Ahead of tomorrow’s official availability of the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D at $499 USD, today the review embargo lifted. This faster variant to the existing Ryzen 7 9800X3D has been undergoing lots of Linux benchmarking the past two weeks for seeing the performance capabilities of this fastest 8-core 3D V-Cache processor.
The AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D is an 8-core / 16-thread processor with a 104MB total cache thanks to 3D V-Cache. The difference compared to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is a maximum 5.6GHz boost clock with the 9850X3D, a 400MHz increase. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Ryzen 7 9850X3D both have a 4.7GHz base clock and maintaining the 120 Watt default TDP. For that 7.6% higher boost clock with the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is about a $30 premium, or…
Ahead of tomorrow’s official availability of the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D at $499 USD, today the review embargo lifted. This faster variant to the existing Ryzen 7 9800X3D has been undergoing lots of Linux benchmarking the past two weeks for seeing the performance capabilities of this fastest 8-core 3D V-Cache processor.
The AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D is an 8-core / 16-thread processor with a 104MB total cache thanks to 3D V-Cache. The difference compared to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is a maximum 5.6GHz boost clock with the 9850X3D, a 400MHz increase. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Ryzen 7 9850X3D both have a 4.7GHz base clock and maintaining the 120 Watt default TDP. For that 7.6% higher boost clock with the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is about a $30 premium, or 6% at $499 USD, compared to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D.
AMD is promoting the Ryzen 7 9850X3D as a great processor for gamers with the tag line, "The World’s Best Gaming Processor Just Got Faster." Indeed, it performs great for games and many other workloads as to be shown in this article. If all you do is gaming and typical desktop tasks, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is indeed a fantastic option. If you are also running other demanding workloads too, it depends upon how multi-threaded they are and other factors whether the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is the best fit or if you’d be better off going for the AMD Ryzen 9 9900 series for the higher core/thread counts.
For the benchmarks in this article, I freshly (re)tested the following processors under Linux:
- Intel Core Ultra 9 285K
- AMD Ryzen 5 9600X
- AMD Ryzen 7 9700X
- AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
- AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D
- AMD Ryzen 9 9900X
- AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D
- AMD Ryzen 9 9950X
- AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D
The main AM5 test platform was the ASRock X870E Taichi with 2 x 16GB GSKILL DDR5-6000 memory and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics. All of these processors were freshly tested under an Ubuntu 25.10 with the Linux 6.17 kernel, NVIDIA R580 graphics card, GCC 15.2 compiler, and other Ubuntu 25.10 Linux defaults.
Graphics/gaming benchmarks were run as well as a wide assortment of over 190 other Linux benchmarks in evaluating the performance of the Ryzen 7 9850X3D as well as a fresh look at Intel’s Arrow Lake up against the AMD Ryzen 9000 (Zen 5) series.
Thanks to AMD for providing the Ryzen 7 9850X3D review sample in time for Linux testing ahead of tomorrow’s official launch.