AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D Review: Gaming Faster than 13900K and 7950X3D?

The one we’ve been waiting for is here. The $449 Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor promises to offer similar gaming performance to AMD’s flagship 7950X3D and Intel’s Core i9 13900K, while also consuming significantly less power and costing less than its competitors. To find out which of these three options is the fastest gaming CPU on the market, we’ve started a shootout – and tested each option in nine of the most challenging CPU-bound scenarios, absorbing all available Thread modern gaming into ray tracing showcases and esports championships.

We had high hopes for the 7800X3D – after all, the CPU’s design allows its full 120W TDP to be dedicated to an octa-core chiplet with a performance-boosting 3D V-Cache. In contrast, the 7950X3D and 7900X3D announced in February split the power budget between two chiplets, with only one featuring additional L3 cache, so we’ll likely see higher performance than those CPUs. It’s a similar situation to the Intel Core i9 13900K, an excellent CPU for gaming and content creation – but it relies on Windows’ built-in scheduling algorithms to take full advantage of its asymmetric performance core and efficiency core design.

Even close to its rivals in terms of frame rates, the 7800X3D could be in the same hallowed class as the legendary 5800X3D, an affordable mid-range CPU that punches well above its weight and even challenges Intel’s flagship parts of the same generation.

You can see how the 7800X3D fits into AMD’s Zen 4 series in the table below. As a reminder, each of these Ryzen 7000 desktop designs benefits from a host of advancements over their Ryzen 5000 (Zen 3) counterparts, citing a 13% increase in instructions per clock (IPC) and more internal improvements , such as an improved execution engine and a better branch predictor. There’s also DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 support, with 5nm CCD and 6nm I/O chips, and a new AM5 socket that unlocks extra power and performance — albeit requiring a new motherboard, new RAM, and possibly new cooling.

For our testing, we use the same basic setup as our Ryzen 7950X3D review. That means our graphics card requires an ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard, a G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo DDR5-6000 CL30 RAM, and an RTX 3090 Strix OC from Asus. Cooling is provided by a 240mm Alphacool Eisbaer Aurora AiO, which is happily still compatible with the AM5 socket.

For storage, we use three PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs to hold all our games – a 4TB Kingston KC3000, a 1TB PNY XLR8 CS3140, and a 1TB Crucial P5 Plus. Our rig came with a 1000W Corsair RM1000x power supply.

We previously used an older version of Windows 21H2 to maintain compatibility with past benchmarks, but this time we threw out the old results and retested – with the latest Windows updates, chipset drivers and BIOS revisions installed. This means BIOS version version 1.18.1006 for the ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard hosting our AMD processor and BIOS version F8a for the Z790 Aorus motherboard socket 13900K.

Before jumping into the gaming benchmarks that make up pages two to six, let’s take a quick look at some quick content creation benchmarks: Cinebench R20 3D rendering and Handbrake video transcoding. These results are useful even in a gaming environment, as they set expectations for single-core and multi-core performance where the extra cache has no advantage – you might want to occasionally export a video clip of your sick Counter Strike 2 Clutch .

In both single-core and multi-core results, we see results from the 7700X that are 10% faster than the 7800X3D, which has the same basic eight-core, 16-thread design as the new chip, but at a higher frequency. No need to accommodate 3D V-Cache. This corresponds to the 7800X3D’s single-core scores of 706 and multi-core scores of 7108 in Cinebench R20, compared to 768 and 7894 for the 7700X.

That doesn’t sound great, but it’s a relatively small performance hit considering the massive performance boost we’re expecting to see later on in games. For context, this still puts the 7800X3D well ahead of the previous generation 5800X, with a 16% advantage; compared to the 5800X3D, we see an almost 25% increase in multi-core performance.

The Handbrake results are perhaps more relevant to the average gaming enthusiast, here the margins from 7800X3D to 7700X are a bit tight for H.264 encoding – just 7% – and a bit looser for H.265 (HEVC) encoding at 12%. However, the 7800X3D does achieve this while using much less power than the 7700X, measuring just 190W at the wall compared to 266W for the 7700X – that’s 40% more than the older Ryzen 7000 octa-core chip.

Now, let’s get to the meat of the test – a series of games that test the CPU in different ways. Choose your favorite from the links below, or just hit the next button to continue.

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D analysis

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