The new AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is reportedly massively quicker than the 7800X3D, according to a new leak that's reportedly come from the MSI OC Lab. This latest leak pits the two CPUs against each other in Cinebench and gives us a glimpse of the gaming performance of the new chip in Far Cry 6 and Black Myth: Wukong.
If these figures are genuine, then the Ryzen 7 9800X3D looks set to take the best gaming CPU trophy when it launches, and we conduct our 9800X3D review. Not only does it look significantly quicker than the current champ, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, but even Intel has admitted that the 9800X3D will beat the Core Ultra 9 285K when it launches.
Let's start with the gaming performance, where it looks as though the 9800X3D (called the 8-core 9000X3D in the graphs) has the edge over the 7800X3D. The biggest headline here is Far Cry 6, where the 9800X3D reportedly clocks up a frame rate of 190fps, using an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 and the latest Windows 11 24H2 update.
Comparatively, the same spec only averages 168fps when using the 7800X3D, meaning you get a 13% boost from the 9800X3D.
The other game results are less inspiring, with the 9800X3D being 2% quicker than the 7800X3D in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Black Myth: Wukong, but the CPU doesn't always have a big impact in game tests compared to the GPU. Also, while the differences are small, there's still an uptick by going from the 7800X3D and 9800X3D.
To us, this doesn't just suggest that the performance improvement comes from moving to the new AMD Zen 5 architecture, but that there's also a decent boost in the 9800X3D clock speed. While the Ryzen 7 7800X3D's 64MB stack of 3D V-cache makes it a formidable gaming chip, it's been held back by its meager 5GHz boost clock, and it looks as though AMD is raising the frequency with the new chip.
This also appears to be demonstrated in the Cinebench R23 results, which are in line with previous 9800X3D Cinebench leaks. According to these latest figures, the 9800X3D scores 23,317 in the Cinebench R23 Multi Core test. Compared to 18,243 on the 7800X3D, a huge 28% performance boost. Likewise, there's an 18% boost in the Cinebench Single Core test, where clock speed is crucial, with the 9800X3D reportedly hitting a score of 2,145, compared to 1,822 on the 7800X3D.
These new figures also pit the 9800X3D against the new Ryzen 7 9700X in Cinebench, where the former is actually quicker. This is a reversal of the situation with the last generation, where the Ryzen 7 7700X's 5.4GHz boost clock made it significantly quicker than the 7800X3D in this test. This time, though the 9800X3D is reportedly 2.2% quicker in the Cinebench R23 Single Core test, and 6.5% quicker in the Multi Core test.
The new figures appear to have been inadvertently published by German tech site Hardware Luxx, as a result of uploading a large dump of images following its tour of an MSI motherboard factory in China. The images have now been removed, but Videocardz has preserved them for posterity.
While we wait for the final details of AMD's new Ryzen 9000X3D chips, you can check out what the competition has in store by reading our Intel Arrow Lake guide, which contains the specs and prices of the new chips, as well as details about the release date.