AMD released its latest gaming CPUs at CES in Las Vegas, and they’re both better and worse than we hoped. The big news is that AMD has applied its 3D V-Cache technology to the Ryzen 7000 series (opens in new tab). And this time it’s not just one chip, but a trio of CPUs.
Last time it was the sole Ryzen 7 5800X3D (opens in new tab) which got the game-accelerating 3D V-Cache treatment. For Ryzen 7000, there are three CPUs, extending to 16 cores.
As a reminder, the whole 3D V-Cache thing is about using 3D packaging to stack extra memory on top of CPUs. Games in particular benefit from additional cache memory, which reduces traffic over the CPU’s memory bus and increases frame rates.
Anyway, for the new 3D V-Cache versions of the latest Ryzen 7000 series CPUs, the fun begins with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. It’s a direct replacement for the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and the chip that many thought would be the Ryzen 7000 series’ only V-Cache offering. It retains eight CPU cores, although clearly based on Zen 4 rather than Zen 3 technology, and includes 104MB of total L2 and L3 cache.
That total cache figure is more than double that of the Ryzen 7 7700X without V-Cache, but only marginally higher than the 5800X3D’s 100MB. In terms of clock speeds, the 7800X3D tops out at 5 GHz, some 500 MHz faster than the old chip.
All told, AMD says the 7800X3D is over 15% faster in a range of popular games than the 5800X3D. If that sounds like quite a boost, things get complicated here. AMD is also launching 12- and 16-core 3D V-Cache equipped chips in the Ryzen 9 7900X3D and Ryzen 9 7950X3D.
The thing is, those chips are clocked at 5.6 GHz and 5.7 GHz respectively. AMD estimates that the 7950X3D is nine to 24% faster in games than Intel’s current top CPU, the Core i9-13900K. All this means that AMD is now proposing a 16-core CPU as the best gaming chip, which doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Very few games scale beyond eight cores. The eight-core 7800X3D would be enough. Except that AMD capped the clock speed on that chip at 5GHz, significantly lower than the 12- and 16-core variants.
It’s a different strategy from the Ryzen 5000 series, where AMD released a single eight-core V-Cache model that stood alone as the clear game choice, leaving 12 and 16 cores as tools for wider computing and content creation .
This time, you’ll have to shell out for a lot of extra cores that offer little benefit to gaming in order to access a V-Cache chip with the highest clock speeds that matter for gaming. That’s more than a little annoying.
That’s especially true given the overclocking limitations with 3D V-Cache chips. Last time with the 5800X3D, AMD didn’t allow overclocking at all. For the new 7000 series V-Cache chips, that has been loosened a bit. But just a little bit.
The new chips support both AMD’s automatic overclocking function Precision Boost Overdrive and the use of the Curve Optimizer. However, manual frequency overclocking is still off the menu, so you can’t buy a 5GHz 7800X3D and simply clock it down to the level of the 12- and 16-core models. Disappointing.
For now, we don’t have prices and sales dates for these new chips. But watch this space for updates.