As for power consumption, we're going to show total system usage as we feel that's more relevant to someone looking at buying this CPU. These results are heavily influenced by performance, as in how many frames the RTX 4090 is able to pump out, so do keep that in mind. That said, the 7800X3D was 3% faster than the 13900K in this game while using 20% less power, so that's a big deal when it comes to thermal output.

Simply put, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is the Zen 4 3D V-Cache CPU that you should all be interested in, it's fast and extremely power efficient. For some reason, AMD decided it would be a good idea to delay the release of this model, and lead instead with the 7950X3D and 7900X3D, both of which arrived about a month ago. There was some speculation that AMD released the Ryzen 9 7950X3D first because the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which is about half the price, is just as fast in games. My testing lends some credibility to that assumption. In nearly all games, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is just as fast, and in some games, it’s even faster. Finally, I took all of the datapoints I'd gathered and compared the average scores of each processor tested for this review against its retail price, current as of this review, to measure how good of a value this processor is or isn't. Blender Open Data is a core-heavy workload that isn't as efficiently accelerated by Intel E-cores and as a result the 13600K was just 11% faster in this test, though the 13700K mauled the 7800X3D by a 44% margin. You can also make your own pricing adjustments, the Ryzen 7700, for example, is 5% slower than the 7700X, so reduce the performance shown here from 199 fps to about 190 fps and then recalculate with your updated pricing.

We've been asked by some members of the driving simulator community to change the way we test ACC, moving away from the Medium preset to Epic, so that's what we've done and this has led to some interesting results which verify what some sim racers have been reporting. In this game, Intel's Core i9-13900K pushes total system usage just 16% higher than the 7800X3D and while that's a 73w increase in power draw, it's by no means the worst result we've seen. If you look at my suite of tests, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is a decimal point away from the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, and that’s just due to rounding. Outside of that, it blows past the previous generation and competition from Intel. Over the Core i9-13900K, it’s 13% faster, and over last-gen’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D, it’s 20% faster. No question, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is thegaming CPU to buy right now. Should you buy the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D? Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

And while this chip is slightly more expensive than the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D was when it launched, the price inflation isn't the worst I've seen, so I won't complain too much on that front. In addition to the hardware, I left ReBar turned on, as well as enabled EXPO or XMP for the memory. Just like the Ryzen 9 7950X3D required, there were a few BIOS tweaks to make sure the Ryzen 7 7800X3D was running properly, but otherwise, I left BIOS settings default. The Core i9-13900K is still a mighty impressive processor and a terrific gaming CPU, but it's not without its flaws. The need for expensive DDR5 memory to roughly match the 7800X3D hurts its value, though it will still get reasonably close with much cheaper memory, so as we see it the real issue here is power consumption, and of course, platform longevity.As for power usage, officially the 7800X3D has a TDP of 120W, but it didn't even come close to this in my testing, often using a full third less power than it's rated for. Once official drivers get updated after this chip launches, I expect there to be more utilization of the available power potential, but it might not be much more and honestly, it doesn't need it. It gets phenomenal performance for significantly less power than competing chips, so why mess with a great thing? Next up we have Hogwarts Legacy with ray tracing enabled and here the 7800X3D does quite well, edging out the 13900K by a 3% margin, so performance overall is much the same between these two CPUs. The Core i9-13900K gains ~5% more performance on average when going from DDR5-6400 to 7200 memory in our testing, so with more affordable memory the 7800X3D would be around 7-8% faster.

Even so, the 7800X3D is 9% faster than the 13900K and remember the Core i9 processor has been paired with DDR5-7200 memory which does help in this bandwidth-sensitive game. Both are extremely power hungry for all core productivity workloads though, and need to be power limited, and at that point you are better served by the 7950X or 7950X3D which typically deliver a similar level of performance to that of an unlimited i7 or i9 while reducing total system usage by half, which is a staggering difference. So the single core score drops to just 1816 pts, which is a 30% boost from the 5800X3D, but 8% slower than the 7700X.Outside of what the spec sheet says, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is notable for using a single-core complex (CCX). The Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Ryzen 9 7900X3D both used a dual CCX design, forcing AMD to focus the cache on a single CCX. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D doesn’t have that problem, which allows for faster transfers. Ultimately, that translates into higher gaming performance in some titles, which I’ll dig into later. Test configurations Jacob Roach / Digital Trends Of course, what matters most is performance across the board, and we’re as keen as you to get some verified benchmarks to consider. As soon as we do, we’ll give you our expert view on this next step in AMD’s Zen 4 journey.

We suspect the 7950X3D is using the 3D V-Cache enabled CCD for this workload, which is why the 7800X3D offered a similar level of performance.This is already an enormous amount of L3 cache to have on a chip, but AMD pushes this to the next level by applying a 64MB 3D V-Cache chip to the Ryzen 7 7800X3D’s CCX. In total, this gives the Ryzen 7 7800X3D a massive 96MB of L3 cache. However, the 3D V-Cache cache might be better referred to as L4 cache, as it is architecturally separate from the CCX’s L3. The 3D V-Cache is also ever so slightly slower, though AMD has said the performance difference here is exceedingly small. If you compare its power consumption with its performance, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D may well produce the best performance-per-watt ratio of any processor we’ve tested, though it would certainly be a close call with some like the Ryzen 9 7900 also performing impressively here. This is one area that AMD has a notable advantage over Intel, though energy efficiency doesn’t often drive many purchasing decisions. Simply put, AMD's Ryzen 7 7800X3D fails to fill much of a niche. If you are after a fast processor in terms of pure CPU grunt, you’d be better off with almost any other chip shown in the charts above. Almost all of them are faster, and many of them are cheaper, too. Naturally, this means the Ryzen 7 7800X3D also doesn’t make sense as a budget option.