Gaming Zen 5 with V-Cache said to be coming out in early November
It looks like AMD is planning to proverbially rain on Intel’s parade around the new Arrow Lake desktop processors (Core Ultra 200S). Rumors lately say that AMD will release Zen 5 derived gaming “X3D” processors, which could conquer the throne of the fastest gaming CPU, just after the competitor’s launch. According to the latest reports, they will really come shortly after Arrow Lake and with better clock speeds than what “X3D” Zen 4 achieved.
According to previous reports, AMD was expected to release an octa-core version of Zen 5 with 3D V-Cache, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, this year, while the 12-core and 16-core would be released later in the coming year. Now, information has surfaced on the Chinese forum Chiphell that the Ryzen 7 9800X3D could be officially announced on October 25, the day right after Intel starts selling Arrow Lake processors for the LGA 1851 platform. This date, it seems, was even communicated on the forums by one of AMD’s local representatives, however, his comment was then deleted.
If this date holds true, the 25th should only be the day of the official unveiling of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. On this day AMD will announce the specs and availability date with pricing. Probably some benchmarks could be shown, but as always with official testing they may not be completely trustworthy due to the possibility of cherry picking and other bias. It will be best to wait for independent testing.
According to the same deleted comment, the actual availability of the processor should then start from the 1st to the 5th of November, which is a range spanning over the weekend (Friday to Tuesday). However, different information has also surfaced, according to which the actual release with store availability should be on the 7th of November, which is the following Thursday. According to this, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D should be available for purchase two weeks after Arrow Lake processors. However, this information has not been officially confirmed yet.
5,2 GHz All-core boost?
On the Chinese social network Bilibili, information on the parameters of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D appeared almost simultaneously with the launch date rumors. It appears that the processor could have higher clock speeds than the previous Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which could help drive its gaming performance a bit higher. According to an alleged snapshot from Cinebench testing, the base clock speed should be 4.7 GHz and the processor is reportedly capable of boosting to 5.2 GHz with all cores. This isn’t necessarily its maximum boost, as it could theoretically clock a bit higher on one or two preferred cores (in single and low-threaded apps only though). However, 5.2 GHz could be its clock speed relevant for gaming.
In contrast, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D based on the previous Zen 4 generation has a base clock speed of only 4.2 GHz, so there would be a significant improvement there. However, it will be the real-world clock speeds that will be more important in practice. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D has an official maximum boost of 5.0 GHz and unofficially the real maximum is a bit higher (5050 to 5100 MHz). According to HWCooling’s review, the clock speeds averaged 4.7 GHz in Cinebench R23 and around 4.8 GHz in games. If the Ryzen 7 9800X3D really was able to hold up to somewhere around 5.2 GHz in games instead, that would mean a noticeable boost in performance and in-game FPS, up to 8-10% just due to clock speeds, which could then be compounded by some further uplift due to the improved CPU architecture.
However, we have to take into account the possibility that the clock speeds in games will be slightly lower than those in the leaked Cinebench test. For example, it’s possible that the leaker used some extremely powerful liquid cooling, whereas results would have been worse with air cooling (we also can’t rule out the possibility that the leak shows an overclocked system).
In addition to the higher clock speed, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D should mainly draw better performance from the cores with the new architecture (Zen 5). The L3 cache will remain at 96 MB and the model will still have eight cores and 16 threads. There will be official support for DDR5-5600 memory instead of just DDR5-5200, but this may not matter much since users will be using overclocked memory with XMP or EXPO profiles anyway.
Arrow Lake officially slower than Ryzen 7 7800X3D?
The Ryzen 7 9800X3D should be the fastest gaming processor when released. This seems to have been indirectly confirmed by Intel as well. The company’s representative Robert Hallock (who previously worked at AMD, actually) reportedly said in one of the briefings that the Core 9 285K as the most powerful Arrow Lake model should have “roughly” 5% lower gaming performance than the current Ryzen 7 7800X3D of Zen 4 generation. The successor 9800X3D is expected to be even faster, so AMD is likely to extend its lead with this processor, making its “X3D” models the most powerful CPU option gamers will be able to buy.
Again, it should be added that this statement is part of Intel’s marketing, so take it with a grain of salt. Here too, we need to wait for real independent tests. Also, performance varies depending on the specific games being tested, so for that reason as well, comparisons like this are always only a rough indication of how things look.
Sources: VideoCardz (1, 2), HXL (1, 2, 3)
Jan Olšan, editor @ Cnews.cz
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