AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D Review: The Best Gaming CPU, Boosted
| AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D: $499 MSRP The new AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D is a clone of the existing 8-core Ryzen 7 9800X3D, but with higher clocks to boost performance and solidify its gaming leadership.
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Although details had emerged well before the show, AMD officially announced the new Ryzen 7 9850X3D at CES ’26, along with its upcoming Gorgon Point Ryzen AI 400 series mobile processors, and Ryzen AI Halo small form factor system, among many other things. If you’re a regular around here, you’ll know exactly what the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is—the follow up to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D; a sort of mid-model refresh if you will. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D is essentially identical to the existing 9800X3D, but with a significant increase to its maximum boost frequency. What does that do to performance? Let’s find out, but first let’s get some specs and other particulars out of the way.
AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D Specifications And Feature Comparison
Find The AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D @ Amazon
Here’s a quick feature and spec comparison between the Ryzen 7 9850X3D and 9800X3D. as you can see, the two chips are basically the same—they share the same core and cache configurations, voltages, TDP, base clock, etc. The only difference is a 400MHz bump to the Ryzen 7 9850X3D’s max boost clock. That’s 400MHz will undoubtedly increase performance in some circumstances, more specifically in lightly threaded workloads, like most games, which is where the Ryzen 7 9850X3D shines. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D was already considered the leading CPU for PC gamers—that will no longer be the case now that the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is here. That additional 400MHz should also help with general responsiveness and help kick performance up a notch in shorter, bursty workloads.
The Ryzen 7 9850X3D also looks just like any other Socket AM5 Ryzen 9000 series processor, save for its unique branding, of course. The processor uses the same socket, coolers and motherboards, etc., though you’ll have to install a BIOS / UEFI update with support for the chip for your particular motherboard, to ensure compatibility.
AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D CPU-Z Details
The Ryzen 7 9850X3D’s details as reported by CPU-Z are laid out in the images below. The family, stepping and other details are the same as other Ryzen 9000X3D series processors.
Idle clocks (left), 100% MT load clocks (right)
There’s 80K of L1 per core (48K D-Cache [12-way] + 32K I-Cache [8-way]), which is an increase from 64K on Zen 4 / Ryzen 7000, along with 1MB of 16-way set associative L2 cache per core. Standard Ryzen 9000 series processors also feature 32MB of L3 cache per compute die, but with the Ryzen 7 9850X3D its compute die is outfitted with an additional 64MB of 3D V-Cache bringing the total L3 up to 96MB (104MB total cache).
And it’s that massive 96MB of L3 cache that allows the Ryzen 7 9850X3D to keep lots of data close to the CPU cores and boost game performance. But the Ryzen 7 9800X3D's higher boost frequency can help general performance as well.
