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John (He/Him) is the Components Editor here at TechRadar and he is also a programmer, gamer, activist, and Brooklyn College alum currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Visual performance in general tended to be a bit better on the IGPs on competing Intel chips here as well, so if you are buying a processor and don’t want to buy a graphics card, it’s worth keeping this in mind. Power and Thermal Performance The 7800X3D's worst performance against the 13900K was Returnal, where it averaged about 12.5% fewer fps, while still managing an impressive score of 224 fps. Meanwhile, the 7800X3D battled the 13900K to a technical decision in Total War: Warhammer III (552 fps for the 7800X3D to the 13900K's 594 fps), while handily beating the more powerful processor in F1 2022 and Tiny Tina's Wonderland. As for power consumption, we're going to show total system usage as we feel that's more relevant to someone looking at buying this CPU. These results are heavily influenced by performance, as in how many frames the RTX 4090 is able to pump out, so do keep that in mind. That said, the 7800X3D was 3% faster than the 13900K in this game while using 20% less power, so that's a big deal when it comes to thermal output. You can tinker with the performance profile to a degree in the Ryzen Master utility if you need to eek out some extra non-gaming performance, but how effective that will be will take a lot more testing on my part than I have time for in this review. Personally, I wouldn't even want to push it further than where its at, since the prospect of a processor running under 100W paired with a newer GPU running less than 200W has me seeing mini gaming PC builds dancing through my head.
The rest of the test results were mixed, with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D unable to secure any more clear wins. Performance in the rest of these tests were all close together, which does show that, with a card like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, at least with this game subset, you won’t see much in the way of a performance benefit from the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. You will likely need, as AMD advised us, a top-tier card like an RTX 4080 or RTX 4090 to see the 7800X3D pull away. But when you consider that 0.44%—that's less than half of one percent!—of PC gamers are using a GeForce RTX 4080 or 4090 per March 2023's Steam Hardware Survey these days, that's a niche within a niche's niche. Integrated Gaming Tests Both are extremely power hungry for all core productivity workloads though, and need to be power limited, and at that point you are better served by the 7950X or 7950X3D which typically deliver a similar level of performance to that of an unlimited i7 or i9 while reducing total system usage by half, which is a staggering difference. The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Intel Core i9-13900K are undoubtedly two of the best processors you can buy, but they aren't equal. We threw both of the CPUs on the test bench to answer the age-old question: is AMD or Intel better?Yet despite what we just saw, in Photoshop 2022 the 7800X3D performs quite well, matching the 7950X3D with a score of 1481 pts, though that meant it was still 5% slower than the 7700X. Of course, what matters most is performance across the board, and we’re as keen as you to get some verified benchmarks to consider. As soon as we do, we’ll give you our expert view on this next step in AMD’s Zen 4 journey.
Blender Open Data is a core-heavy workload that isn't as efficiently accelerated by Intel E-cores and as a result the 13600K was just 11% faster in this test, though the 13700K mauled the 7800X3D by a 44% margin. If you compare its power consumption with its performance, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D may well produce the best performance-per-watt ratio of any processor we’ve tested, though it would certainly be a close call with some like the Ryzen 9 7900 also performing impressively here. This is one area that AMD has a notable advantage over Intel, though energy efficiency doesn’t often drive many purchasing decisions. AMD's chipset driver manages which cores are best suited for specific tasks so games that benefit from V-Cache, for instance, get put on V-Cache cores while other apps would get thrown onto the full frequency cores. When it comes to productivity though, the 13900K is simply in a different league, as is the 13700K. Still, there are some things we can infer just from the little information we have currently. At CES 2023 AMD did provide an initial February launch window, and also availability of the specs for the three chips:Cyberpunk 2077 has been tested with ray tracing enabled and here the 7800X3D basically matched the 7950X3D while producing similar numbers to the 13900K, though 1% lows are a bit stronger. Then when running the single core test, we saw a sustained frequency of 5 GHz, so just a 200 MHz increase over the all core. The peak operating temperature also dropped to 66c. Benchmarks AMD reworked the CCX on the Ryzen 7 7800X3D somewhat to improve its energy efficiency compared with other Ryzen 7000-series processors that don’t have the 3D V-Cache. This was necessary to help accommodate the added heat and power demands of the 3D V-Cache, and it results in the Ryzen 7 7800X3D being one of the more energy-efficient options we’ve tested.
