AMD Ryzen 9800X3D leak shows it running at 5.6GHz on all cores – could this be the CPU to finish off Intel in PC gaming?

AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D has some impressive potential to be fine-tuned for eye-opening performance levels, or that’s the latest rumor (among many) around the soon-to-be-unleashed Zen 5 processor.

Wccftech spotted that on the Anandtech forums, Igor Kavinski leaked some benchmark scores for the Ryzen 9800X3D. These come complete with CPU-Z details of clock speeds, and notes on the processor configuration used to achieve the eye-opening boost clock shown – namely just over 5.6GHz across all eight cores.

The Ryzen 9800X3D (likely a prerelease engineering sample chip) was turbocharged to those levels by using Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) and Curve Optimizer (CO) plus a raft of other manual fine-tuning of the CPU by Kavinski. We can guess the cooler used was a high-end effort, too, which all goes to explain hitting 5.6GHz, which is quite remarkable across all the processor’s cores.

To put it in perspective, the rumored all-core boost of the 9800X3D is 5.2GHz out of the box (with no tuning), although that’s still a good deal faster than the 7800X3D (at 4.8GHz).

Turning to the benchmarks shown, one is from Cinebench R23 and the Ryzen 9800X3D comes out well here too, with a score of 2,261 in single-core and 25,258 in multi-core. As Wccftech points out, for the latter, the Ryzen 7800X3D typically falls between 18,000 to 19,000, so this appears to indicate that this (heavily amped up) 9800X3D could be a good 30% faster when it comes to non-gaming performance.

As for gaming, a Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail benchmark is aired here, showing a score of 62,360 (but the GPU that the 9800X3D was paired with isn’t shared). We don’t have comparisons for the 7800X3D there, but the general reaction to the result is that it’s again impressive – as you’d expect from the juicing up that’s gone on here.

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Analysis: Trying to guess the real generational uplift

Clearly, we need to bear firmly in mind that not every Ryzen 9800X3D buyer will go to lengths that Kavinski has done here – many won’t – and there are unknowns like the cooling setup and how fancy it was. So, the benchmark leaks need to be interpreted with a healthy dose of skepticism, but just seeing that all-core boost pushed this high is promising.

Looking at the gains here, we can anticipate (read: guess) that out of the box – with standard cooling and no CPU tuning – we could see the 9800X3D be about 10%, or possibly up to 15%, faster than the 7800X3D for gaming. And a good deal more than that for everyday use away from PC games – as this is not the only leak which has suggested that the all-round performance of X3D has been seriously pepped up with Zen 5. Mainly because AMD seems to have solved the problem of the clock speeds being held back by that 3D V-Cache with the 9800X3D (and by extension the other X3D chips for Zen 5 when they arrive later on).

We can certainly be broadly optimistic about a decent performance uplift, in both gaming and overall terms, given that we are (supposedly) getting quite a boost for clock speeds, plus the generational gains for Zen 5 X3D on top. (Despite some other leaks having outlined a bleaker situation – spillage you need to take with a heap of salt in our opinion).

Whatever the ultimate generational performance increase ends up being, the other vital part of the equation will be pricing – will the 9800X3D retail at $449 (in the US, and proportionate to that elsewhere) as its predecessor did? Or will AMD charge a bit less than this? The latter is probably tilting too far with the optimism, but the point remains that whatever performance boost we get with the 9800X3D will need to be viewed through the lens of the MSRP, naturally.

AMD has confirmed that Ryzen 9000X3D will arrive on November 7, 2024 – all rumors point to this just being the Ryzen 9800X3D CPU, with a possible reveal in just a couple of days. The 9800X3D is, of course, very much anticipated as the successor to the rightly popular 7800X3D (which has now all but vanished from the shelves), with the hope that it’ll wash away some of the bad taste that the Ryzen 9000 launch has left (in the mouths of PC gamers, anyway).

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