AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D Review with Gaming and Workstation – Ultra-fast gaming with half the fuel of a Core i9-13900K

Take a Ryzen 7 7700X, piggyback some 3D V-cache and halve the power consumption of the Intel Core i9-13900K. The half Ryzen 9 7950X is ready, which now comes to the customer as Ryzen 7 7800X3D without the second die and can still usually act just as fast in gaming. It’s not squaring the circle, but it’s close. As long as you use applications, i.e. games, that can also fully utilize the cache in terms of feed. Away from that, it gets a bit tighter, but gamers were probably less interested in that.

Nevertheless, I will test both gaming AND also workstation, because the required “whitelist” of suitable applications is omitted here and the only CCD with the V-Cache always has to work, whether it wants to or not. The fact that gaming works isn’t really an issue, but the overall work environment is actually the much more exciting topic. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D is also limited by the power limit (board manufacturer?), which I personally approve of. I will be happy to prove that this is not a criterion for exclusion. But our Ryzen with the Janus head has two faces and that’s exactly what I want to show you today. Enthusiasm or disappointment aside. Both are simply part of the game.

Update from 08.04.2023 at 05.25 a.m.

After an attentive reader’s tip, I also noticed that there was still a calculation error in the cumulative overviews of the power consumption. While the single data of all games was correct as usual, there was a calculation error in the final summary because I had removed some games from the test field again for plausibility reasons. Since I handle and calculate the power consumption separately from the performance, I unfortunately did not notice this circumstance.

However, the overall picture and the assessment do not change at all, especially since the order of the CPUs remains exactly the same. After all, all tested CPUs were affected to the same extent. But since I attach great importance to transparency and accuracy, I have of course corrected the values and replaced all the graphics. By the way, I didn’t have to change the text, it is still valid. Thank you for your understanding! Something like this can happen in the daily stress, but it should not.

The new AMD Ryzen 7800X3D ‘Zen 4 Raphael’ with specifications

Let’s finally get to the new CPU, which is also based on the Zen 4 core architecture and is basically a halved version of the well-known Ryzen 9 7950X3D. The fact that the nomenclature differs somewhat with the X3D is due to the special construction and the (stacked) 3D-V cache mounted on the single CCD. The model without V-cache is the Ryzen 7 7700X, except that the die is removed to make room for the cache.

 

The AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D tested today offers a count of 8 cores and 16 threads, which is retained from the previous two generations and the current X version. The CPU has a base frequency of 4.2 GHz instead of the Ryzen 7 7700X’s 4.5 GHz and a boost clock of up to 5.0 GHz (5.5 GHz for the Ryzen 7 7700X). One should have gone to the limits here and exhausted what is still somehow stably possible within the 120 W TDP (105 watts for the Ryzen 7 7700X, 90 watts for my motherboard). As for the cache, the CPU has a total of 104 MB of cache. The CPU consists of an IOD and a single chiplet (CCD). The MSRP is $449, which is about 50 Euros higher than the Ryzen 7 7700X, whose street price is currently only about $345

Important preliminary remark about the test field and the test methodology

The fact that I decided to use a GeForce RTX 4090 and not a Radeon RX 7900XTX as a graphics card after some plausibility tests in the run-up, I certainly don’t have to comment at length, because I will test all four resolutions of interest from 1280 x 720 pixels to 3840 x 2160 pixels this time and need a graphics card that is as non-limiting as possible for that. In fact, we will see later that there are even games that can show differences in Ultra HD, even without DLSS. Unfortunately, this was no longer possible with the Radeon RX 7900XTX.

Since the new Ryzen 7 7800X3D is more about the question of when and if the 3D V-cache is of any use, I had tested almost 20 games in advance and analyzed their behavior. After that, I sorted out games with similar results and kept one of each in the pool. This ranges from enormous performance gains to no response at all. And I’ll talk about a game that AMD even had in the slides themselves, because it simply doesn’t belong in such a slide and distorts everything. You can’t use it that way.

Rainbow Six Extraction prefers CPUs with fewer cores and even the tests in 720p and 1080p are neither plausible nor usable in a direct comparison. Of course, that’s also a statement, and that’s exactly why I bring up this bad example right in the introduction. that’s exactly why I controlled the benchmarks very carefully and tried to use as representative a mix as possible without such dropouts in the end. Unfortunately, some things have fallen by the wayside. In fact, you can actually pre-program any conclusion through a targeted selection of games (which doesn’t do anyone any good), so you really have to differentiate hard here.

I have counter-tested this on a few systems and always came to the same, yet very skewed result. That’s why I removed this game from the statistics again, even though it was given completely with all CPUs. A lot of effort for nothing. So much more important here are the games that decide victory or defeat in a fair and balanced way, and their weighting. For this I also let myself be guided a little by the experiences of the very (time)consuming workstation part.

I also don’t want to hide the fact that I once again and very consciously decided against my Z790 system for the Intel test system and rely on a very stable running Z690 system. To be fair, I’ve been a bit suspicious of the performance loss on the Z790 boards since Intel’s last IME update and the new BIOSes. Between two similar boards from the same manufacturer, there was up to 5% performance difference after all updates (and once even more) with otherwise the same RAM and CPU. I deliberately deviate from AMD’s system configuration, but you have to be fair. Raptor Lake Refresh? This is perhaps how you create certain “progress” at Intel in advance.

In general, I already decided against simply continuing to use older results when testing the Ryzen 9 7950X3D because there were simply too many differences in the last few months. Even if it would have shortened the time considerably. New AGESA versions, new chipset drivers, game updates and graphics card drivers. And you just don’t work with interpolation and calculators. I need almost a day per SKU with gaming and workstation, which also explains the test scope better. But then at least the results are right. And so I also included the Ryzen 9 7900X3D in the tests this time, which MIFCOM was kind enough to lend me.

More articles from igor’sLABon the topic of Ryzen 7000

At this point, I also want to introduce further articles that round off the launch article, because everything doesn’t fit into a single review and there would also be too much redundant content. Therefore, I ask you to simply read across here if there is a need for further information.