- This is the fastest gaming CPU on the planet!
Or at least it was when AMD first announced it.
Intel beats them to the punch
with what they claim is the fastest gaming CPU:
The Core i9-1200KS.
They put that together so quickly,
we didn't get a chance to review it
before they shoved it out door.
What is it about this unassuming little square,
the Ryzen 7 5800X3D,
that's got Intel so scared
that they dropped everything to come out ahead of it?
I'll tell you,
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- AMD's new gaming CPU
achieves its fastest ever gaming claims
by using their shiny new 3D V-Cache technology,
where ultra-fast cache memory
is stacked on top of the CPU die,
in addition to the cache that's already inside it.
But why is cache so important for gaming
that AMD would go out of their way
to literally make a cash sandwich?
Because it's so close to the CPU cores, it is fast!
You can think of it roughly
like the relationship between RAM and storage.
And there are different levels of cache
that get even faster the closer they get to the cores.
3D V-cache is L3 cache, which for the 5800X3D,
is a shared pool of cache memory
for all of its eight cores.
For games, this cache is used for, well, everything.
But especially for things like AI behavior trees,
physics information,
and other things that the CPU is constantly doing.
If the cache fills up
and this stuff has to be evicted back to RAM,
the CPU not only has to wait
for new data to arrive from RAM,
but it also has to wait for the old data
to come back when it's needed again.
This is what you'd call a bottleneck.
And this one will lower frame rates of CPU bound games,
or cause hitching, even when FPS is high.
With three times the cache of its namesake:
the Ryzen 58007X.
The 5800X3D promises to basically
never run out of cache on a normal circumstances,
which should improve gaming performance.
To test that, we've got a range of CPUs
from both team red and team blue,
including the brand new 12900KS.
And we've equipped our Intel bench
with the fastest memory we had available
to give it the best chance to rain on AMD's parade.
We'll have all this linked down below.
Right away, 3D V-cache makes itself known in F1 2021,
where it beats out the Core i9-1200K
and matches the brand new 12900KS.
And this continues to a lesser extent with Forza Horizon 4,
where the 5800X3D slips a little bit, but nothing too major.
Far Cry 6 brings the first maybe.
One percent low frame rates in averages look good,
but five percent lows are significantly lower
as they are with the standard 5800X.
AMD is at a disadvantage here.
Hitman 3 shows more of this pattern,
albeit with better news for AMD in general,
as average frame rates are higher than even the 12900KS,
at the cost of frame stability.
Microsoft Flight Simulator
brings the first flawless victory over the entire field,
where it seems the extra cache really helps
with maintaining not only high, but stable frame rates
in this very CPU bound title.
C-S Go, also famously CPU bound,
but with an older and more simplistic engine,
tips the scales back towards Intel
with the 12900KS taking a commanding,
almost 20% lead in average FPS.
Oh, and you're not getting better turn times
in Civilization V1, FYI.
But I don't think that's quite what they were talking about
when they called it, "The World's Fastest Gaming CPU".
You're also not getting better turn times
with our recently restocked Wan hoodies from LTDstore.com,
but at least you'll look good while you wait.
Tallying it all up,
the 5800X3D pulls about a seven percent lead
over the 12900K,
which would've made it the fastest gaming CPU,
if only the 12900KS didn't exist.
A fact certainly not lost on Intel.
The 12900KS is about three percent faster
across our benchmarks.
But it's worth remembering that that CPU costs $800.
More on that later.
AMD hasn't really marketed the 5800X3D for productivity
and the slower clock speeds
are probably going to hurt it more here
than the extra cache will help.
Sure enough, we see about a five percent performance drop
across the board in Cinebench R23 over the OG 5800X.
And Blender doesn't fear much better in BMW.
Surprisingly 3D V-cache appears to help
with the more complex Gooseberry render.
Likely thanks to being able to keep more asset data
close to the cores.
Creative Cloud shows a similar performance uplift,
with Premiere picking a good five percent lead
over the 5800X.
And finally, SPECviewperf
shows a similar give and take, depending on the tests.
With life sciences and general operations
seeing a performance boost,
and energy and financial services taking a hit.
Looking at all our tests,
it works out to roughly equal performance
to the non-58003DX at the end of the day.
So you'd have to pay attention to the specific benchmarks
to know if it's better for a given workload.
Intel meanwhile, is firmly on top.
And it's it's not even close.
Even the Core i7-12700K is way out ahead.
That means that unless you're in the market
for a top-end CPU, the 12700K represents
a better value for productivity overall
than either of those Ryzen 7 chips.
For thermal testing,
I decided to give these chips a workout using Prime95
to see just how hot they'll get.
And the 5800X3D pleasantly surprises in this torture test,
with a consistent 90 degrees using our Noctua NH-D15S.
And that's just a few degrees more
than the standard 5800X puts out,
and significantly lower than either Core i9.
What's more, it maintained 4.1 gigahertz all core,
throughout most of the run,
with power consumption below the OG5800X.
Even though both CPUs are rated for 105 Watt TDP,
precision boost doesn't seem to be pushing the X3D
quite as hard.
Why the hotter cores then?
Well, you've got the 3D V-cache
sitting between the cores and the IHS,
so it's less thermally efficient.
Which brings up the other reason
the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is special:
Overclocking.
Or rather, lack thereof,
for the first time on the Ryzen platform.
AMD says that this is a limitation
for this one specific CPU,
because the 3DStats cache memory
needs a hard capped maximum voltage for reliability.
Not only does that mean
that overclocking one of these things
would potentially be dangerous,
it also means that thanks to the extra power draw
required to run the 3D V-cache,
core clocks are lower than the vanilla 5800X, as we saw.
Obviously that hasn't hurt it much in practice,
but you can imagine how much faster things could be
if only that limitation weren't in place
and they can drive the clocks just that little bit faster.
Overall, it's a weird chip,
but (chuckles) it's not a bad one.
Is it the most powerful gaming see you in the world?
No, it's beaten out by the Core i9-1200KS.
But again, that CPU is a power hungry beast that costs $800.
The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is $450,
which makes it the fastest gaming CPU
at a price that makes any sense.
And that's why the Core i7-12700K at $400
is in our test lineup.
That chip still represents an extremely good value.
It's not far off for gaming and dominates for the price,
if you need productivity.
Plus, it's running on a brand new platform.
Speaking of platforms, hit Subscribe,
because we've got a brand new storage platform
with a petabyte of flash,
(bell dings)
and we are totally gonna benchmark it.
But the 5800X3D is a fitting sendoff
to a platform that's been around
since I started writing for Linus Tech Tips.
By all accounts, this is probably the last CPU
that AM4 is going to see.
I wouldn't recommend it for new builds,
the platform's a dead-end.
But if you are primarily a gamer
who got into AMD's ecosystem early
and you've been waiting for a chip to upgrade to,
then this is a solid choice for top-tier performance
that won't require you to take a second job.
It doesn't need fancy cooling, or a big power supply,
or even new RAM.
Could you get similar performance by overclocking
a plain Ryzen 7 5800X or even the new $300 5700X?
Probably, yeah.
But if you don't want to deal with that,
or if you are a small form factor enthusiast,
then for you, the 5800X3D has few downsides.
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- Thanks for watching guys.
Go check out our most recent sleeper
where we had to (chuckles) go to some extreme lengths
to make a Core i9-12900K work.
The 5800X3D here,
would've been a much better fit, literally.