The 9850X3D is here. $499 MSRP, and promises of a new king of the hill on what concerns high-end consumer gaming CPUs.

At first glance, we have in front of us what seems like a binned, overclocked 9800X3D.

Same architecture and specs, higher boost clock speeds

We conducted our benchmarks on a MSI X870E Carbon Wifi with 2 DIMMS of 16GB each of 6000 Mhz CL28 RAM and an RTX 5090.

Starting with the synthetic benchmarks, 3D Mark Timespy is a DirectX 12 1440p benchmark for both CPU and GPU.

We were within margin of error for total score, and got a 3.2% better result on the CPU score with the 9850X3D

This general 3% improvement can also be observer on Cyberpunk 2077, which we chose to run at high settings and without any kind of scaling. The improvements were small but relatively steady across the board, with a slight advantage, as expected, at lower resolutions.

This is exacerbated in the DX12 benchmark of Shadow of the Tomb Raider. At 4k we observed the same results with the highest graphical settings, but somewhat more interesting improvements with lower resolutions, particularly, and obviously at 1080p, where we got slightly under 5% more frames per second.

Going back to the synthetics, Cinebench, namely the Single core test, is where we got the biggest difference between these two CPUs, with the 9850X3D getting an almost 8% boost in score over its slightly less buff brother.

The same cannot be said for Black Myth: Wukong, a game that was not able to leverage this extra boost clock speed and behaved the same at all resolutions, at its highest graphical setting.

The 7-Zip benchmark measures the performance of compression and decompression tasks using the LZMA and LZMA2 algorithms. Here we observed this somewhat typical 3% boost, which we observed in quite a few tests already, and that we’d say is a good baseline number for what you can expect right now if you opt in for a 9850X3D over the 9800X3D.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Does the 9850X3D make sense for you? Maybe. It depends on what you're looking for, and, more importantly, at what price you can find it and the 9800X3D for (don't forget the 7800X3D too, which is still a fantastic CPU for the right price).

Assuming that the 9850X3D will be found for 480-500 USD and that the 9800X3D will hover around 450-470, it can make sense if you’re building anew and don’t mind to pay slightly more for this, also slightly higher performance, and to be able to state that you do indeed own the best consumer grade gaming CPU.

If you already own a 9800X3D, it’s very hard to justify it. Waiting for Zen 6 is probably going to be the correct route.