It’s hard to believe that the Ryzen 7 9800X3D came out back in November of 2024. Well over a year later, AMD announced at this year's CES that they were adding another CPU to their 9000 Series lineup, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D. Their new 9850X3D takes the original 9800X3D’s core configuration, and it bumps performance up with a 400 MHz increase in clock speed. AMD’s X3D CPUs have already been impressive with their gaming performance. I’m excited to see what the refresh will look like. We also get to revisit what performance from a 2nd Generation 3D V-Cache CPU looks like now that drivers have had even more time to mature. So let’s dive in and see what AMD's new CPU looks like in our test suite!
Product Name: AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
Review Sample Provided by: AMD
Written by: Wes Compton
Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE
AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
Before getting into testing, I did want to touch on what the Ryzen 7 9850X3D has to offer, especially if maybe you weren’t paying attention when the 9800X3D launched. Both CPUs have 8 cores and 16 threads and are based on Zen 5 architecture. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D has improved the max boost clock speed up to 5.6 GHz from 5.2 GHz. The base clock of 4.7 GHz is still the same however, it will be interesting to see the situations where the extra headroom helps and the times that it doesn’t because of that. Beyond that, they have the same specs with the same 120-watt TDP, 162 Watt socket power, and so on. This isn’t a big revolutionary change, it is just a refresh that offers new buyers an option to have a little more performance. If you already had a 9800X3D, obviously this wouldn’t be for you. With that in mind, while I am interested in seeing how the two CPUs compare. The real data will be how the Ryzen 7 9850X3D compares to older CPUs that you might upgrade from and Intel’s offerings as well.
If you haven’t had one of AMD's 3D V-Cache CPUs, then you have been missing out. The 9850X3D and the previous 9000 Series X3D models all have their latest 2nd Generation of 3D V-Cachew which has moved the cache down under the cores, where previously it was on top. With that, it allows the CPU cores more direct cooling, which was a big issue with previous generations of X3D CPUs, and with that, you also have the ability to overclock.
AMD has been very reliable when it comes to their motherboard socket lifetimes. They stick with the same socket long enough to allow for an upgrade path later on and with the AM5 socket, that is no different. It has CPU support up until at least 2027 and does work with coolers designed for older sockets if they use AMD's clip mounting. That said, it doesn’t mean we won’t see new AM5 motherboards, refreshes of AM5 boards were also announced at CES this year.
Here is a full listing of the current AMD 9000 Series of processors, and you will notice that the Ryzen 7 9850X3D doesn’t replace the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, it just slots in just ahead of it. Both will still be available.
Now, when sending over the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, AMD did send along with it a few components in their review kit to try to have test setups be the same. For clarity, I’ve included those below. That includes an MSI X870E Carbon Wifi motherboard, Samsung 9100 Pro 1TB SSD, and G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo RGB 6000 MHz DDR5. None of those is a departure from what we would test with anyhow.
The Ryzen 7 9850X3D did come in the retail packaging, so we did get a look at that as well. Because it doesn’t come with an air cooler, the packaging is relatively compact and has the Ryzen color scheme with black, silver, and orange being used. The front has a big orange arrow pointing at the CPU showing through the window in the middle and highlighting the 3D V-Cache technology. Down along the bottom, it has the AMD Ryzen branding and shows that this is a Ryzen 7 CPU. Inside the CPU comes in the normal clear plastic clamshell along with an installation/warranty booklet and a paper with a QR code that takes you to AMD’s website.
If you haven’t seen one of AMD's recent CPUs, the X-like shape of the heatspreader on the Ryzen 7 9850X3D will surprise you. As always, I love that AMD etches their AMD Ryzen branding large on top of the heatspreader, and below that is the Ryzen 7 9850X3D model name. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D, like with all of their other AM5 CPUs, doesn’t have pins on the bottom like we used to see in the past, moving the pins to the motherboard.
