AMD touts Ryzen 7 5800X3D as world’s best gaming processor, with receipts

AMD added a few details to the picture it has painted of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which the company claims is currently the world’s fastest gaming processor.

Specifically, AMD fleshed out the expected performance difference between the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and the Core i9-12900K, Intel’s rival 12th-gen “Alder Lake” processor.

Though AMD will begin shipping the Ryzen 7 5800X3D on April 20, the chip is already well known. A “backpack” of 64MB of bonded V-Cache bumps up the chip’s total level-3 cache to a total of 96MB, which provides an enormous performance advantage over a chip like the standard Ryzen 7 5800X, which might spend a relatively lengthy amount of time hunting down data from a PC’s main memory. The 8-core/16-thread chip runs at a base clock of 3.4GHz and a boost clock of 4.5GHz.

AMD chief executive Dr. Lisa Su showed off the Ryzen 7 5800X3D at CES 2022, where she claimed that the chip was faster than Intel’s 12th-gen Core i9-12900K by 10 to 20 percent, in games ranging from Final Fantasy XIV to Shadow of the Tomb Raider. AMD’s 105-watt, 7nm Ryzen 7 5800X3D (with a 142W power limit) will cost $449 when it ships on April 20, AMD has said, compared to the 125W 10nm Intel Core i9-12900K, which is priced at $609.99 at retailers like Best Buy.

On Thursday, AMD revealed more benchmarks in anticipation of upcoming reviews. While the company has already showed off how the chip is expected to perform against its Ryzen 9 5900X—from a virtual tie to a performance improvement of 1.36X in Watch Dogs: Legion—it hasn’t had many comparisons with the i9-12900K. (Interestingly, the 5900X-vs.-5800X3D performance comparison has been lowered from 1.4X to 1.36X. The 5800X3D will also perform at 92 percent of the 5900X in Cinebench R15, which technical marketing manager Erin Maiorino characterized as a frequency and IPC [instructions-per-clock] test, without capturing the other aspects of performance.)

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“And with that leading gaming performance, and being priced at $449 and drop-in ready to our AMD 500, 400, and select 300-series motherboards, this is an absolute winning combination for gamers and their wallets, with the 5800X3D having up to 40 percent more performance per dollar than the competition,” Maiorino said.

AMD executives have said previously that the Ryzen 7 5800X3D can’t be overclocked, and won’t be shipped with a cooler inside the box. (Technically, the memory and Infinity Fabric are overclockable, Maiorino said. That’s because, “currently,” the V-Cache architecture doesn’t scale like AMD’s chiplet architecture, she said. AMD is working on improving that, she added.)

The 5800X3D will be compatible with the venerable AM4 socket, though you’ll need a BIOS with AGESA 1.2.0.6b or higher to enable the V-Cache, AMD said.

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Robert Hallock, director of technical marketing at AMD, noted that packaging is now just another significant way AMD can increase performance. “It used to be that you had to change process nodes or change CPU architecture to get 15 percent gaming performance,” he said. “We’re doing it with a package. Our competitor is not.”