AMD's newest chip doesn't overclock || Ryzen 7 5800X3D

This is the fastest gaming CPU on the planet or at least it was when AMD first announced it. Intel beats him to the punch with what they claim is the fastest gaming CPU the Core i9 12900 KS. They put that together so quickly we didn't get a chance to review it before they shoved it out the door, what is it about this unassuming little square the Ryzen 7 5800 x 3d that's got Intel so scared that they'd drop everything to come out ahead of it.

3d V-Cache

AMD's new gaming CPU achieves its fastest ever gaming claims by using their shiny new 3d v-cache technology where ultra-fast cache memory is stacked on top of the CPU die in addition to the cache that's already inside it but why is cache so important for gaming that AMD would go out of their way to literally make a cash sandwich.

Because it's so close to the CPU cores it is fast you can think of it roughly like the relationship between ram and storage and there are different levels of cache that get even faster the closer they get to the course 3d v-cache is l3 cache which for the 5800x3d is a shared pool of cache memory for all of its 8 cores for games.

This cache is used for well everything but especially for things like AI-behavior, trees, physics, information, and other things that the CPU is constantly doing if the cache fills up and this stuff has to be evicted back to ram the CPU is not only has to wait for new data to arrive from ram but it also has to wait for the old data to come back when it's needed again this is what you'd call a bottleneck and this one will lower frame rates of CPU-bound games or cause hitching even when FPS is high.

With three times the cache of its namesake the Ryzen 7 5800X the 5800X 3d promises to basically never run out of cash under normal circumstances which should improve gaming performance.

Overclocking

The other reason the Ryzen 7 5800X 3d is special, overclocking or rather lack, thereof for the first time on the Ryzen platform AMD says that this is a limitation for this one specific CPU because the 3d-stacked cache memory needs a hard-capped maximum voltage for reliability, not only does that mean that overclocking one of these things would potentially be dangerous it also means that thanks to the extra power draw required to run the 3d V-Cache core clocks are lower than the vanilla 5800x as we saw obviously that hasn't hurt it much in practice but you can imagine how much faster things could be if only that limitation worked in place and they can drive the clocks just that little bit faster.

Conclusion

Overall it's a weird chip but it's not a bad one is it the most powerful gaming CPU in the world no it's beaten out by the core i9 12900 ks but again that CPU is a power-hungry beast that costs 800$. The Ryzen 7 5800X 3d is 450$ which makes it the fastest gaming CPU at a price that makes any sense and that's why the core i7 12 700k at 400$ is in our test lineup that chip still represents an extremely good value it's not far off for gaming and dominates for the price if you need productivity plus it's running on a brand new platform.