Performance and power consumption
The first thing to note about the 9850X3D is that its multi-core performance is essentially indistinguishable from the 9800X3D. If anything, the 9800X3D behaves a little better in our Handbrake video encoding tests, which could be something or nothing – maybe it’s a genuine difference between the chips, maybe it’s the silicon lottery, maybe it’s something else. Overall, it’s mostly a wash.
9850X3D does The 9800X3D has a significant improvement in single-core performance, closing the gap with both the Ryzen 9900X3D and 9950X3D (both of which have regular Zen 5 cores with no 3D V-cache) and the 9700X (which has no 3D V-cache).
There is a world in which AMD can get this extra performance for “free” without changing anything about the architecture or manufacturing process. AMD could have been “binning” silicon lottery winners, or the reliability of the manufacturing process could have improved so much that AMD could reach better numbers that were not consistently achievable a year ago.
But it seems that AMD has improved the single-core performance of the 9850X3D mainly by treating it like a non-X3D chip. The chip’s power consumption during gaming shows that this is more or less what’s happening – the 9850X3D’s CPU package power during gaming is about 25 or 30 W more than that of a 9800X3D playing the same game, despite single-digit-at-best performance improvements (in both our testing and AMD’s advertising).
Although the power consumption of the 9850X3D while gaming is not much higher than that of the 9700X or 9950X3D, it becomes hard to get excited about the small performance gain over performance here.
And that’s on top of the cost deal you’re already making when you buy an X3D-series chip. Game performance is always impressive, but you notice the benefits most of In situations where your CPU, not GPU, is the performance bottleneck.
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