AMD’s desktop processors with 3D V-Cache on deck have become crowd favorites in the gaming community for their ability to drive the fastest possible refresh rates at lower resolutions. Until now, AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D has led in this niche, but here comes its slight successor. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D ($499) is essentially a faster 9800X3D: It has the same number of cores and amount of added 3D V-Cache, but now a faster boost clock speed, at 5.6GHz compared with 5.2GHz. We have no doubt the Ryzen 7 9850X3D will find a loyal band of followers just like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D did, but it's not quite well-rounded enough for us to call it "the world’s best gaming processor," as AMD has dubbed it, for every situation. For generally outperforming its predecessor and other chips in its class at high-refresh 1080p gaming, we recommend it over the 9800X3D. However, the average PC gamer or productivity-focused user will save some money with the Intel Core Ultra 7 265K or an AMD Ryzen 9000 alternative at this tier.

Features and Specs: I'm Just Here for the Frames

While the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D is just now heading to market, under the integrated heat spreader (IHS), so to speak, this processor is anything but new. It’s identical to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and built from the same silicon map. Apart from the price, the only difference between the two chips is their clock speed. At the core, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is just a 9800X3D chip that was tested (by a selective, well-known process known as "binning") to support running a bit faster.

The Ryzen 7 9850X3D has eight CPU cores in total based on AMD's "Zen 5" architecture; simultaneous multithreading (SMT) support enables it to crunch up to 16 threads at once. These cores can turbo up to 5.6GHz, which gives the 9850X3D nearly an 8% advantage in clock speed over the 9800X3D, which tops out at 5.2GHz.

(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)

The key selling point of the 9850X3D, like all AMD processors with 3D V-Cache, is the 64MB of additional cache. AMD typically reports this as extra L3 cache, but it is physically and functionally diverse from the processor's L3 cache, which makes calling it an L4 cache, or last-level cache (LLC), technically more accurate. AMD has told us in the past that the performance difference between the L3 cache and the 3D V-Cache is negligible, which is why the company often doesn’t differentiate between the two.

(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)

The Ryzen 7 9850X3D’s asking price is also interesting. At $499, it's a 4% price hike over the 9800X3D's list price of $479 for an 8% theoretical performance bump, so it could, technically, be a better value. If you are doing more than gaming, however, you should also keep in mind that the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X costs the same. That processor doesn’t have the 3D V-Cache and is typically considered less appealing for high-refresh-rate gaming as a result. That said, it has 12 cores instead of eight, which will make it far faster in any heavily threaded workload.

The 9850X3D, like other Ryzen 9000 series chips, runs on the AMD AM5 socket. No CPU cooler comes in the box.

Test Setup and Competition

For testing, I installed the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D on Gigabyte's X870E Aorus Master, the high-end motherboard that I use to test all new AMD AM5 Ryzen processors. The motherboard is equipped with two 16GB DDR5 RAM sticks that run at 5,600MHz to match the 9850X3D’s officially supported maximum memory speed. It also has a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090. The RTX 5090 was utilized for all tests except those focused on integrated graphics performance.

In addition to these components, a SilverStone Hela 1650R Platinum ATX 3.1 power supply delivers juice to the system, and everything sits on a Praxis Wetbench open-air chassis. All tests are conducted using Windows 11 with the latest updates installed.

(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)

In addition to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and the Ryzen 9 9900X, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D also directly competes with Intel’s "Arrow Lake" family, specifically the Core Ultra 7 265K and the Core Ultra 9 285K. The 9850X3D’s MSRP is roughly in the middle between these two Intel competitors, with the Ultra 7 costing $105 less and the Ultra 9 costing $90 more.

Processor Tests

Based on CPU performance alone, the eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D is not particularly competitive at its price, which is not surprising. This dynamic was also true for the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D in our testing, and that hasn't deterred many devoted buyers who care about game performance before all else. While the 9850X3D showed mild performance gains over the 9800X3D thanks to its higher clock speed, it still lagged well behind the Intel competition in many of our CPU tests. The only test in which the Intel Core Ultra 7 and Intel Core Ultra 9 didn’t hold a significant performance lead over the Ryzen 7 9850X3D was in the Adobe app tests.

Either way, if you are concerned about CPU performance, it's no question: Either the Core Ultra 7 265K or the Core Ultra 9 285K will provide you with substantially faster performance over the 9850X3D in core- and thread-sensitive content creation and most productivity tasks.

Gaming Tests: Low Settings

Running games with low graphics settings is what all AMD processors with 3D V-Cache are best at. The advantage you get from this will vary depending on how potent your graphics card is, the game you play, the resolution you select, and the settings you enable. Configured with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 and keeping the graphics settings low, you can see the 9850X3D's specific advantage.

In Cyberpunk 2077, the 9850X3D achieved the best performance out of all of the processors tested, with the 9800X3D trailing behind it and the Ryzen 9 9950X3D not much further behind. F1 2024 resulted in a familiar breakdown, except that at 4K resolution the 9800X3D and 9950X3D pulled ahead slightly.

The results gathered from Black Myth: Wukong were less clean-cut. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D performed about the same as the 9800X3D and 9950X3D in this game at 1080p resolution. (The 9950X3D pulled far ahead at 4K resolution, perhaps due to its increased cache; we were unable to resolve that specific anomalous number.) Also an oddity: The 9850X3D performed worse with the resolution set to 1440p. After running the test several times, this seems likely due to a game-specific glitch.