Test Rig and Procedures
Test Rig
Motherboard – MSI X870E Carbon Wifi – Live Pricing
Ram – G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo RGB 6000 MHz 2x16GB – Live Pricing
Storage – Samsung 9100 Pro 1TB – Live Pricing
Video Card – Nvidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition – Live Pricing
OS – Windows 11 Pro – Live Pricing
CPU Performance
To start off our testing, I went with the rendering-focused Blender benchmark, specifically the latest version, Blender Benchmark 4.2. To get a good look at the overall performance, I have all three of the results stacked together, and in this test, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is sitting right with the 9800X3D here, with both most likely not taking advantage of their boost clock here.
Continuing with the video encoding theme, I also have Handbrake which is an open-source transcoder. For this test, I am taking a 4k video down to 1080p 30 FPS, and the results are the average FPS of that task. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D came in just behind the 9800X3D here and ahead of the 14600K.
For the always popular Cinebench, I am testing with the older Cinebench R23 as well as the 2024 edition as well. I always like Cinebench because we have multi-core and single-core performance which gives us a good look at the performance of the whole CPU and IPC performance. In both tests, we see something interesting when we compare the Ryzen 7 9850X3D to the 9800X3D. With the multi-thread tests, they perform similarly, but with the single thread tests the Ryzen 7 9850X3D stands out in both tests. In R32, its single-core result was 2221 to the 98000X3D’s 2090, and the Cinebench 2024 test was similar, with 142 to 133.
Next up, we have ray tracing-focused rendering benchmarks. Here I tested the CPUs in POV-Ray and V-Ray Benchmark 5. POV-Ray was also tested with a single core and across all of the cores. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D performed similarly to what we saw with Cinebench here. It’s basically on par with the 98000X3D in the multi-threaded test, but stands out significantly with the single-core test. V-Ray Benchmark was similar as well with the Ryzen 7 9850X3D just ahead of the 98000X3D but still sitting below the older 7900 and 7900X, which are both 12-core CPUs.
I also tested using the CPUz’s built-in benchmark, which runs on a single thread and with all threads. In the multi-thread test, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is sitting ahead of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, but with a little bit of a gap between the two. But once again, the single thread test is where we really see it excel with the Ryzen 7 9850X3D sitting up in the top five of the CPU tests and 60 points ahead of the 9800X3D.
Next, we have wPrime, which is a classic overclocking benchmark that calculates pi out to 1024 million digits and is timed. This is a multi-thread heavy test which has the older high-core count CPUs still all over the top of the charts, and you can see that with the top CPUs sitting at 8 or more cores. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D finished the test in 53.261 seconds, which was almost 1 second faster than the 9800X3D, putting it in behind all of the 12-core and higher core count CPUs but at the top of the 8-core CPUs.
7 Zip is another open-source program, this time for compressing and decompressing all of your files. Here, I have run the benchmark and we have three results. The combined MIPS is a combination of compressing and decompressing performance. Then I have it broken down between the two. The combined results have the Ryzen 7 9850X3D sitting behind the older 16-core 7950X and ahead of the 9800X3D with a noticeable gap between those two. On the second chart, the decompressing results have the Ryzen 7 9850X3D ahead of the 9800X3D by 1000 points and 3500 points on the compressing results.
Jetstream is a compilation benchmark that takes a long list of HTML5 and Java in-browser tests and runs them all three times to put together an overall score. I love this benchmark because let's be honest, most people are using their browser more than any other game or program. Jetstream gives some interesting results sometimes but it tends to prefer high IPC or single-core performance and there are some situations where it prefers lower core-count CPUs. In this case, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D did extremely well on both the 2.1 and 2.2 tests, sitting at the top of the chart with both tests and not by a small amount. The extra clock speed helps a lot here, but we may also be seeing the fruits of the drivers maturing here as well. Either way, though this is one of the tests that shows how web browsing may feel, I’m curious to see if we see similar results in the other tests later.
