the 9800 x3d. It looks pretty good, guys. Unhinged thumbnail from LTT. Just scroll down about the reviews on YouTube, and you know most people are just very, very positive about the CPU. And it's just kind of relieving to see something like this because we've seen generations of really lame products, say like Zen 5. The base models were just really lame. Intel just released their core Ultra Series on desktop, and I'm not going to lie, those CPUs are really, really lame. So, it's good to see a CPU that people are excited for. And if you did want to go and buy it right now, good luck doing that 'cause if you look at the 9800 x3d on Amazon, for example, there isn't any 9800 x3ds available on Amazon, at least not from what I can tell. If you look it up on PC part picker, which does scan basically the whole internet for parts and everything, this chip is supposed to sell for $480, and it's going for $750 on PC part.

picker right now, so basically they're sold out. That's what that means. It's cool that at the very least it seems like it's living up to that title, that it's succeeding the 7800 x3d, which actually succeeded the 5800 x3d. They are both great gaming CPUs, but I think we need to step back a little bit and really look at this objectively. It's why I reviewed reviews of the CPU. I know I'm apparently the authority on who can review a product now. That's just who I am because I review reviews now. The first one is Optimum Tech. I did Hardware Unboxed, Gamers Nexus, Linus Tech Tips, Der8auer, Tech Power Up, J's 2 Cents, and Level One Tech. Basically, what I did is I went through and, you know, obviously gathered a bunch of the data from their videos and took an average of the performance increase versus these CPUs. Now, I have all the data for the 7800 x3d just for the sake of time. Personally, I don't

think we need to review data from all of the reviewers on these parts. I have a few of the data from these two CPUs, but this one I have data from everyone 'cause it's really important generation on generation, and with all the percentages from every single review, we can make an average of the percent overall to see really on average how much faster is, say, the 9800 XTRD versus the 7800 X3D. It's kind of like an aggregate of everything if you want to get all nerdy. And now, if you guys know anything about Optimum Tech, he makes very short, to-the-point videos. Sometimes they're reviews, sometimes they're experimentation, sometimes they're just showing off something really cool. I think it's a good one to start off with because he'll kind of lay the groundwork. He found the 9800 X 3D to be 9% faster than the 7800 X3D. But I will add, there are only five games in his video, so that's all the comparison was.

but that actually isn't an outlier for a lot of the testers. He's very excited about the AM5 platform. I've got a lot of confidence in the AM5 platform, so as you know, the 9800X 3D is part of AM5. It started with Ryzen 7000 series or Zen 4, those processors. And if we know anything about AM4 motherboard platform, it lasted a super, super long time. And the AM5 platform, he likes the 9800X 3D, the 7800X 3D. He just seems like there are a lot of chips that are coming to this platform, and he sees that it's probably a good future ahead of it. But we can't be 100% sure at this point in time. Something else too, and we're going to see this throughout all the reviews, is everybody talks about previously with these X3D chips. The extra cache was actually stacked on top of the CPU cores, but here they're stacked underneath, are a lot more kind of directly in contact.

with the CPU heat spreaders, they're more thermally efficient, which means that they can squeeze extra clock performance out of them. Cash basically made like an insulating barrier above this, the cores themselves, and the cores can cool themselves. And basically, what that did is limited the power and the temperature that could be on the 7800 XTRD. For example, is this performance really coming from a better architecture increase, or is this more coming from it? The CPU is actually able to draw more power, and it's able to clock higher, 'cause 9% isn't unreasonable for clocking a chip higher in a generation. Let's go ahead and move on to one of the big dogs here, which is Hardware Unboxed. Obviously, tons of data in their videos. 9800 X3D, what they found is 11% faster than the 7800 X3D. You know, within reason, these numbers, it's not out of the ballpark or anything. Hard Box, I think they did like 10 games or something like

that it was quite a bit more so a little bit of an more averaged maybe real-world performance thing for you guys here. Not really that crazy, especially generation on generation. I mean, it's more than what we've been seeing 9700x, so the non-x3d part from this generation. The 9800 x3d for gaming is 30% faster, by the way. All these are for gaming. We'll talk about some of the other tests as well. And then against Intel's part. This is a running theme that we're going to find in this, is that AMD is destroying Intel now 35% faster against their new part on average. Now, what Hardware unbox this theory here of why the 9800 x3d is quite a bit faster in the 7800 x3d, at least based off of what we thought Zen 5 was going to be versus Zen 4, is a little bit different. The extra cash available on the CPU that we haven't seen before on Zen 5 actually eliminated one of the

