by making it behave more like a non-X3D chip. The chip’s power consumption during gaming suggests that’s more or less what’s happening: the 9850X3D’s CPU power during gaming is about 25 or 30 W higher than the 9800X3D playing the same games, despite the performance improvement being single digits at best (in our tests and in AMD’s advertising).

While the 9850X3D’s power consumption while gaming isn’t far off from that of the 9700X or 9950X3D, it’s hard to get excited about the tiny performance gains shown here.

And that’s on top of the cost trade-off you’re already making when you buy an X3D series chip. The game’s performance is still impressive, but you notice these benefits right from the start. most in situations where your CPU, not the GPU, is the performance bottleneck.