AI has been the big buzzword, I have to include some testing there as well. I have tested with Geekbench AI and Procyon’s Computer Vision Benchmark. The Geekbench AI test looks at single and half-precision performance with scores for each and a quantized score as well. They test using 10 different workloads to create their score. The Procyon AI Computer Vision Benchmark focuses on machine vision tests using neural network models like MobileNet V3, Inception V4, YOLO v3, DeepLab V3, Real-ESRGAN, and ResNet 50. I test those using the Windows ML setting, and in cases that support it, I test built-in NPUs as well. I have also included Windows ML and TensorRT results using an RTX 4090, as well as a reference point where these CPUs compare to a high-end GPU. For Geekbench AI, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D does come in sitting ahead of the 9800X3D, but we do see that with the quanitized result, it takes a big step forward but interestingly dropped down slightly with the single precision result. With Procyon, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D improved on what the 9800X3D did in both the integer and Float16 tests, enough so that it jumped ahead of the 9950X3D. The Float32 results on the other hand have them just one point apart.
For Passmark Performance Test I used the latest version, Performance Test 11. I only look at the overall CPU score, which takes a few different synthetic benchmarks and combines the results to put together an overall score. This is a test that favors multi-threaded performance over IPC. In Performance Test 11, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D improved on the 9800X3D’s score by 1600 points, pushing it up over the 12900K as well.
Crossmark is from BAPCo, which also makes SYSmark, and this is a cross-platform test where you can compare performance between phones and both Windows and Mac computers. This is the start of our overall PC benchmarks, and Crossmark uses a mix of real-world tests to output an overall score. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D scored a 2402, putting it in over the 14900K and the 9800X3D as well.
PCMark 10 is a great test because it tests things like video calls, browser performance, Excel, and Word performance to give an idea of real-world performance. It tends to like higher clock speeds, but does take raw core count into account as well, which you can see. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D did very well here, and this is partially showing us how much the drivers have improved, but the increased boost clock speeds are helping here as well. The same goes for the PCMark Applications test results, and those results are the most interesting to me because they are using real-world applications. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D with its clock speed and the 3D V-Cache performed really well with Microsoft Office.
The PugetBench for Creators is another real-world benchmark using the most current version of DaVinci Resolve, as well as Adobe Photoshop, which for me, are both programs I use often for editing my photos for this and with DaVinci I use it for editing videos on other non-LanOC related content as well. With that in mind, performance in both are very important for me, and the results for the Ryzen 7 9850X3D were interesting. I have the graph sorted with the DaVinci Resolve results, and those matched the 14900K and are a little behind the 9950X3D, but the Photoshop results have the Ryzen 7 9850X3D doing even better!
Moving the focus over towards gaming, my next test is using Dolphin 5.0 Benchmark. Dolphin 5.0 is a Wii emulator and like most emulators, it doesn’t care about high core counts at all. In fact, it only runs two in total. Clock speeds are king here most of the time, which is why all of the 5 GHz+ CPUs are at the top of the chart here. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D, with its high boost clock speed and lower (in relation to the 9950X3D) core count topped the chart sitting ahead of the Threadripper 9980X by three seconds. This was 24 seconds faster than the 9800X3D even, but you will notice that AMD has the top of this chart completely dominated.
Before diving into game testing, I wanted to check out synthetic performance using 3DMark. I tested with the older DX11 Fire Strike test as well as the newer DX12 Time Spy. I also added the new 3DMark CPU Profile benchmark into the mix as well which does a good job of showing the full range of thread counts that you might see being used in games as well as a max threads option that does everything above 16 threads. In the Fire Strike test, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D scored a 40744, this was 1269 points over the 9800X3D but just below the 12900K. In Time Spy, the performance was similar with a nice margin over the 9800X3D, but still slightly down the chart and behind the 13600K this time. For the CPU profile at 1 thread, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D did well with just the 9950X3D and the 285K sitting ahead of it. As the threads get added in falls into the middle of the pack with all of the CPUs with more cores outperforming it in the 16-thread and max threads tests.