For this review we've had to update all of our already very fresh data. This is because Nvidia recently changed the way their GeForce drivers behave by disabling Resizable BAR in games such as Horizon Zero Dawn and we believe Spider Man-Remastered as well, resulting in performance gains in those games. There were also a few smaller performance changes so we simply decided to re-test everything, including AM4 and AM5 processors. All tests were performed inside of Windows 11 with the latest Windows updates installed. An Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 was also used for all tests except for those focused on integrated graphics performance. CPU TestsWe've been asked by some members of the driving simulator community to change the way we test ACC, moving away from the Medium preset to Epic, so that's what we've done and this has led to some interesting results which verify what some sim racers have been reporting. As for power usage, officially the 7800X3D has a TDP of 120W, but it didn't even come close to this in my testing, often using a full third less power than it's rated for. Once official drivers get updated after this chip launches, I expect there to be more utilization of the available power potential, but it might not be much more and honestly, it doesn't need it. It gets phenomenal performance for significantly less power than competing chips, so why mess with a great thing? As with all Ryzen 7000 chips, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D's RDNA 2 integrated GPU has two compute units, 4 ACE, and 1 HWS. This unit doesn't have the necessary horsepower to benefit from faster CPU cores — it is entirely GPU compute-bound. The iGPU also doesn't benefit from the 3D V-Cache tech because it resides on the I/O die and can't access the L3 cache, so performance is the same as the regular Ryzen 7000 processors (see more in our X3D iGPU testing). The one area where the Ryzen 7 7800X3D has a hint of success is in the gaming market, but it's walking a thin line there. AMD provided us with data that clearly shows the Ryzen 7 7800X3D can perform better than the Intel Core i9-13900K or the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X when all three are paired with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090.
A processor that has impressive performance might fit well in a high-end work system, but be an unaffordable option for a home PC. A relatively low-performance chip might appear inadequate at first but be an ideal solution in a small form-factor PC where cooling and power limitations prevent power-hungrier chips from being used. Right off the bat with our cost per frame graphs, we have to highlight the fact that we're not including the more affordable but just as effective non-X Ryzen processors. There are a few reasons for this: first, adding another three processors to the testing would have required time we simply didn't have to publish this on a timely basis, and on top of that, we would have had to add Intel's non-K CPUs as well to make it fair, and before you know it the total number of CPUs tested would have doubled. In this game, Intel's Core i9-13900K pushes total system usage just 16% higher than the 7800X3D and while that's a 73w increase in power draw, it's by no means the worst result we've seen. Hitman 3 doesn't run particularly well on Zen 4 processors, at least relative to Intel Raptor Lake CPUs. The 7800X3D is just 4% faster than the 7700X and that means it's 11% slower than the 13900K and 8% slower than the 13700K.Similarly, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D squeezed out a win in Hitman 3,but the cheaper eight-core part was within a few frames. This game is a great showcase of Zen 4 and 3D V-Cache at work, with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D outpacing the previous generation by a whopping 26%. healthy Pro-teen said:It doesn't burn the chip itself, but the bug does allow you to mess with the voltages, so you can fry it but only if U manually (intentionally) push the voltage to insane levels like Igor did.As I said, if you forget that you had higher Vcore for your previous CPU you can fry it on the spot. The Riftbreaker is another game where Zen 4 processors aren't particularly impressive. The 7800X3D manages 225 fps on average, making the 13700K 2% faster which means performance between these two parts is basically identical, but the 13900K is 8% faster.
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