9850X3D - Launching today. More clocks.. more performance? Review and Benchmarks!

Boom. That's why you're here. The 9850X3D is launching today. It's 7% faster and can use more than 7% more power at times, but the high clock speeds make this a fairly interesting processor. Some games are actually more than 7% faster. Not Not many. A few, but not many. And boy, it sure is hard to build a computer right now, isn't it? Yes. Yes, we can all commiserate about that. But I also want to talk about the 9850 X3D. This is the new fastest gaming machine and this is likely to be ahead. Uh, you know, there's there's rumors, there's there's percolation that maybe a competing processor is coming out of Team Blue. We don't have that. There's not even a hint of that. It wasn't even a hint of that. It's CES really, but maybe it's coming. But this this is dethroning the 9800 X3D and it's coming in at $499. Let's do some benchmarks. Benchmarks in this economy, are you insane? So, this is kind of a refresh. The 9850 X3D. Who is this for? This is probably for somebody that is just building a computer. If you have a 9800 X3D, you're not going to upgrade. If you have a 7800 X3D, this would be a tough I mean, maybe the high clock speed here is really nice. And that was always kind of the trade-off, right? is that for certain games or certain workloads, certain non-gaming workloads, the other AM5 CPUs generally would clock higher. This thing clocks much higher. Uh 5.6 GHz. It turns out it's 5.6 GHz, which is quite a bit faster, about 7% faster than the 9800X 3D. So 7% faster. That should translate, right? It's also weird because Intel hasn't announced a new desktop CPU. Uh CES was rife with lots of Panther Lake news, but really the only thing I have to compare to is the Core Ultra 9 285K. And the really surprising thing is that Cinebench is about the same speed on this new processor. I mean the 9 like these are eight core processors, 16 threads and the Core Ultra 9 is like eight performance cores and then you got 16 efficiency cores and Cinebench is as fast on eight cores and even before we get to the gaming what how is this possible? uh V-Ray is is not quite as fast, but Cinebench is basically the same speed on this processor as a Core Ultra 9 285K H. For gaming performance, especially if you got a high-end GPU like a 5090, well, I mean, we already knew the 900 X3D was the fastest CPU, right? Well, it's it's even faster. I'm upgrading my Falcon Northwest Tiki to be a 9850 X3D. And that's where I discovered something interesting. Cooling does actually make a little bit of a difference. I mean, this is 120 watt TDP CPU. The 900 X3D is a 120 watt TDP CPU. But, um, if you have better cooling, this processor will reward you, especially in the 1% lows. So like Balders's Gate 3, Balders's Gate 3 is going to be about 7% faster than a 900 X3D or significantly faster than a Core Ultra 9. Those are kind of outliers. Star Wars, depending on what area of the game that you're playing, Star Wars Outlaws, uh can be up to 7% on average. It was like four to five, just depending on what game area that you're playing in. So yes, like I say, it it's not an upgrade that makes sense for people that are already on something amazing. But if you bought an inexpensive AM5 CPU like a 7600 and you were holding out to upgrade, now might be the time that you want to upgrade before things get even more bleak over the next couple of years probably. And this CPU does offer a really interesting uh option. And it was fun because AMD even called this out on their slides. It's like ah, you know, with all that vcash, you can use slower memory. Is that a challenge? Oh my gosh, look at that. It's Dell OEM crucial. RIP crucial 5600 ancient DDR5. Uh, does it work fine at 5600? Yeah, it only hurts your your gameplay performance generally about 2% at worst. So 100 FPS and Cyberpunk becomes 98 FPS, I think you'll live. Uh, the other interesting thing was what about one dim? One dim is a little worse. You could limp by on on one dim. I wouldn't really recommend it, but maybe that's an option. That may be an option for other manufacturers to ramp up like I mean oh yeah DDR5 has been a challenge at these blistering speeds like beyond 5600 and you remember CU DIM we had CU dim on the Intel platform. It's like oh we'll have 8800 and then like four DIMs on the platform is also still a little bit tricky. 