If, in the past year, you’ve been in the market for a top-tier CPU, there has only been one clear choice: the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. It is, across the board, the fastest gaming CPU around. However, with that supremacy comes a high price, with the chip selling for $479 – nearly 50% more than the price of some of AMD’s other 8-core Zen 5 CPUs. Thankfully, though, just as RAM and graphics card prices are creeping upwards, AMD has thrown us PC gamers a bone and knocked $30 off the price of its flagship chip, at least at some retailers.
Ok, so a $30 reduction on the best gaming CPU only amounts to a 6% saving on AMD’s finest, but considering just how doggedly this chip has stayed at its original price – or had its price pushed above MSRP – it’s a welcome move in the right direction. Buyers in the UK and other regions have seen more regular sub-MSRP prices on this chip for a while, but in the US, this is one of the few times we’ve seen such a drop.
As for what makes the 9800X3D so special (which we explore in full in our Ryzen 7 9800X3D review), it’s AMD’s 3D V-Cache technology that really sets this and other X3D CPUs apart from the rest. 3D V-Cache refers to an entire extra silicon chip being added to the CPU, providing the main processor with an extra 64MB of L3 cache – a type of data storage that’s inside the CPU and which is much faster than normal system DRAM. By more than doubling the supply of L3 cache, this provides the CPU with a lot more possible data to quickly access, saving the need to access the slower DRAM.
3D V-Cache is useful for all sorts of applications, but is particularly beneficial for gaming, as the unpredictable input from humans when gaming means it’s far less easy for a CPU to predict what data it needs and pre-fetch it from DRAM. By simply having a larger pool of pre-fetched data in L3 cache, the CPU has a much higher chance of having the data it needs, preventing any slowdown.
So effective is 3D V-Cache, when combined with AMD’s latest Zen 5 CPU architecture, that the 9800X3D outperforms all other CPUs in games, despite not otherwise being the fastest-clocked or having the most CPU cores. Suffice to say, if you can afford the 9800X3D, it is absolutely the CPU you should buy for a gaming PC.
You can grab the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D at its reduced price over on Amazon via this link. Meanwhile, if you’re in the UK, you can get the 9800X3D for just £399.95 via this link, down from its original £449.99 price.
With this reduction in price coming so shortly before Thanksgiving, this does hint at further savings on Black Friday being unlikely. However, you never know, so you may want to hold out to see if other stores offer an even larger saving. We’d be surprised if any offers reduce this price by much more than around $20, though, so this saving right now is well worth snapping up.