AMD Reveals Ryzen 7 9850X3D Price And Release Date: What You Need To Know

The Ryzen 7 9850X3D, which was announced by AMD during (not at) CES 2026, has had a date and price finally set: January 29th, and $499 USD. That's only a $20 jump over the Ryzen 7 9800X3D's MSRP, although those parts have been available as cheap as $430 in the past. The new model brings a 400 MHz bump in peak boost clocks and absolutely no other practical changes versus the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, so if you're picking between the two, probably pick the cheaper one unless you simply must have "the best" gaming experience.

Indeed, the big difference between these two processors and the rest of the CPUs out there is the presence of AMD's second-generation 3D V-Cache technology, which places a 64-megabyte slab of SRAM cache underneath the CPU cores, both tripling the amount of L3 cache available to the CPU (from 32 to 96 MB) and also avoiding interference with processor cooling. This is a pretty good trick, because routing from the underside like this is very complicated. The extra cache radically improves gaming performance, as memory latency remains the #1 performance constraint, and tripling L3 cache drastically reduces trips out to main memory.


AMD actually points out in its press release announcing this news that the Ryzen 7 9850X3D doesn't need fast memory. Likely as a response to the ongoing RAMmageddon, AMD says "thanks to 2nd Gen 3D V-Cache technology, high-frequency memory is not required. Across an average of 30+ games, the FPS difference between DDR5-4800 and DDR5-6000 was <1%." This is probably more-or less true; as we just noted ourselves, the large L3 cache reduces the number of trips to main memory, reducing the need for the lowest latency possible.


We haven't tested the Ryzen 7 9850X3D for ourselves yet, but there's no reason to doubt AMD's claim that this is the new fastest PC gaming CPU—the Ryzen 7 9800X3D was already the fastest extant gaming CPU, and this chip just adds extra clock rate on top of that. Of course, the higher-end Ryzen 9 9950X3D already offers extremely similar gaming performance to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, with a higher boost clock than the new chip, but that's another $175 USD. Still, if you have use for the extra eight CPU cores, it might be the smarter buy in the long run. There's still that rumored Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 supposedly waiting in the wings, too...