After that, I dove into in-game tests which for any 3D V-Cache CPU, like the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, is its bread and butter. Adding in the extra clock speed is just a bonus here, almost all of the games tested have all of the X3D CPUs filling up the top of their charts, and except for two, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D came in top in them all. AMD's claim of this being the new fastest gaming CPU is true, and when comparing it to what Intel has to offer, it isn’t even close.
Lastly, I also ran the AIDA64 benchmarks as well. These give us a great look at a few aspects including the full range of cache performance, memory performance, and more. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D’s cache performance was a little better than the 9800X3D, which is interesting because they have the same cache size. That must be improvements in the driver in the time between those launches. The extra clock speed helped with the single and double precision FLOPS. But all of the IOPS tests are still about the same.
Onboard Video Performance
With the Ryzen 7 9850X3D or any X3D CPU really, I doubt that anyone would be looking to run it without a dedicated GPU unless you had a specific use case where the 3D V-Cache is needed for your workload. But I always test CPUs with their own integrated graphics in our onboard video test suite to see how they perform. Our expectations are significantly lower here than you would have with any dedicated GPU, but it is nice when you are waiting for your new or replacement video card to come in to still be able to play SOME games. To start testing off, I went with old reliable, 3DMark. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D sits right in the middle of a large clump of CPUs on the Fire Strike chart, with all of the Ryzen non-G CPUs performing similarly. Intel’s older generations are still ahead here and the 245K and 285K are significantly higher than that even. With Time Spy, the AMD G Series CPUs are still at the top along with Intel's latest CPUs, but the Ryzen 7 9850X3D did jump out of the normal pack and into the mix with the older 14900K and 13900K. With Speed Way, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is back in the mix with the other Ryzen CPUs and was a few points below the 9800X3D. I did also run the AMD FSR Feature test at 1080p using the quality setting and those results are below as well. The frame rates are scary with the Ryzen 7 9850X3D seeing 3.18 without FSR and 5.77 with it, but the importance here is that we can see just how much FSR could help edge out a little more performance and in this case, get close to doubling it, which would be huge when gaming with your integrated graphics. I also slipped in the Steel Nomad Light test, which is more in line with testing integrated graphics, and the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is sitting once again in the middle of the other Ryzen CPUs.
For Unigine Superposition, I ran both the 720 Low and 1080 Medium presets. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D scored a 4415 on the 720 Low test and 1318 for the 1080p0 medium test. It was again right in the middle of the pack for the Ryzen CPUs, but it did come in a little lower than the 9800X3D for comparison.
With AI being an important metric these days, I did slip in a look at the AI performance for the integrated GPU as well, using Procyon’s AI Computer Vision Benchmark which tests using a few different neural network models including Yolo v3 which is one of the models we use with our own AI security camera filtering. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D is in a three-way tie with the 9950X3D and 9800X3D. That put them ahead of the older Intel CPUs but well behind the newer Intel CPUs.
Then from there on, I jumped into game tests. Some of our tests are older games, but I did also add in a few newer games as well to get an idea of newer games when tested at 1080p and low or medium settings. My goal with these tests was to see if base-level gaming at low or medium settings was possible at all. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D isn’t at the top of the charts in these game tests like in our previous game tests, but it does still sit right in the middle of the pack of Ryzen CPUs. What that means in games like F1 22, you can expect playable but not amazing framerates, especially if you utilize FSR to improve performance from 28 FPS up to 41 FPS. Still not over 60, but in a pinch it does work. In the older games like Tomb Raider, you will see over 40 FPS, but in a majority of the games you can expect less than 30 FPS unless you plan on playing at lower than 1080p.