major problems with the architecture design, and there is just a lower quality in and out die on the chip, which also controls memory, all the I/O on your board, like PCIe and USB and all that kind of stuff. So, that's all controlled by this die. It's basically the same IO die that was on Zen 4, and it just doesn't seem like it's enough to get the improvements for Zen 5. And there's theories that this is why Zen 5 has been kind of lame. We can't 100% confirm it, as far as I know, but basically what Steve claimed is that, Hey, with the extra cache on the die, it helps alleviate all the memory bandwidth constraints because of the IO die on the chip. And that fixes a lot of the issues. Steve did try PBO, which is Precision Boost Overdrive, available on AMD CPUs, and especially with this new one. This isn't really, I mean, it is overclocking, but it's not like really deep overclocking, highly optimized overclocking. He didn't really find that that overclocking or the PBO

really changed a whole lot. So, even though the CPU, you can overclock it now, at least the basic overclock doesn't seem all that different. It seems like AMD is already pushing the CPU basically to the limits. He also tested memory speed, really wasn't that different. So, if you have faster RAM or lower latency RAM, it doesn't really matter. And this theory could also go to support Hard Run Box's theory that, Oh, it's the IO die, because IO controls the memory and that kind of stuff. If it is IO die and memory speed doesn't matter as much, and it's alleviated by the extra memory on the CPU itself instead. And this is where I'm going to start talking about the pricing as well. So, this is a $480 CPU when it's actually selling for the correct price, basically as much as a 7800 XT, like a GPU. That's a pretty damn good GPU, and this is just a CPU. This doesn't include the motherboard or the RAM. Yeah, this chip is pretty expensive. Steve was basically saying, I like, oh

even for the price, because there really is no other competition to the CPU. The 7800 x3d was already the fastest gaming CPU, so the 9800 x3d at $480 is actually still surprisingly a good value. The 7800 x3d is getting very, very expensive right now. You can see it's getting basically scalped, or I don't exactly know how to explain it, but it's at like $450, $476. But this isn't really the price of the 7800 x3d. It has been enjoying nearly as much for most of its life. Yes, it did launch at $450, but we've seen the CPU over the last year multiple times dipped down to like $340 to $350, and it's really only recently the CPU started to increase in price. The 9800 x3d is a good value right now, but it's kind of manufactured to be a good value in this specific position in the market because it has no competition. But what Steve hinted to in his video is that AMD does

tend to drop the prices of their parts pretty quickly. If you were to go and snap up a 9800 x3d right away, do so knowing it will almost certainly be cheaper in a few months' time. AMD is typically very aggressive with their CPU pricing. AMD cut the price on the 7800 Xtra D very aggressively. We'll see if the 9800 xtd gets that same treatment because it doesn't have any competition really. Let's talk about another Steve from Gamers Nexus. The 9800 XD was 12% faster than the 7800 x3d, again pretty in line with these other scores here. I do want to point out this crazy chart that Gamers Nexus had. Like, I don't know what the hell I'm really looking at. They said it was a beta chart too. It's something to do with like simulated performance of the CPUs at different price points. I don't know it. This is a weird chart. I'm not going to lie. That needs some tweaking. I have no clue what I'm looking

at there, Gamers Nexus did have one example of the 9800 x3d just killing everything in Baldur's Gate 3. They tested this, retested this, it just destroyed this game, 20% faster than the 7800 xrd, which is already very fast in the game. And on the price, well, Steve said a similar thing to Steve. The entire thing, just to be really clear, is predicated on the price. The 78 x3d is at the two largest retailers in the US at the time of writing this, was about 480 bucks. If it falls to say 400, 420, and the threes especially, it starts to make sense to really consider it. It really only looks good right now because the 7800 xtd is going for the price that we've seen it been going for for a good amount of its life. But at least AMD didn't overcharge for the CPU. Also, something else that Steve pointed out is that the 9800 x3d launched without any real bugs whatsoever. It looks like this is a more