The test results from Total War: Three Kingdoms and Shadow of the Tomb Raider again showed the 9850X3D largely leading the pack in test scores, trading blows with the similar 9800X3D.

Without going through each game again to discuss Intel’s performance here, Intel’s processors are unquestionably slower in these tests. What is questionable about these results, however, is how much value you should place on them. It depends on your gaming priorities.

Myself, I prefer gaming with the best possible image quality and typically stick to a 60Hz refresh rate. Second, even for high-refresh gaming, Intel’s performance here is sufficient for most gamers. These Intel chips wouldn’t have an issue maintaining a 144Hz refresh rate in any of the games tested except Black Myth Wukong at 4K, which vexed almost every CPU tested. In most games, the Intel processors soared past the 200Hz mark, which suggests that, in most cases, you’ll hit your monitor’s refresh-rate limit before you hit the processor’s frame-rate ceiling.

Also, recognize that these results were derived using a GeForce RTX 5090 card. While this is a standard we adhere to for consistency, and this pairing is what the 9850X3D's target audience expects, testing with slower graphics cards would push all of the tested processors closer together. While the Ryzen 7 9850X3D technically wins here, its real-world benefit mostly applies to specific gamers with high-end cards.

Gaming Tests: High Settings

Testing with 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, UL’s latest 3DMark test for CPU performance, we can see the Ryzen 7 9850X3D falls behind the competition a bit, supporting our findings in the CPU-centric benchmarks above. This benchmark is not wholly representative of real-world performance, though. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D showed it is also a capable processor for running games at high graphics settings, which may be a more impressive display of its capabilities for mainstream buyers than its low-graphics 1080p performance.

In Cyberpunk 2077, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D was again the fastest processor tested, followed closely by the other 3D V-Cache processors. The performance gap narrowed to a tie as the resolution increased, but the lead that the 3D V-Cache chips held at 1080p was substantial and impressive.

AMD’s Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 processors continued to perform exceptionally well in F1 2024 with ultra-high graphics settings. The 3D V-Cache chips were once again the fastest at 1080p, but the Ryzen 9 9950X without 3D V-Cache pulled into a tie with them at 1440p. Almost all of the Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 processors ran F1 2024 faster at 1440p than the Intel competition could run the game at 1080p, which shows more clearly than just about anything else the advantage AMD holds in this area.

In Black Myth: Wukong, all the processors were pulled into a near-tie while running the game with its cinematic graphics preset. The only real exception here is the AMD Ryzen 5 8500G, which lagged behind. This is due to the graphical workload making the RTX 5090 the performance bottleneck rather than the CPU, which is why the games all pulled together at 4K in Cyberpunk 2077 and F1 2024, too.

These results give us a clear impression of how we should consider these processors for gaming. If you are going to game at 4K resolution, it likely doesn’t matter quite as much what CPU you pick from this list, so long as it isn’t the Ryzen 5 8500G. Most reasonably capable modern processors will fall into this group as well, as the graphics card is more often the bottleneck. This means that if you buy something like an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K because you need its faster general CPU performance for other tasks, it should serve you fine for gaming at 4K.

If you are gaming at 1440p, you should be OK with an Intel processor most of the time, but realistically, you would be better off with something from AMD. You don’t necessarily need to buy a processor with 3D V-Cache for 1440p gaming, as the Ryzen 9 9950X did just as well at 1440p in these tests, but you probably do want to stick to AMD.

For gaming at 1080p, however, Ryzen processors with 3D V-Cache, like the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, look more appealing. If you have a high-refresh-rate monitor and play at 1080p or 1440p, there is enough of a boost here to make the Ryzen 7 9850X3D recommendable. (Just know, you won’t see as significant an advantage in every game or with every graphics card.)

Integrated Graphics Tests

This is a mostly academic section. The integrated graphics processor (IGP) that AMD provided with the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is unchanged from the rest of the Ryzen 9000 and Ryzen 7000 series of CPUs. All of these processors have an IGP based on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture with 128 streaming processors, typically clocked at 2.2GHz. Thus, it was no surprise when I ran these tests that the 9850X3D performed nearly identically to most of the other late-model AMD CPUs I’ve tested.

The performance displayed here isn’t bad, as you can still run games like those used for testing. However, the truth is that this Radeon IGP is the slowest on the market, so that works against it. Intel has included faster IGPs in its processors for some time now, so if you want a more capable IGP, you should look at one of those instead or into an AMD processor with a better IGP, like the Ryzen 5 8500G.

All that said, this is a moot point! You absolutely shouldn’t consider any processors with 3D V-Cache for their IGP performance, as the entire point of those processors is to be paired with a super-fast GPU.

Power Consumption and Thermal Tests

Testing with a Kill-A-Watt power meter gave me an idea of how much power the Ryzen 7 9850X and the other tested processors pulled during select tests. It’s hard to gauge how efficient these processors are from this data alone, though. The 9800X3D and the 9850X3D performed very similarly, which isn't a surprise. The Core Ultra 7 265K and the Core Ultra 9 285K both used considerably more power, but they were also much faster in the multicore CPU tests, which could make them more efficient overall. (By which we mean: They might execute their tasks more quickly and then ramp down, saving power.)

Thermally, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D and the 9800X3D both run a bit hot compared with the competition and AMD’s higher-end Ryzen 9 processors. This difference is likely due to the added heat of the 3D V-Cache layer, and while the Ryzen 9 9950X3D also has one of these, it’s positioned over just one of the chip's core complex dies (CCDs) and not both, which likely affected the results.