(Most of) AMD’s gaming-centric Ryzen 7000 X3D CPUs launch February 28

Enlarge / AMD has announced pricing and availability for its new 3D V-Cache desktop processors.

AMD

AMD’s 3D V-Cache-equipped Ryzen 7000 desktop processors will be available for purchase on February 28, the company announced today. The rollout will begin with the 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X3D and 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D, which will start at $599 and $699, respectively. A cheaper model, the eight-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D, will be available for $449 but won’t launch until April 6.

All of these processors are successors to the original Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and their sales pitches are similar. AMD stacks an additional 64MB of L3 cache on top of mainstream Ryzen 7000 processors, which can provide a significant performance boost for software (like games) that is particularly sensitive to cache size and speed.

These prices aren’t actually much higher than the launch prices of the original Ryzen 7000 processors in August – the 7950X3D has the same launch price as the 7950X, and the 7900X3D and 7800X3D are only $50 more than their counterparts. But prices have come down a lot since then; the 7950X typically costs between $550 and $600 now, and non-X series processors like the Ryzen 7 7700 and Ryzen 9 7950 are even cheaper. Prices for X3D chips will also eventually come down, but they are still significantly more expensive than versions without additional cache.

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It looks like AMD fixed some of the limitations of the original 5800X3D when it was released. Most notably, there are now 12- and 16-core options for people who use their PC for more than gaming. The X3D-series processors still run at lower clock speeds than comparable X-series processors, but the gap is a bit smaller. And the processors support limited performance tuning via Precision Boost Overdrive and Curve Optimizer features, in addition to memory overclocking.

But the X3D chips still don’t support the typical overclocking features available in the rest of Ryzen CPUs, nor do they support changing the default 120W TDP limits of the CPUs. This can further limit the performance of 12- and 16-core CPUs in applications that don’t care about cache: the 7900X and 7950X have a default TDP of 170W, allowing them to run faster and longer. The Ryzen 5800X3D also ran hotter than other Ryzen CPUs, but the Ryzen 7000’s core temperatures are already quite high, so we’ll have to test them to compare.

AMD says the new processors will require a socket AM5 motherboard with an updated BIOS and chipset driver, and the company also “recommends[s] using at least a 280mm all-in-one liquid cooler for the best performance.”

Listing image by AMD