4 is a little more possible on the MSI platform, but who is crazy enough to buy 256 gigs of memory for AM5 as we we did in a in a video before the madness. So, could you limp by on a single 8 gig stick? If you've got 3D Vcash, you're certainly going to have a much better experience with VCash than without. But that's kind of bleak, isn't it? Isn't that like I I don't know. I I don't know. I don't I don't I don't I don't I'm not to the point where it's like, "No, I'm not going to buy a computer." But it might be to the point where you're you're uh going to corporate surplus auctions and harvesting desktop computers for their DDR5 memory because what else are you going to do? It's really an unfortunate time that AMD is launching the 9850 X3D in the in the in a great RAM drought. Um, it it's certainly easy to not be enthusiastic about building a machine and at the same time it's like the CPU is insanely fast. I wish that they had launched with these kinds of CPU speeds. Like what was holding them back? Because this is bending. Is this a TSMC thing? Did they really just dial it in? Because again, the 5.6 GHz clock speed in Windows and Linux generally is across the board. Like it holds up really well. The power usage is a little higher with this CPU than not, but does anybody on a desktop computer really care about power utilization? I mean, it's I know it's 120 watts TDP versus 120 watts TDP, but this CPU definitely benefits from from better cooling and will reward you if you give it a little bit better cooling even before you turn on PBO or anything like that. So, it's really nice to see actually. All right, so for our test system configuration, we're using the ROG Cross Hero X870E from Asus. This is a full AMD recommended bias defaults, not the ASUS defaults, but with the Expo profile set on a GCL Trident Z memory. This is F5 6000 J28. So, this is CL28 memory. It's very fast. It's the TZ5NR kit of memory, and this is 32 GB, two 16 gig sticks, so it's very fancy in this configuration. For storage, we're using a Samsung 9100 Pro 1 TBTE game drive. It's a pretty zippy drive. It could do 15 gigabytes per second. And for a RAM or secondary RAM for slow testing, like will it work with slow crappy memory? We're using Dell OEM Crucial DDR5600. Yeah. One and two sticks. For cooling, we tried the ND15 tower cooler as well as the Arctic Liquid Freezer 2. It's a little older. Liquid Freezer 2 is perfectly fine. It's perfectly serviceable cooling. It's a very good liquid cooler. and uh an AIO for this CPU uh definitely is awesome. I did okay with the the Noctua runs a little hot, but the Noctua in a dual fan configuration, not bad. The D15. All right, look, it's it's 7% faster. What What do you want for the benchmarks? Let's look at Borderlands 4 9850 X 3D 900X 3D. It's uh one FPS faster at 1440p. Okay, it pulls a little 2 FPS 2160p. It's the same performance. Uh this speaks more to Borderlands than it it does anything. What about an older game like DSX Mankind Divided? Oo, that's a that's a nice little bit of an uplift and a nice little bit of an uplift on our 1% lows. And the 1% lows story, I think, is the more interesting story on this CPU. So, even at 2160p, we have a little bit better 1% low performance, even though our topline average frame rate really isn't a lot different between these two CPUs. 1440p, okay, the average is a fair bit different. 1080p. Uh, okay. It kind of makes sense. Monster Hunter Wilds 139 versus 138. 9850 X3D are 1% lows. That's doing pretty good. 1440p, 89, 2160p, 68. Even at 4K, we get a little bit of a performance bump, which is nice to see. An ancient game like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, functionally no difference in performance at 1080p, 1440p. Okay, the 9850 X3D may is is more than margin of error faster, just barely. And then at 4K things sort of equalize again. So 1440p is the interesting outlier. 1080p, the engine can't handle it. 1440p. There you go. And 2160p. Oh, the boiler snake. Got a little bit of water hammer in my century old steam heating system. It's fine. It's fine. It's going to It's going to get a little louder here in a minute. Okay, let's throw in the 9950X3D. So, the 9850 X3D, that's your your gaming CPU, right? It's the high clock speed. Wouldn't it be awesome to have a 950 X3D that has a high clock speed? See, the 950X3D is interesting because there's the high clock speed chiplet. And then there's the slower chiplet that has Vcash. And so, depending on the scheduler in your operating system, your operating system could choose to put your game on the Vcash chiplet if your game needs that. Or if your game doesn't really benefit from Vcash, it could put it on the fast one. And Windows almost always does