The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D has hit a new low price in the US, dropping to $323 on Amazon. That’s down from the best price we saw during Black Friday last year, and a great price for the fastest gaming CPU available on the venerable AM4 platform.
I’ve already reviewed this CPU in detail a few times, thanks to its unique combination of extremely strong gaming performance and compatibility with affordable AM4 motherboards and DDR4 RAM, so let’s keep this relatively short. The reason this CPU is so fast – as fast or faster than AMD’s Ryzen 7000 processors in some titles – is that it comes with a dramatic amount of L3 cache. In fact, the 5800X3D has three times as much of this cache as the 5800X on which this CPU is based. This reduces the number of times data has to be fetched from RAM, which is an order of magnitude slower, and can therefore have a transformative effect on frame rates.
Here’s past me on the subject:
This CPU hasn’t received a review here at RPS, so I hope it’s not too far from me to link to my 5800X3D review for Digital Foundry. There I described the 5800X3D as “a special farewell to the legendary AM4 platform,” befitting its massive gaming performance over the 5800X it nominally resembles. For example, in Flight Simulator 2020 we see performance comparable to the more expensive (and DDR5 equipped) 12900K, some 33% faster than the standard 5800X. There’s a similar gap in Hitman 3, where the 5800X3D is actually three percent faster than the 12900K – super impressive stuff.
Interestingly, for content creation, the regular 5800X is faster in most cases because these types of tasks that can be distributed and run in parallel are not so much limited by cache size. That means you might as well go for the $340 Ryzen 9 5900X if the focus is on content creation, as this 12-core 24-thread processor beats the 5800X3D thanks to its core/thread advantage and higher clock speeds.
In any case, the 5800X3D is worth considering if you already have a B550, X570, or older motherboard that can support it, and want to hold off on upgrading to the DDR5-only Ryzen 7000 series until motherboard and RAM prices drop. begin to decline. more reasonable. However, if you’re building a whole new system, the Ryzen 7000 (and Intel’s 12th/13th-gen offerings) becomes a bit more appealing, so it’s worth checking out some benchmarks and praising both options to see what it would be best for you.