AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

The best gaming processor AMD has ever produced

- DAVE JAMES

THERE IS A VERY STRONG argument to be made for the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D being the best gaming CPU around right now. It’s certainly the best gaming chip that AMD has ever made, but it’s also capably outperforming Intel’s top CPU when it comes to gaming frame rates, and is doing so for a lot less cash. It’s a lot less thirsty, too.

That’s possibly one of the most intriguing things about the 3D V-Cache processors of the Zen 4 generation— just how much more efficient they are than the first top-end chips of the Ryzen 7000-series. In fact, with every subsequent release of this new generation, AMD has improved its latest processor range, making the previous ones almost redundant.

The Ryzen 9 7950X3D, reviewed in our May 2023 issue, offers a mix of highend gaming performance and a full 16 cores of Zen 4 processing. But its hybrid design, which offered one eight-core chiplet (or CCD) with the extra 64MB of L3 cache fused on top of it and another CCD without, demanded some extra hoops for the operating system to jump through, and sacrificed some of a standard 16-core chip’s raw multithreaded performance.