the wrong thing. Borderlands 4, really not a huge difference here. If we expand our graph, it's like, oh, let's talk about the performance here. 9800 X3D, 9850 X3D. Yeah. So, the Boiler Snake is just like, what what what's what's going on and what's going on with our frame rate here? Like 9950 X3D on top with 115 FPS, but the 9850 X3D is 118. I It's uh it's it's sort Z to A. So we this be fine. DSX Mankind Divided 950X3D DSX chooses the wrong chiplet every time. This is a scheduling thing. This is also fine with game mode running in Linux. So if you're running Linux, you don't have this problem. And this is one of the scenarios where Linux performance is better than Windows. And it's just it depends on the CPU, depends on a lot of things. I'm on the 950X3D because DSX Mankind Divided is an ancient game. But also the 1% lows like check that out. 137 versus 180 or 9850X3D. So it's sort of what I'm talking about. Monster Hunter Wilds 9950X 3D with 131 versus 139. And again are 1% lows. Very nice to see. Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Again, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an older ancient title. It chooses the wrong thing. This is why it's important to have the AMD chipset drivers installed. The AMD chipset drivers will to an extent mitigate some of this kind of problem depending on what's running in the background and some other parameters for your system. You can generally count on the AMD chipset drivers to do a good job and your performance can be better than this. But with our stuff that's running in the background and some of our specific setup stuff, I sort of rigged the 9950 here to show you like you don't have to do much wrong accidentally or on purpose in our case in order to have, you know, like you have to take go through some extra steps sometimes to get better performance on a 950X3D. And this is why, you know, some of the there there are folks out there that are that are like Intel sick of fants that are doing some of these benchmarks and I see some of these results and it's like Oh, no sweetie. That's that like but you know it's a fair point that you as person driving the computer shouldn't have to think about these things and worry about it. And with the 9850 X3D you sure don't. 382 FPS that is very very nice. And also if you're on Linux you generally don't have to think about this because game mode run. Codblop 7. Codlop 7 950x3D 244 fps 9850 x3d 257 frames per second. But the 1% lows again, the story here is the 1% low improvement. Clar obscure 1% low improvements. 1080p 1440p. Okay, it's basically the same. 4K. Uh I almost forgot that on Codops, but again the 1% lows, even a 1440p on COD 7, that is a that is a pretty substantial improvement. 4K a little little bit of an improvement. Little bit of an overall frame rate improve uh frame rate improvement. I like testing in Cyberpunk because it's kind of a known quantity. Cyberpunk 1080p 241 FPS versus 28. This is a substantial uplift for this this gaming CPU. 1440p shows a similar uplift, especially in 1%. 4K things are basically equal performance. 119 FPS versus 117 FPS. Nothing to sneeze at, but notice the performance does pull very slightly ahead. This is almost but not quite within margin of error. Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy runs really well. 381 FPS at 1080p, 1440p, 332 FPS, and at 4K 28 FPS. And our 1% lows pretty consistently better on the 9850X3D. The Kalisto Protocol, an older title, not a lot of folks are playing this, but visually very interesting. 297 FPS on our 9850 X3D. This engine might be one of the ones that benefits from a higher clock speed as opposed to VCash, at least in this scenario. At 1440p, it's again the 9850 X3D pulls well ahead, even at 4K, 287 FPS. And our 1% lows are improved here. What about the remastered Elder Scrolls? Well, between the 9950 X3D and the 9850 X3D, it's very similar performance. At 1440p, 9850 X3D is just barely more than margin of error faster. And at 4K, it's it's almost margin of error when we're talking about average frame rate, but that 1% low experience again is pretty good. If ray tracing is something interesting, and ray tracing certainly is something interesting on the remastered Elder Scrolls game. 9850X 3D, you're getting eight more FPS and a little bit better 1% low experience at 1080p. 1440p and for I mean at 4K you can barely manage 60 fps. There's really not a lot of difference between the 950 X3D and the 9850X3D, but at you know 1440p you get a a little bit better 1% low experience. So yeah, the higher