The $449/£429 Ryzen 7 5800X3D is something a little different from AMD, a processor that exists to demonstrate the power of the company’s 3D V-Cache design for its upcoming Ryzen CPUs and battle the 12900KS from Intel for the title of “fastest gaming processor”. ‘. It’s also kind of a last hurrah for the surprisingly long AM4 platform, which debuted in 2017 and survived half a dozen Intel generations as Ryzen processors improved by leaps and bounds.
So what exactly is a 3D V-Cache? Let’s start with the basics. You can think of a CPU’s cache as a place to store the data it’s currently working on – much like RAM, but since it’s inside the CPU, it’s an order of magnitude faster. to access it. and an order of magnitude smaller in terms of the amount of data it can store. Modern processors typically use three levels of cache – L1, L2, L3 – with L1 cache being the fastest to access but the smallest, L2 being slower but larger, and L3 being again slower and larger. It’s this third level of cache that AMD changed from a traditional 2D design to a 3D design, a cache stack that takes up more vertical space. This allows much more data to be stored inside the processor at once, increasing the chances that the necessary data is already inside and speeding up any subsequent processing.
AMD should use this technology for its future Zen 4 processors, but here and now it’s just this special 5800X3D, an improved version of the Ryzen 7 5800X that was launched in 2020. Compared to the 5800X, the 5800X3D trades a little frequency and some overclocking checks for a significantly larger 96MB L3 cache – triple the size of the 5800X.
| CPU design | Increase | Base | L3 cache | PDT | Recommended retail price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 5950X | Zen 3 16C/32T | 4.9GHz | 3.4GHz | 64 MB | 105W | $799 |
| Ryzen 5900X | Zen 3 12C/24T | 4.8GHz | 3.7GHz | 64 MB | 105W | $549 |
| Ryzen 5800X3D | ZEN3 8C/16T | 4.5GHz | 3.4GHz | 96 MB | 105W | $449 |
| Ryzen 5800X | ZEN3 8C/16T | 4.7GHz | 3.8GHz | 32 MB | 105W | $449 |
| Ryzen 5700G | ZEN3 8C/16T | 4.6GHz | 3.8GHz | 16 MB | 65W | $359 |
| Ryzen 5600X | Zen 3 6C/12T | 4.6GHz | 3.7GHz | 32 MB | 65W | $299 |
| Ryzen 5600G | Zen 3 6C/12T | 4.4GHz | 3.9GHz | 16 MB | 65W | $259 |
Before we get into the first test results, let’s briefly cover the platform we’re using. For the AMD side we’re using an Asus ROG Crosshair 8 Hero, while 11th Gen Intel gets an Asus ROG Maximus Z590 Hero and 12th Gen gets the Asus ROG Z690 Maximus Hero – all high end cards for their platforms -respective forms. DDR4 motherboards used G.Skill 3600MT/s CL16 memory, while 12th Gen Intel benefited from faster but higher latency Corsair 5200MT/s CL38 RAM.
11th Gen AMD and Intel CPUs were cooled with an Eisbaer Aurora 240mm AiO, while 12th Gen testing was done with an Asus ROG Ryujin 2,360mm AiO. (And to answer the obvious question: the 240mm and 360mm AiOs tend to provide equivalent performance based on our testing – especially for an outdoor test bench in cool ambient conditions (21C). The only difference tends to be the fan speed, which is higher on the 240mm than the 360mm.) Our rig was topped off with a 1000W Corsair RM1000x power supply from Infinite Computing.
In order to reduce run-to-run variance and ensure that we are CPU limited as much as possible, we are using the Asus ROG Strix 3090 OC Edition. It’s a massive three-slot, three-fan design that keeps the card surprisingly cool and quiet.
One of the biggest questions about the 5800X3D is exactly where this upgraded cache will be useful – because if a game or other application doesn’t fit a specific performance profile, it may not see any benefit in terms of performance on the 5800X3D – and indeed it may even perform worse due to the clock speed that AMD has sacrificed to make the design work.
To find out, we tested the 5800X3D in a range of content creation and gaming scenarios – against the original 5800X and a number of other recent AMD and Intel processors. We hope to see big performance increases, especially in video games, but we’ll start with some quick content creation tests: a Cinebench R20 3D renderer and Handbrake video transcoding.
| CB R20 1T | CB R20 MT | HB h.264 | HB HEVC | Using HEVC Power | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core i9 12900K | 760 | 10416 | 70.82fps | 29.26fps | 373W |
| Core i7 12700K | 729 | 8683 | 57.64fps | 25.67fps | 318W |
| Core i5 12600K | 716 | 6598 | 44.27fps | 19.99fps | 223W |
| Core i5 12400F | 652 | 4736 | 31.77fps | 14.70fps | 190W |
| Core i9 11900K | 588 | 5902 | 41.01fps | 18.46fps | 321W |
| Core i5 11600K | 541 | 4086 | 29.00fps | 13.12fps | 250W |
| Ryzen 9 5950X | 637 | 10165 | 70.28fps | 30.14fps | 237W |
| Ryzen 7 5800X3D | 546 | 5746 | 42.71fps | 19.10fps | 221W |
| Ryzen 7 5800X | 596 | 6118 | 44.18fps | 19.50fps | 229W |
| Ryzen 5 5600X | 601 | 4502 | 31.75fps | 14.43fps | 160W |
No content creation results are particularly impressive for the 5800X3D, which outperforms the 5600X and Intel 12400F but falls behind older rivals like the 12900K, 12700K and 5800X (the latter by two to six percent). That’s not a huge surprise – no task would logically benefit from a larger cache, so you only see the effect of the new processor’s lowered base clocks compared to the standard 5800X. However, the results aren’t disastrous either; it’s still a perfectly capable processor for these tasks that easily outperforms previous generations, but not a class leader.
With those out of the way, let’s get to the fun stuff: let’s check out how the 5800X3D performs in a range of games. Click on the quick links below to skip to the titles that interest you most, or click the ‘next page’ button to read it all!
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D Review
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