confident launch with fewer issues to iron out. We don't have to worry about if we're not finding problems. Basically, the 9800 XD dropped smoothly. Also, when the 7800x 3D dropped, that thing was literally exploding in motherboards. Got a good functioning CPU day one launch, which is just unheard of. We've never seen anything like it. And that moves us on to LTT with their unhinged thumbnail. I still, I got to get on what Linus is on. D that found an 8% gain on the CPU for the 9800 x3d. You know, again in line, which I think it's honestly impressive how close these are. Maybe this also goes to show how not buggy the launch is for the 9800 x3d. I mean, the performance numbers are pretty similar between everybody within a few percentage points. Again, just like basically everyone else here, Linus is very happy about having a good CPU. We've seen so much garbage. He's excited to see something interesting. But this does start to get into a point

fastest gaming CPU available at the moment, and that does lead to some things. It's so fast to the point, and it's $48, that a lot of the times, you're not even going to use the speed of the CPU. And this is what Lonus is talking about, because if you have a $480 CPU, I mean, that would probably mean that your graphics card's probably at least got to cost over $1,000. I mean, let's just be honest how the prices work out and everything in that specific position. You're going to have a really good graphics card. You're probably going to be playing at a higher resolution if you're spending that much on your CPU, probably playing at least 1440p up at that performance tier. Even with the 9800 x3d, you're still going to be GPU-limited a lot of the times. You don't even get to see the performance here. Even a lot of the other parts are more than adequate and in other lines of performance. Linus did find that this CPU

is quite a bit better in productivity apps, and this is also congruent with like Hardw un booxed and Gamers Nexus and Optimum Tech. Everybody found that this CPU was leaps and bounds ahead of their 9700x in productivity performance, even though this is an x3d chip. And this is probably because now this CPU doesn't have thermal restrictions, doesn't have power restrictions, so it can clock just as high while also benefiting from the extra cache on the chip. And at the end of the day, that basically just makes it a better version of the other eight-core parts. Even though now the CPU is drawing a lot more power, almost double the power in a lot of cases, at least under full-core load, it actually is about the same temperature as the 7800 x3d, even though the 7800 x3d basically drew like no power. The CPU just was running hot because you couldn't get the heat away from it. But now the 9800 X is just able to control the temperatures. Should be

easier to cool a lot of the time, and even though it does draw more power, like at Peak Performance when you're playing a game or something like that, it doesn't use as much power. That means that even though you might want to say that, Oh, it draws so much more power than the 7800 x3d, it must be so much more inefficient, that isn't really true. Pretty much just as efficient as the 7800 x3d, which just means Peak Performance on this CPU, all-core load, is only going to be better because it can access more power when it needs it, but when it doesn't, it's extremely efficient. Our thermal guy, Dur Bower, this guy is basically like an engineer, a German engineer. He's all into this thermal stuff. 9800 x3d was 10% faster than the 7800x 3D, which again is in line with basically all the other reviews. He was very excited about the overclocking potential for this Chip. He actually delidded the CPU and put direct

die cooling on it, and with direct die cooling. Let me check my notes here. He found that he is able to drop, at least in gaming, from 52 degrees Celsius to 40 degrees Celsius in Remnant 2. I forget what it was in the Cinebench test. Even taking off that metal sheet, the IHS (integrated heat spreader), he's able to get that temperature even lower, which does allow him to overclock it more. Now, we mentioned earlier that Hardw box did a Precision Boost Overdrive test, but Derau genuinely spent some time with it, not a super long time. I think he said it was a few hours. You know, despite all of this, you know, really cool overclocking potential on the chip, the 9800 X3D, he couldn't get that much out of it—10% more performance in Cinebench while only being 20% more power than it was at stock settings, which is pretty cool. Usually, overclocks are wildly inefficient, but that's not really that bad in terms of gaming performance. Uh, he

only at least whenever I saw in this video. He only tested one game with it and Assassin's Creed Mirage. He only found the overclock to be 5% faster, which is noticeable but not really a huge deal. While AMD is already pushing this CPU really well, and you're getting very good performance out of it out of the box, despite the overclock not being that crazy. Dur Bower really does love how AMD has improved it. The 9800x 3D combines everything that I was wishing for in terms of a CPU, improved everything from the 5800 X 3D to the 7800x 3D that I was missing, and it also performs really good in the stock condition. It's also very, very cold in the stock condition. He does say if you have a 7800 x3d, there isn't really a point in buying this CPU. Obviously, if found it's only 10% faster, why would you spend another $480 to get 10% more performance? Let's move on to Tech.