clock speeds plus vcash definitely very nice for gaming. Just for the sake of completeness, we've got Geekbench 6 CPU. Got our 9950 X3D, 9850 X3D, and our 9800 X3D. You can see some minor differences in single thread. And of course, multi-thread is going to be much better on the 16 core part. Open CL. This one is maybe a little surprising because Open CL is somehow faster on the 9800 X3D than the 9850. was repeatable, but I don't know. Vulcan, however, 9850X3D is fastest for Vulcan operations. No surprises there. So, now what about slow RAM? We talked about slow RAM. Yes, we have slow RAM. Borderlands 4, there is functionally no difference. If you put 5600 RAM in your system, 1440p, it's a hair slower. 4K, it is a hair slower. This is almost, but not quite margin of error. So, if you want to run slow memory with your 9850 X3D, this is the level of penalty that you're going to endure, i.e. not much. DSX Mankind Divided, it's an older title. 5600 memory. Again, it's almost, but not quite margin of error. 1080p, 1440p, and 4K. 5600 is basically fine. Monster Hunter Wilds 5600 memory is basically fine. It is a little slower. The 1% lows took a little bit more of a hit here than I expected, but it kind of makes sense if you think about it. And that was true whether it was 1080p, 1440p, or even 4K. Well, like 2 FPS at 4K, so not not too bad really. Shadow of the Tomb Raider with 5600 memory at 1080p. It's 1% lows are a little worse, but not really. 1440p, 1% lows. Again, I mean, this is so close for the average frame rate, but the 1% lows are are where where you're going to suffer. There's going to be a little bit more of a just a tiny tiny bit more of a stutter. But if you're saving hundreds of dollars off the cost of your machine, then you don't necessarily have to get gamer memory. This is again potato class like what ships with Dell OEM systems of 5600. So, not only is it 5600, that cast latency is like 42 or something absurd like that. And of course, the worse your memory is, like if you go for 4,800, it will be a little bit less uh on the 1% lows, I think, in the 1% low experience will be a little bit worse. But having that much cash with most modern titles is not going to negatively impact you that much. So, if you're going to save hundreds of dollars of cost off the m this cost of the machine because you're using older memory or slower memory, that seems like a no-brainer. And the MSRP, if you didn't hear it at the beginning, was $4.99. So, that's also nice to see. AMD is on top. They are the gaming champions and in like it's probably their margins are probably worse on $4.99 than not $4.99 than it was a long time ago. And so that was very kind of them to do that. You know, none of these companies are are your friends, but that is still kind of a PR win. Uh, and it also puts a lot of competitive pressure, I think, on Intel to, you know, because Intel's got to be working on their next thing, right? It's like, is there a is there a gaming panther lake thing coming? Probably not. Is there going to be like some sort of refresh of, you know, the the Core Ultra 9? I don't know. Maybe. But for this out the gate, yeah, this is it's a win for AMD. It's a win across the board. It's a win for engineering. It's a win even if you're running on a potato class motherboard with a single stick of memory. And that's where we are in 2026. Is it going to get better or worse? I don't know. Hello commenters from the future. Tell us. Engage below. Is did 2026 get better or worse? I don't know. All right. I'm one of this level one. I'm signing out. If you have any questions or I missed anything, you want me to test your game, let me know. I'm signing out and I'll see you in the forums. I'm signing out and I'll see you there.

Bottom Line! If you have been wanting to upgrade for a while, then now might be a good time. No need to upgrade if you have the 9800X3D, though. The tech economy is WACK! 0:00 Intro 1:00 Background and Info 3:54 Can you use Slow Memory 6:34 Test Bench Set Up 7:46 Benchmarks 9:25 9850x3d vs 9950x3d vs 9800x3d 15:47 Benchmarks with Slow RAM 17:45 Conclusion You can find us... Twitter - https://twitter.com/level1techs Twitch - https://twitch.tv/teampgp Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/level1 For all our social links, websites, and more, check out our link tree! https://linktr.ee/level1techs Thank you for watching! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *IMPORTANT* Any email lacking “level1techs.com” should be ignored and immediately reported to Queries@level1techs.com.