AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D Benchmark Leak Shows Mixed Performance
While not yet released at retail or even publicly announced, AMD's Ryzen 7 9850X3D processor is confirmed to exist by way of a support document on AMD's website. It's also been benchmarked, assuming a couple of entries at Geekbench are legitimate. If so, they offer the first glimpse of where performance may land, though you should always take these early looks with a dash of salt.
There are ways to manipulate benchmark entries, though considering the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is a real product, we don't suspect that's the case here. The bigger caveat is that early benchmarks are not necessarily indicative of actual performance, as we can't say what drivers or BIOS revisions were in place, what settings were used, and so forth.
The Ryzen 9 9850X3D is presumed to be an 8-core/16-thread chip, based on past leaks and also as identified in Geekbench. It also purportedly has a 4.7GHz base clock, up to a 5.6GHz boost clock, and 96MB of L3 cache.
There are two listings on Geekbench (as spotted by @Olrak29_ on X), one of which shows the chip running at 5.4GHz in a Maxsun B850 ITX motherboard and another with it running at 5.6GHz in a Colorful B580M Gaming motherboard. Both configurations also show 32GB of DDR5-4800 RAM.
The slower clocked benchmark run resulted in a 3,260 single-core score and a 16,149 multi-core core. Meanwhile, the scores are higher (naturally) for the 5.6GHz benchmark run, with the chip scoring 3,436 in the single-core test and 17,530 in the multi-core test.
Looking at Geekbench's roundup of average performance, the top spot in the single-core ranking belongs to AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 9950X3D with a 3,398 score. The faster run of the leaked entries for the Ryzen 7 9850X3D has it scoring just lightly above that by 1.1%.
Geekbench's ranking of average multi-core scores has the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9985WX at the top with a score of 32,076. Meanwhile, the 16-core/32-thread Ryzen 9 9950X3D averages 22,153, while the 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 7 9800X3D shows an average score of 18,335.
The latter is the most appropriate comparison point because both the Ryzen 7 9850X3D and Ryzen 7 9800X3D have the same number of cores and threads, and same amount of L3 cache. Despite the clock speed advantage of the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, however, it's leaked multi-core score falls a little short of its slower-clocked sibling.
This isn't really concerning at this early stage for reasons mentioned above. It should also be noted that DDR5-4800 isn't very fast. The sweet spot for AMD Ryzen 9000 series processors is DDR5-6000, with the memory controller and DRAM speed tied at a 1:1 ratio.
The expectation is that the Ryzen 7 9850X3D will offer a bit of a performance boost over the Ryzen 7 9800X3D simply because it's a faster-clocked variant. However, the real question is where will pricing land. As a reference point, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is on sale for $439.99 at Amazon (8% off).
