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AMD has already closed the Intel gap for gaming with its Ryzen 9 7950X3D, and now it’s ready to take things a step further. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D is the chip everyone has been waiting to see the benchmarks after the previous Ryzen 7 5800X3D dominated gaming CPUs for a long time. Although the 7800X3D arrives more than a month after the 7950X3D, I can confidently say it was well worth the wait.
The new Ryzen 7 7800X3D costs $449, with eight cores, 16 threads and a boost clock of up to 5 GHz. It’s designed to compete with Intel’s flagship Core i9-13900K (about $589), AMD’s flagship Ryzen 9 7950X3D ($699), and even Intel’s $699 Core i9-13900KS processor that runs up to 6GHz natively.
AMD’s 7800X3D impressed me a lot of. At $449, it offers some of the best PC gaming performance you can find right now, while coming in a package that consumes far less power than Intel’s equivalents. It’s so impressive that I think it should be most people’s next gaming PC CPU.
I tested AMD’s 7800X3D with MSI’s Meg X670E Ace motherboard, 32 GB G.Skill DDR5 6000 RAM and Nvidia’s RTX 4090. This is one of the latest AM5 motherboards, so it has a single PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot and three PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots for many PC game storage options.
Unfortunately, we don’t currently have a 5800X3D in our labs, but I’ve tested various workloads, synthetic benchmarks, and games on AMD’s Ryzen 7 7800X3D, the 7950X3D, Intel’s Core i9-13900K, and the 13900KS. All tests were performed on the latest Windows 11 2022 update with VBS security disabled on all systems. Customizable BAR is enabled and tests were performed primarily at 1080p resolution to avoid potential GPU bottlenecks and to analyze raw CPU performance.
AMD’s Ryzen 7 7800X3D blasts past Intel’s Core i9-13900K in all seven games I tested at 1080p and max or ultra settings. Both F1 22 And Shadow of the Tomb Raider run more than 15 percent faster on the 7800X3D, and Watch Dogs: Legion is 9 percent faster on this latest AMD CPU.
I was surprised to see Nvidia’s RTX 4090 pushing 366 fps at 1080p in Shadow of the Tomb Raider with the 7800X3D, which gets past the peak performance I saw on the 7950X3D. Even Subway Exodus sees some solid performance gains for the 7800X3D over both the 13900K and 7950X3D.
All of these results are impressive for AMD at 1080p, but since I usually run a smaller selection of games for our CPU tests, I also wanted to test some of the games I usually use for GPU reviews. In fact, this CPU has impressed me so much that it will be the primary setup here for testing future GPUs The edge.
So I really wanted to put the 7800X3D up against Intel’s Core i9-13900KS in an extended gaming test at 1080p. The 13900KS is a souped-up version of the 13900K, with a top speed of 6 GHz and modified base clocks designed to boost PC gaming performance. It’s the best Intel has to offer for PC gaming right now, but it’s also $699 compared to the $449 price of the 7800X3D.
In the 16 gaming tests at 1080p, the 7800X3D came out on top 10 times. Most of the losses are super close with the exception of CS:GO, where Intel’s 13900KS manages to beat the 7800X3D by nearly 8 percent. Any other time the 7800X3D loses, it’s less than a 3 percent lead for Intel here. It’s a similar story at 1440p, where the 7800X3D can beat the 13900KS in most tests or lose it by a slim margin.
Where AMD doesn’t win is on the productivity side. The 7800X3D lags far behind Intel here. Both of AMD’s top X3D chips lose out to Intel on PugetBench’s Photoshop test, Geekbench 5 and Cinebench R23. The 7800X3D isn’t really designed to take on productivity tasks, so this isn’t surprising, and you’d really want the 7950X3D or Intel’s Core i9-13900K instead.
But if all you care about is gaming, the 7800X3D is the obvious choice given its combination of performance gains, price, and power consumption. It’s really impressive how efficient AMD’s 7800X3D is here. I tested the 7800X3D running Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K with maximum ray-tracing settings, and the CPU pack power peaked at 67 watts. Intel’s 13900KS maxed out at 275 watts for the same task.
I also saw the 13900KS reach 329 watts during a Cinebench run, while the 7800X3D only reached a peak power of 86 watts. While the 13900KS delivers much better Cinebench performance and a small increase in frame rates in games such as Cyberpunk 2077, it provides better performance in most games without additional power consumption.
The 7800X3D also reached a maximum temperature of 84 degrees Celsius during a Cinebench run, compared to 101 degrees Celsius max on the 13900KS. Like the 7950X3D, the 7800X3D has a TDP of 120 watts, lower than the 170 watt TDP of the original Zen 4 7950 chip. Intel uses a base power of 125 watts on the Core i9-13900K and has pushed it up to 150 watts on the 13900KS. At maximum turbo power, both of the latest Intel chips go above 250 watts and can go even further if a motherboard allows it.
The efficiency of AMD’s latest X3D chips is due to the latest Zen 4 architecture and a combination of the impressive 3D V-Cache technology. 3D V-Cache works so well in games because they don’t need a lot of CPU cores and power. Instead, they prefer CPUs that can process data quickly with large amounts of cache. Productivity apps don’t typically favor large amounts of cache, so we don’t see the same performance gains on those tasks.
The 7800X3D, like the 7950X3D, requires a new AM5 motherboard. These boards have support for DDR5 memory and up to 24 PCIe 5.0 lanes. The first PCIe 5.0 consumer SSDs will be launched soon, but most will still use PCIe 4.0 SSDs for now. The PCIe 5.0 support on AM5 boards is great for future proofing, but you won’t need it anytime soon for GPUs. Nvidia’s latest RTX 40 series cards do not support this latest standard and we have not yet reached the limits of PCIe 4.0 for GPUs.
Existing AM4 coolers should also work fine with AM5 boards. I was able to use Corsair’s H150 Elite LCD with no changes needed on the 7800X3D, 7950X3D and regular 7950. It’s worth checking with your cooler manufacturer to see if existing AM4 models can be easily used with this new AM5 motherboards. .
You should also make sure to configure a new BIOS option to ensure that boot times are reasonable. I noticed some early issues with the DDR5 memory training process during my Ryzen 9 7900X test, with an additional boot time of about 30 seconds. AM5 motherboards come with a “restore memory context” BIOS option that you must have enabled to reduce boot time.
Although I enabled this on MSI’s Meg X670E Ace motherboard and it dramatically reduced boot times, my system started shutting down with Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) memory related errors. I quickly changed the setting back to regain some stability and reported the issues to both AMD and MSI. I’m sure these early issues will be fixed with a BIOS update as I’ve already seen improvements since my initial 7900X review.
AMD’s 7800X3D is a truly impressive gaming CPU. AMD closed the gap with the 7950X3D, and now it goes further and increases its efficiency at the same time. If I were building a gaming PC right now, I’d choose the 7800X3D without a doubt.
If you use your PC for both gaming and productivity apps like Photoshop, Premiere Pro or the like then the 7950X3D is a better option for those who need performance in both. Both of AMD’s top options pack great PC gaming performance in processors that don’t cost that much to run. That’s important in many markets that are still feeling the effects of rising energy bills or for anyone who wants their PC gaming to have less impact on the environment.
The 5800X3D became the popular option for PC gamers, and I think the 7800X3D will shine here for 2023 and beyond.
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