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AMD’s pumped-up, 3D V-Cache-equipped Ryzen 7000 desktop processors will go on sale February 28, the company announced today. The rollout begins with the 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X3D and 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D, which start at $599 and $699, respectively. A cheaper model, the eight-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D, is available for $449, but will be only launched on April 6.
All of these CPUs are successors to the original Ryzen 7 5800X3D and their sales pitch is similar. AMD stacks an additional 64 MB of L3 cache on top of the regular Ryzen 7000 CPUs, which can provide a big performance boost for software (such as games) that is particularly sensitive to cache sizes and speeds.
These prices aren’t actually much higher than the launch prices for the original Ryzen 7000 CPUs back in August – the 7950X3D has the same launch price as the 7950X, and the 7900X3D and 7800X3D are only $50 more expensive than their counterparts. But since then prices have come down considerably; the 7950X now usually costs between $550 and $600, and non-X-series CPUs like the Ryzen 7 7700 and Ryzen 9 7950 are even cheaper. The prices of the X3D chips will eventually come down as well, but they are still significantly more expensive than the versions without the extra cache.
It looks like AMD has fixed some of the limitations the original 5800X3D had when it came out. Most notably, there are now 12- and 16-core options for people who use their PCs for things other than gaming. The X3D-series CPUs still run at lower clock speeds than comparable X-series CPUs, but the gap is slightly smaller. And the CPUs support limited performance tuning through the Precision Boost Overdrive and Curve Optimizer features, in addition to memory overclocking.
But the X3D chips still don’t support typical overclocking features available in the rest of the Ryzen CPUs, nor do they support changing the CPUs’ default 120W TDP limits. This can further limit the performance of the 12- and 16-core CPUs in apps that don’t care about cache: the 7900X and 7950X have a native TDP of 170W, allowing them to run faster for longer. The Ryzen 5800X3D also ran hotter than other Ryzen CPUs, but the base temperatures of the Ryzen 7000 are already quite warm, so we’ll have to test them to compare.
AMD says the new CPUs require an AM5 socket motherboard with an updated BIOS and chipset driver, and the company also “recommends[s] with an all-in-one liquid cooler of at least 280 mm for best performance.”
List image by AMD