PowerUp. Obviously, this is a website. This isn't a video review or anything like that. 700x 3D, at least through their testing, from when I was looking through some of their games, weren't always GP or CPU limited. So, I'm not sure on this number exactly. It seems low compared to the other ones. It's the 9700x, only 11% faster against the 285k, only 133% faster. Yeah, overall, they had a lot of good things to say about the CPU, despite its kind of underwhelming performance, at least from their specific testing. They said it was the fastest gaming CPU in the world, and their application performance, like we talked about with the other ones, is great. Like, productivity performance, good. Energy efficiency, easy to keep cool, overclocking, all that kind of stuff. They tested all this, but the cons in is the high price. I mean, it's $480 for this CPU. That is quite a bit, not going to lie, especially for a gaming chip that when you're already spending that much are

you even going to get CPU Limited in a game. You could buy it for future proofing, even though there is good application performance with productivity. You know, you could get an Intel chip for much cheaper, like a 13700K, that destroys productivity. If you are looking for this for productivity, then it's probably not the best way to go. Again, this is basically when you need the extra power that you can get, the extra power on the chip. So, this isn't power limited compared to the old 7800 X3D chips and all that kind of stuff. If we scroll down here, especially the pricing alternatives, they talk a lot like a $48 a lot for an 8-core processor, and it is very fast, and they talk about that. But you know, there's a lot of other options. 9700X is $150 cheaper, um, and you can even get a 7700X for a lot cheaper than that. 14900K, which is 24 cores, 32 threads. I think this CPU is like $400.

right now, so yeah, there's just a lot of good options around for the 9800 X3 that don't necessarily beat it in gaming, but they are very competitive across the board, and it makes you consider if you really want to spend it on the 9800 X3D. I mean, maybe not the best deal. Let's move on to Jay's 2 cents. The 9800 X3D is 15% faster than the 7800 X3D, at least on average. All right, this is the highest total that I found out of all the reviews, and it seems like it's because it's some of the older games that really like cash, particularly performs well in those games. Jay is also very excited about how easy it is to cool this thing, and he's found the CPU itself basically as a toy to be something really fun to play with. We've been playing around with it for like the last week or so, and I can tell you right now, it's actually a pretty fun CPU to play with. Spending

$480 on a CPU. I don't really think it's a toy at that point, but you know, at least you have fun with it. And let's move on to our last review, which is Level One Tech, and see what he found. And that is, that's 9% faster overall. Again, most of these are in line. I think the biggest outlier is Tech Power Up and Jay's Two Cents, and you can see based on their reviews of probably why they concluded the ways they conclude. Tech Power Up was pretty nuanced, and Jay was almost care that the thing is going to do too well. And you can see the other reviews were also somewhat in the middle. So it's interesting to see how those review conclusions turned out based on what their testing actually gets. In Level One Tech, pretty middle of the road. He mentioned some stuff about Linux in his video. Linux doesn't have as many scheduling issues compared to what Windows does. So I'm not sure on Linux. I don't really know anything about it, but he's kind of talking about that, but

Wendell also says that the CPU doesn't feel like if you have a 7800x 3D. This is not worth getting, and really based off of all of this data. Here is it really worth 10% more performance to spend another 480 bucks, and the actual generation improvement is kind of just okay. Usually, like 15 to 20% generation performance on CPUs is like really solid, but Wendell did show that the extra CPU performance, even at 1440p, and this did apply to other people's testing as well. The CPU is faster, the 1% load, so basically how much the game is stuttering. The game stutters less even when you are technically GPU limited because in those short bursts where you're CPU limited. The 9800 X3, because it is faster, because it has more power, access to alleviate some power spikes or whatever. It can handle that kind of stuff, and it's a much smoother experience. I mean, at least a noticeably smoother experience even when you are GPU limited. I'm not sure if I'd pay that.

