AMD is using its latest CPU launch to declare, once again, it’s the current king of gaming CPUs for desktops. We finally know how much the long-rumored AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D will cost and when you can expect to have it in hand. But before you go out and drop the cost of a budget PC on a single CPU, know that most gamers can grab a cheaper CPU and not miss out on much.
The Ryzen 7 9850X3D, which was first announced at CES 2026, is set to launch Jan. 29 for a suggested retail price of $500. The previous reigning champion, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D from last year, was first released for $480. Sure, if you’re already spending the cost of a Nintendo Switch 2 on a CPU, what’s $20 more? While the 9800X3D chip still sits at that astronomical price at some retailers, it regularly goes on sale for less. Around Black Friday last year, the CPU dropped below $450 and even cost less than $400 at some retailers like Micro Center. We don’t know with the ongoing memory shortage whether we’ll see such price cuts again, but the cost of PCs is so astronomical it’s still worth your time to save every penny.
So what does the Ryzen 7 9850X3D get you that you don’t already have with the 9800X3D? The new chip is still an 8-core, 16-thread CPU that uses AMD’s coveted 3D V-Cache. This means AMD stacks the CPU’s memory on top of itself, resulting in big benefits for gaming that depends on extra memory. Both chips have the same 96MB of L3, of which 64MB is in the V-Cache. The main difference is clock speed. The newer CPU has a 5.6GHz boost clock speed compared to 5.2GHz on the 9800X3D. That 400MHz can make a difference, though only in select games.
Both chips have the same 120W TDP (thermal design power), so they’re completely interchangeable on an AM5 socket. We have yet to see anybody test the 9850X3D in any real-world scenario, though AMD promises it is going to hold an average of 27% better gaming performance on average compared to Intel’s leading Arrow Lake CPU, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K.
The main thing is, most gamers won’t actually see a difference between the two chips. In an interview, AMD’s head of the Ryzen product family, David McAfee, told Gizmodo the new CPU would see better performance in very select titles, namely older DirectX 9 games and more recent major esports games that require higher frequencies. So a game like Counter-Strike 2 may see 148% better performance compared to the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, while a 9800X3D will only see 140%, at least according to AMD. However, games like Marvel Rivals or Battlefield 6 won’t see any performance increase if you plug in either CPU. These small percentage increases would result in a bare few extra frames for your games.
Even then, we won’t know what these numbers mean for real-world performance until we have the CPU in hand. You can spend the extra $20 to make sure you get the peak of CPU performance, though you really don’t need to upgrade if you already have a 9800X3D humming inside your gaming rig. The latest in AMD’s X3D family will still not be as good at some other productivity tasks as other high-end CPUs from both Intel and AMD. These are purely graphics-centric chips built with gamers in mind. Anybody who can nab either of these chips for cheaper than the $500 asking price should feel sated for the time being.
Read the full article here