Power Usage and Temperatures
For some people, performance is the only thing important, but for others, power usage and temperatures also play a role, so we do take a look at both of those as well. This is especially important in SFF, or even just smaller mid-sized builds and it affects the components you need to get for your system as well as your PSU and cooler. To take a look at power usage, I ran three different tests. I noted the idle power draw of our entire system, then I took a look at the load wattage of the system using two different workloads. One was wPrime and the second was AIDA64 using their FPU workload, which is extremely demanding. At idle, the testbench with the Ryzen 7 9850X3D pulled 96.7 watts, which is almost the same as we saw with the 9800X3D. That is still higher than with the Intel CPUs, the 285K pulled 77.1 watts for example but it is better than some of the previous generations of Ryzen X3D CPUs. With wPrime as the workload, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D and testbench pulled 284 watts at peak, which does put it up near the top of our charts with CPUs like the 9950X3D and Threadripper CPUs sitting ahead of it. The 285K was at 253 watts and the 9800X3D was at 208 watts for comparison. On the other hand, with the AIDA64 FPU workload the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is just behind the 9800X3D and the 285K was pulling a lot more at 328 watts. So it does depend on the workload.
I’ve spoken in the past about how temperature testing isn’t an end-all, be-all result. CPU to CPU with the same CPU can be different and that gets even more complicated once you add in different motherboards and BIOS revisions as well. Not to mention different coolers. In this case, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D ran at 84 degrees when running the AIDA64 FPU workload for a half hour, which was 3 degrees higher than the 9800X3D using the same cooler. Then, when using the more realistic (for normal use) CPU workload was cooler but again noticeably higher than the 9800X3D with the Ryzen 7 9850X3D sitting at 68 degrees and the 9800X3D at 55 °C. That was 4 degrees less than the 285K, but it's clear that the extra max boost clock speed does affect temperatures.
Overall and Final Verdict
Well AMD still has it, the new Ryzen 7 9850X3D may just be a refresh with a higher clock speed of the 9800X3D, but when it comes to gaming performance that extra max boost clock speed just means even better performance. At this point, AMD is just breaking their own records on the gaming front. I was also very impressed with the real-world performance of the 9850X3D, including basic tests like the browser-based Jetstream benchmarks. For a majority of gamers, that covers everything you might want in a CPU. On top of all of that, AMD has once again reminded everyone that their AM5 socket isn’t going anywhere for a while still, which also means future upgrades can always be on the table, and if you use your PC until it’s last dying breath, you will most likely find it easier to find a replacement motherboard late in life because of that.
Now the 9850X3D isn’t all roses, everything has its downsides and this is no different. Similarly to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the 9850X3D pulls a lot of power and the new higher clock speed has exaggerated that even more. AMD still also has some catching up to do when compared to Intel when it comes to AI performance, not that I think that is an important quality for a gaming CPU. Its integrated graphics performance was right in line with other recent Ryzen CPUs, other than the Ryzen G lineup, but Intel is ahead with its mainstream iGPU performance. Again, not something that is overly important for a gaming CPU, you really should be using a dedicated GPU with the 9850X3D. But it would be nice to see integrated graphics on CPUs progress forward.
For pricing, the new Ryzen 7 9850X3D has an MSRP of $499 which is $20 more than the $479 MSRP of the 9800X3D. I hate that we even need to compare the 9850X3D and the 9800X3D, no one who owns the 9800X3D is going to be looking at this as an upgrade. But if you skipped out on the upgrade when the 9000 Series X3D CPUs came out and are now considering it, there is a good chance that you will be wondering if you should go with the 9850X3D or the 9800X3D. The truth is, both are going to be great. But that 20 bucks does get you a little more headroom at the cost of more power usage and with that higher temps as well. If neither of those things bother you, I would go with the 9850X3D, either way you are going to get the best gaming performance you can get. Which is good because with the overall price to build a computer now, especially with RAM and SSD prices adding to already costly GPU and CPU prices, you might be sticking with this build longer than your last PC.
Live Pricing: HERE
