The Ryzen 7 9800X3D has rightly earned its now-legendary status as one of the greatest gaming CPUs on the market, and now this coveted chip can power your PC for just $411. Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days has driven down the CPU’s down by 14%, a mere $1.05 shy of its best ever price, making now an excellent time to pick one up. Better still, the processor comes with a redeemable code for Onimusha: Way of the Sword too.
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
“The best gaming processor on the market.” Read our review.
At its heart, the 9800X3D packs eight Zen 5 cores and 16 threads, and is capable of boosting operating frequencies all the way up to 5.2GHz. These qualities are more than enough to keep pace with the demands of almost all games, but it’s a 96MB pool of L3 cache that gives this CPU the ability to push frame rates above processors without 3D V-Cache.
Unlike older X3D CPUs, the 9800X3D features second-generation 3D V-Cache technology. In short, AMD’s latest approach shifts the L3 cache pool underneath the CPU cores, rather than on top of them. This greatly reduces operating temperatures, allowing the processor to reach much higher boost clocks than its predecessors, as well as support overclocking.
As you can see from the bar chart above, the 9800X3D is capable of outpacing practically every processor on the market when it comes to gaming, maximising the performance available from your graphics card. While not every game will take to 3D V-Cache as readily as Cyberpunk 2077, we’ve frequently seen similar results manifest across our benchmark suite.
With a 120W TDP, 9800X3D thermals are by no means difficult to control, but certainly demand moderately competent cooling. Using a 420mm AIO water cooler in our 9950X3D test benches, we were able to keep the CPU at a modest 70°C under load in a 22°C room. This is well below the 95°C thermal limits of the processor, but it’s worth checking out our guide to buying the best CPU cooler if you think you might need some more heat-shifting power.
Don’t forget, you’ll need an active Prime membership to snag this Prime Big Deal Days offer. You can find all you need to know about an Amazon Prime subscription by reading our guide.
