This is how I used to eat breakfast. And this is how I eat breakfast now. See the
difference? Thanks to the Ryzen 7 9850X 3D, I now do everything 7.69% faster,
which doesn't sound like a big deal, but as far as mid-generation refreshes go,
this one is pretty all right. TLDDR. It
costs a few dollars more for a chip that is by and large the same as the 9800 X3D
that you already know and love, except it boosts its clock speeds higher,
resulting in measurable gains across productivity and esports gaming. And it
does so without running hotter or louder
or drawing a ton more power. Is it the most exciting chip launch we've ever
seen from AMD? No. But it never claimed to be. It's just some mid-generation
fine wine aging for the AM5 platform while we wait for a true successor based
on Zen 6 toward the end of this year or early next. So with that in mind, let's
take a look at performance to see who should be interested in the 9850X3D
and maybe more importantly who should be holding on to their existing hardware
and saving their money. And also who should be checking out our sponsor,
>> Jawa. With DDR5 getting so expensive,
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computers. There's more info in the link down below.
RTX5090s are in short supply, even here at LT. So, we set up four identical
benches with RTX 4090s and got right to work on gaming performance, where AMD's
claims were immediately validated. The king got a little king glear with the
9850 X3D leading the pack across our entire suite of esports titles and 1080p
benchmarks. Now, I could spend the rest of my slideshow presentation here
talking about the cases where it leads by a little bit and the ones where it
leads by a little bit more, but instead I'm simply going to say it wins and I'm
going to use the rest of my time to explain why reviewers even bother to
test like this. I mean, surely no one buying a $500 gaming CPU is going to be
running at 1080p low on an RTX 4090,
right? Well, yeah, you're right. But we do this because we want to know which
chip is faster, period. Not which one
handles better, not which one is more likely to impress the chicks at the
club. Which one is faster? And when you want to know which chip pumps out frames
better, lowering both your resolution and your in-game details helps to
isolate the CPU's game engine handling performance and really separate the
fastest chip from the almost fastest
chip. And AMD's 9850X3D is the fastest
gaming chip that we tested thanks to all of the things that made its predecessor
processor the fastest before. Eight of AMD's Zen 5 cores coupled with ample 3D
vcache creates a combo that puts both Intel's latest Core Ultra desktop chips
and their older 14th gen flagship to absolute shame. But does any of this
matter? To answer that, we need to get a little more realistic both in terms of
in-game visuals and the realworld use cases for these chips. Let's step up
then to 1440p resolution and throw in some tests with ray tracing where uhoh,
the 9850X3D no longer sits alone at top the roost,
king of his domain, but becomes simply another runner in the race. Still a very
fast chip, boasting the highest average FPS in both Counter-Strike 2 and Rocket
League. So, it's clear then that once we start to introduce more variables, the
story becomes muddier to say the least
with certain games favoring some CPU architectures more than others and those
advantages shrinking the more GPU eye
candy you turn on with ray tracing being the ultimate equalizer, bringing every
chip we tested within about 5% of the
rest. Which isn't to say though that you should just buy any chip and expect
exactly the same experience. In the longer term, theoretically, a faster
gaming chip will last you through more GPU upgrades, extending the time before
your next platform upgrade. And with upscaling technology becoming more and
more important all the time, rendering high frame rates at lower resolutions
and then upscaling them with AI could become increasingly important for
high-end gaming. Okay, then Linus. So, just buy the one at the top of the chart
then. Well, not that either. It's horses for courses. If all that matters to you
is the highest FPS at low or medium details or in esports titles, yeah, it
doesn't get any better than the 9850X3D. But for almost anyone else, we need to
at least think about the bigger picture. What about whole platform pricing? Where
could I score a deal? Intel's older generation 12th gen CPUs are still
potent gaming chips and they support cheaper DDR4 memory. We'll have a full
video on that coming soon. But the TLDDR is it's a pretty compelling value. Or if
I'm willing to go to the secondhand market, 5700 X3D pricing has not spiked
nearly as high as 5800 X3Ds. And AM4
motherboards and matching DDR4 can be had for cheap. Add an open box 1440p
gaming monitor. And that's an entire platform refresh for the price of a 9850
X3D CPU alone, which would leave plenty
of budget to get some nice new cables at ltstore.com. We'll have that link down
below. Of course, none of what I just said means the 9850 X3D is bad or a bad
deal. It's a bad CPU. No, it's not. The best of the best always comes at a
premium, and honestly, it's a better product than I thought it was going to
be. My initial reaction was h it's probably going to be a roided out 9800X
3D and I expected a big boost to both
power draw and heat output in order for AMD to reach their lofty 5.6 GHz boost
frequency targets. But that turned out to not be the case. In our Cinebench
power draw test, AMD's finest hit higher clock speeds than its predecessor while
running ever so slightly cooler and drawing ever so slightly less power. We
didn't see quite the same thing in F-124. Power draw was actually up a
little bit on average, but still both of these results are so close that it is
safe to say that this is not a meaningfully more power- hungry chip,
and it does clock noticeably higher. This translates to a better experience
outside of games as well, where the 9850 X3D consistently beats its 50less cousin
across both our productivity and our creative benchmarks with small victories
in multi-threaded workloads and larger ones in singlethreaded applications
where it really gets to flex its boosted clock speed. It's worth noting, by the
way, we didn't run our entire suite here since these X3D chips really are
marketed primarily towards gaming, but we still wanted to show a snapshot of
what they're capable of outside of games. Now, I'm not going to go into
this too much, but Intel's core count advantage translates into some really
lopsided results in our multi-threaded benchmarks. And that's with their last
gen Core Ultra. Can't wait to see what happens when their new architecture
makes its way from mobile to the desktop. Core Ultra NextG versus Zen 6
is going to be a heck of a battle. Of course, that's a story for tomorrow. The
story for today is Ryzen 7 9850X3D.
It's a little faster and it costs a little more. Not the most exciting chip,
but certainly better than AMD simply resting on their laurels and waiting for
Intel to close the gap. And I was really impressed to see that their
manufacturing has improved so much in the last year that they can do this
without juicing power consumption. Now, to juice this segue to our sponsor,
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rig today. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out our recent look
at AMD's top of the top of the top-of-the-line workstation pro chip.
That thing is nuts. It costs more than an entire PC with this and a 5090 in it
for just the CPU.