AMD claims to have the fastest gaming processor with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D; Intel promised exactly the same two weeks ago with the 12900KS. Who’s right? On average, our gaming benchmarks give Intel the benefit of the doubt, but it can vary considerably from game to game who is the fastest. A fairer conclusion, in our opinion, is that AMD is back on par with Intel’s Alder Lake processors with the 5800X3D, and the differences between them are too small to point to a real winner.
Effect of the extra L3 cache
Intel and AMD may have had the same goal, but the plan of approach is completely different. For the 12900KS, Intel simply increased the clock speeds and thus the power consumption of the 12900K. AMD even had to slightly lower the clock frequencies of the 5800X3D, because it added extra L3 cache with a new production technique. That’s the first time in a consumer processor.
That extra L3 cache delivers extra performance in many games, averaging 11 percent in our testing, and specific other workloads, such as x264 encoding and compression. However, many other software is less sensitive to this addition and therefore performs comparable to the 5800X, or even slightly worse due to the lower clocks. You don’t add that yourself again, because the new production technology still scales poorly with voltage and that’s why AMD has completely switched off the overclocking functions of this chip.
Maybe not the best buy, but by far the most efficient
The 5800X3D will not be worth buying for many people. Although the suggested retail price on paper has remained the same as that of the 5800X, in practice you pay around 150 euros more. In all software in which the 5800X3D is not or barely faster, that is of course a bad story anyway, and even if you are purely concerned with the game performance, you can wonder whether the profit achieved is worth so much money. Moreover, with the Core i7 12700K, Intel has a processor that is cheaper, performs almost equally in games and often performs significantly better in other software.
Still, we appreciate AMD’s approach. The chip world has been talking for years about combining multiple dies into a chip as a vision of the future, but after the chiplets with the Ryzen 5000 series, AMD is now also the first to bring vertically stacked chips to mass-produced consumer products. The technology still has some drawbacks, but it does allow AMD to match Intel’s excellent gaming performance with a substantially lower power consumption. It’s debatable whether the 5800X3D really is the fastest gaming CPU, but there’s no question that it’s by far the most efficient gaming CPU. AMD receives a well-deserved Innovation award.
The Future of 3D V-Cache
AMD emphasizes that the performance gains of 3D V-Cache in the best scenarios are higher than those of a completely new architecture, which usually only appears once every two years. Although the manufacturer does not want to confirm that with so many words, it will therefore not stay with this one chip. Not every Zen 4 processor will be equipped with 3D V-Cache later this year, because not every end-use will benefit enough from it to be worth the extra cost of the cache and the advanced production method, but AMD does confirm to Tweakers that ‘3D stacking is an important part of the future roadmap’.
The possibilities are numerous: think of adding a GPU die or a chip with super-fast working memory. AMD shows with the 5800X3D that it has already mastered the technology.
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