much for a slightly smoother experience, but it's there. Wend does also appreciate that the CPU didn't cost like $600 or something like that. And just like how also Steve from Hard Run Box said, it's probably a wise decision. Almost certainly gotten away with charging even more. Thankfully, they didn't, which I think long-term will prove to be a smart choice. If you guys have at least two brain cells functioning on your head, you can probably assume what kind of performance we get overall. And that does total up to about 10% faster against the 7800 X3D, and about 21% faster than the 9700X, which is AMD's non-3D cache part. And about 24% faster than the 285K, Intel's latest part. Intel is just crumbling right now. And basically, all reviewers said that is that Intel just cannot compete. If you compare the prices, at least MSRP, of these CPUs. 7800 X3D was $450, 9800 X3D is $480. But maybe a year

and a half between these CPUs, maybe at the rate of inflation, basically the same price, and getting 10% faster performance, and it's easier to cool a good CPU. If you want the absolute fastest thing available, you can get it. $480 is a lot to spend on it. I do kind of hate to say that because I don't want to just be raining on the parade because I do want to get excited about a product too. It's good to see that something is happening here, and if the price does come down, I mean, this will be a very reasonable CPU. I know I didn't buy a 7800 Xtra D right away because it was pretty expensive at the time, and it was $450 for an core CPU. And yes, it's great at gaming, but it's like, do you really need to game that much? And I actually bought it in a bundle deal at Micro Center. I got the 7800 Xtra D. If you actually price out the bundle, it was only $220, so it was like really dirt cheap at

the time, so I'd love to see the price of this 9800 XRD come down to a more reasonable area, and it probably will, 'cause I think people will stop buying it at some point in time. I do have a theory of also what might be happening for the 16-core and the 12-core if they are making a 12-core one. Both core complexes, so 8-core and 8-core, basically those 16-core CPUs are divided up into eight and eight, and then those are combined together to make the full CPU. This time, I think they might put the cache on both sides or both sets of cores. Last time, only one set had the cache; the other set was actually just a normal 7,000 series set of cores. When they gamed, then it basically just turned off or tried to. It didn't always work, but just tried to turn off the one that doesn't have the extra cache on it. So, that would mean that it gets normal gaming or really good gaming performance, and then when they want to all work

together for like a big core workload. Then they all wake up and they just kind of combine their strengths together, so you kind of get the best of both worlds. But it can lead to some problems with like scheduling and making sure that the right cores are doing the right task. In theory, it's really good, but in practice, it doesn't always work out with the 9950 x3d, maybe the 9900 x3d as well. And they might put the cash on both sides, so you don't get those issues with conflicts and scheduling issues. And at the same time, these CPUs could be as fast as the 950x. You would be making no compromises because the power, they're not power constrained anymore. They had to constrain the 7950 x3d, and they wouldn't have to do it this time. So, the only problem that I think with this theory, why they might not put it on both sides of the chip, if the CPU itself would just cost too much to do that. Because obviously, doing the 3D vcash

stuff costs more money. They got to stack like chips on top of each other, and that just gets expensive. At the end of the day, it would just be the ultimate CPU to buy if you want to put it in your main rig and be able to do both of those things. Let me know what you think about that theory. Overall, the consensus of this CPU is like it's cool that there is something new. It's pretty expensive, and if you already have a 7800 x3d, if that CPU's price wasn't inflated right now, there isn't really a reason to get this new one in particular. But you really wouldn't be upgrading every generation anyways, let's be honest. And I kind of did this to actually check for myself to see if I want to get this CPU. I'm not 100% sure. I might have to get it or something depending on testing and stuff for videos and all that. So yeah, hopefully this helps you as well and makes that decision for you. I mean, I would mainly recommend it if you're

going to AM5, and you're going to upgrade your motherboard and RAM to this platform. Anyways, the 9800X could make some sense, but I'd definitely wait a few months to see if it comes down in price. If it doesn't, then I would just say buy it. Otherwise, though, if you just want to come to AM5 and you want to get a better deal on a CPU, I mean, there's great deals out there. The R5 7600, 9600, or the 7700X, really great CPUs for the price. Yeah, I wouldn't beat yourself up about not getting literally the fastest gaming CPU, 'cause at the end of the day, if you're playing at 1440p and you don't have a 4090, you're probably not going to be getting CPU-limited. And even when you are, it's still going to be at a good frame rate, unlike the other CPUs that are available right now, unless you're playing Monster Hunter Wilds. I reviewed the reviews, sorry to maybe put a wet

blanket on it, but I just got to be real with it. It's cool, but it ain't that crazy. I ain't rushing out to buy it, but apparently, a lot of people are. So, I'm going to see you guys in the next video. You all have a good one, and peace. [Music]

The "Perfect" Gaming CPU isn't what they say it is... -- 9800x3D META-ANALYSIS!

The "Perfect" Gaming CPU isn't what they say it is... -- 9800x3D META-ANALYSIS!