The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D reached just 6.9 GHz and thousands of in-game FPS with an overclock and barely broke a sweat

The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is now officially with us. PC Gamer's hardware commander and conqueror Dave has been testing it for some time and considers it “the new king of gaming CPUs.” That's what we expected, or at least hoped, since its predecessor, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, held the crown for the longest time. Now we see how far it can be pushed, and the answer is far indeed.

Asus China GM Tony Yu has shown (via Wccftech) that the 9800X3D hits a whopping 6.9GHz at just over 100W, hitting over 1,000fps at times in CS2 and Valorant at maximum settings. That's 1080p, of course, but these are esports titles and we like our frames more than our pixels for competitive gaming.

The most important takeaway, however, isn't the frame rates achieved, nice as they are; The most important takeaway is the 6.9GHz overclocking. For reference, the 9800X3D has a standard base clock of 4.7GHz and a boost clock of 5.2GHz, which is a 1.7GHz increase over the boost clock.

Importantly, the 9800X3D is the first unlocked 3D V-cache CPU from AMD. In previous generation X3D processors, the V-cache was located on top of the chips, which prevented sufficient heat transfer for cooling during overclocking, leaving the chip locked. You could overclock them a bit by playing around with PBO, but you wouldn't get much out of them.

However, on the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the cores sit proudly on their V-cache, so that the IHS sits comparatively flush with the silicon underneath. This means better heat transfer for cooling, which has ultimately resulted in an X3D CPU that is finally cleared for overclocking. Additionally, clock speeds in general can now skyrocket, even without manual overclocking.

Since we've never been able to properly overclock an It's of course worth noting that this overclock was done using liquid nitrogen, but just through our own tinkering with the overclocking capabilities of the new Ryzen chip, we managed to pull it off almost Stable at 5.6 GHz and absolutely stable at 5.57 GHz. And that's without getting involved in the curve optimization shenanigans, although with just 400 MHz on top of the standard boost clock of 5.2 GHz you obviously can't see any big increases in frame rate and requires a lot more power.

But considering these overclocks, that's still pretty impressive, which says a lot about a chip that already significantly outperforms other non-X3D 9000 series chips and Intel Arrow Lake chips in gaming performance even without overclocks.

Speaking of which, now that we know that the Ryzen 7 9800X3D can overclock so well, there's really no reason to choose Arrow Lake when gaming. However, there probably wouldn't be a reason for that anyway, considering the Ryzen 7 9800X3D performs better, runs cooler, and And uses less electricity. This last point is the only thing that Arrow Lake had to offer before the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which has now killed it. Big oof.

Maybe not so much for Intel, but these are exciting times for the rest of us. An X3D chip overclocked by 1.7 GHz, who would have thought?

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