This is how I used to eat breakfast. And this is how I eat breakfast now.
See the difference? Thanks to the Ryzen 7 9850X3D,
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. TLDR, it costs a few dollars more for a chip
that is by and large the same as the 9800X3D
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?
["RTX 5090s"]
RTX 5090s are in short supply, even here at LTT.
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 glir with the 9850X3D 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 gonna say it wins
and I'm gonna 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 gonna be running at 1080p low on an RTX 4090, right?
Well, yeah, you're right. But we do this because we wanna 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 wanna 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 3DV cache
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 real world use cases for these chips.
Let's step up then to 1440P resolution and throw in some tests with ray tracing where,
whoa, the 9850X3D no longer sits alone atop 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 lower medium details or any sports 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 TLDR is, it's a pretty compelling value.
Or if I'm willing to go to the second hand market, 5700X3D pricing has not spiked nearly as high
as 5800X3Ds and AM4 motherboards and matching DDR4
can be had for cheap at an open box 1440P gaming monitor.
And that's an entire platform refresh for the price of a 9850X3D CPU alone,
which would leave plenty of budget to get some nice new cables at lttstore.com.
We'll have that link down below. Of course, none of what I just said means the 9850X3D is bad
or a bad deal, it's 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 gonna be.
My initial reaction was, ah, it's probably gonna be a righted out 9800X3D.
And I expected a big boost to both power draw
and heat output in order for AMD to reach their lofty 5.6 gigahertz 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 F124.
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 9850X3D consistently beats its 50-less cousin
across both our productivity and our creative benchmarks with small victories in multi-threaded workloads
and larger ones in single-threaded 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 gonna 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 what 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 next-gen versus Zen 6 is gonna 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. 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.
Just a CPU.