Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 0%
• Anchoring Bias - 6.9% (69 hits)
• Availability Heuristic - 2.2% (22 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 0%
• Hindsight Bias - 2.3% (23 hits)
• Overconfidence Bias - 2.8% (28 hits)
• Framing Effect - 12.8% (129 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 0%
• Status Quo Bias - 0%
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 0%
• Pessimism Bias - 0%

Article text

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D re-review: Maxing out DDR4’s gaming potential

AMD answered the demands of gamers and re-released the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, though not without compromise.

Although the return of Zen 3 X3D has been a good idea for months, given the limited time we saw those chips on the market, this re-release comes with a surprisingly high price, considering the silicon and how it compares to the best CPUs for gaming.

The CPU is flanked on one side by the Core i7-14700K that also supports DDR4 memory, and on the other by the Ryzen 5 7600X3D, which offers superior gaming performance and a lower price to offset the cost of a DDR5 platform.

Price is the biggest issue for the Ryzen 7 5800X3D.

AMD shaved $100 off the original MSRP for the 10th Anniversary Edition re-release, but that puts it in very competitive waters, even considering current RAM prices.

It’s difficult to evaluate the specs of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D given the current market, so this is a refresher of what the processor offers and how it compares to some of the current options featured in our test suite.

It’s an eight-core / 16-thread chip sporting AMD’s Zen 3 architecture, and it boosts up to 4.5 GHz, with a base clock of 3.4 GHz.

The chip is fabricated on TSMC’s 7nm FinFET process, with GlobalFoundries stepping in to fab the I/O die on its 12nm process.

Of course, the main draw of the CPU is the 64MB chunk of SRAM that’s bonded to the compute die, giving the processor access to a total of 96MB of L3 cache.

In recent years, we’ve seen both AMD and Intel increase cache sizes broadly, not just on X3D CPUs.

For instance, the Ryzen 7 9700X has the same 32MB of on-board L3 that we can see all the way back to Zen 3, but it has double the L2 cache.

Intel has traditionally split L2 and L3 more evenly, and we’ve seen an increase in both with Arrow Lake and Arrow Lake Refresh.

Still, the huge boost in L3 helps a lot here.

It comes with some thermal trade-offs, however.

Although the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is a very efficient CPU, it also has careful power management.

The SRAM sits on top of the compute die, insulating the cores from the IHS.

This thermal design means the Ryzen 7 5800X3D has relatively low peak clock speeds out of the box, and it doesn’t officially support AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive.

AMD has addressed that issue in newer X3D chips, riding the efficiency of Zen 4 with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and moving to a new bonding process that situates the SRAM below the compute die with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D specifications and pricing

CPU / (MSRP)

Street Price

Architecture

Cores/Threads (P+E)

Cache (L2 + L3)

Base/Boost Clock (GHz)

TDP / Maximum Power

Ryzen 7 5800X3D

$350

Zen 3 X3D

8 / 16

100 MB

3.4 / 4.5

105W / 142W

Core Ultra 7 270K Plus

$350

Arrow Lake Refresh

24 / 24 (8+16)

76 MB

3.7 / 5.5

125W / 250W

Ryzen 5 7600X3D ($300)

$246

Zen 4 X3D

6 / 12

102 MB

4.1 / 4.7

65W / 88W

Ryzen 7 7800X3D ($450)

$399

Zen 4 X3D

8 / 16

104 MB

4.2 / 5

120W / 162W

Core i7-14700K ($410)

$340

Raptor Lake Refresh

20 / 28 (8+12)

61 MB

3.4 / 5.6

125W / 253W

Recent updates

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is sold out at most retailers, but you can grab it at list price from Amazon right now.

Some notes on this re-review

We don’t normally re-review products here at Tom’s Hardware, much less update existing reviews outside of some extraordinary circumstance.

We will follow up reviews with additional coverage as needed, but our reviews are as much buying advice at the time they’re written as they are historical context years down the road.

Reviews exist in the context in which they’re written.

That’s important because, especially with PC hardware, some good products can become worse over time and bad products can become good over time.

Even in this past generation, AMD had several stumbles with Zen 5, which it addressed post-launch through a combination of firmware updates and exposing additional settings in the BIOS.

Intel had some major regressions in performance with Arrow Lake, which it partially addressed after release with Core 200S Boost.

These products are better now than they were at launch, but it’s still important to know that they had issues at launch.

That’s the function of our reviews.

They’re a snapshot of how a particular component performs and compares to the rest of the market at a certain point in time.

Our list of the best CPUs for gaming and CPU benchmark hierarchy pages are where you’ll find the consistent updates on which chips are best at any given time.

That preamble is to say that this re-review of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D does not replace our original review, which is why this is a separate piece of content and not merely an update.

We’re re-reviewing the chip because AMD is re-releasing it, and we need to compare the chip to the current market it exists in.

That market includes high memory prices, which is a driving force behind the re-release of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D in the first place.

We’re paying especially close attention to memory in this review, both in terms of price and performance.

However, we’ve also brought some price-competitive DDR5 chips into the mix, including some of AMD’s own CPUs.

Finally, we’re reviewing the original Ryzen 7 5800X3D here.

AMD says that the new 10th Anniversary Edition should be identical to the original model, but it’s using a slightly different bonding process, which could have a minor impact on power and thermals, in particular.

We’ll be getting a 10th Anniversary Edition into the lab in order to find out, but we don’t expect major performance differences between the original and re-release versions.