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The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D are targeting the premium gaming CPU market in late 2025. Among these, however, the 9800X3D seems to be the more popular kid, with most buyers showing little interest in the higher-end 9900X3D and 9950X3D. You could think this is because of their prohibitively high prices, but there's something else going on under the hood.
Read on for an in-depth comparison of the two gaming chips: stuff that's expected and bizarre trends that turn scaling laws upside down.
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D both target top-tier gaming systems
The Ryzen 9000 X3D chips are AMD's latest series of premium top-of-the-line gaming chips that they rightfully market as the "fastest in the world." While Intel's 14th-gen K-series chips put up a decent fight, the latest Arrow Lake CPUs have only been disappointing, which gives gamers more reason to bet on the Team Red offerings.
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The Ryzen 7 9800X3D, for starters, bundles 8 cores and 16 threads with 96 MB of 3D V-cache. Despite these specs, the chip draws just 120W base, but can boost higher under full speed.
The Ryzen 9 9900X3D is slightly beefier, packing 12 cores and 24 threads. It clocks 300 MHz higher than the 9800X3D (5.5 GHz boost clock vs 5.2 on the Ryzen 7). Despite these spec bumps, the chip is rated at the same 120W.
The 9800X3D is a single CCX design, while the 9900X3D bundle two: one with 8 cores running at full speed, while the other featuring four slightly slower cores alongside the L3 cache. The detailed specs differences are as follows:
In terms of pricing, the eight-core chip starts at $480, while the 12-core 9900X3D is currently selling at a hefty premium of $590.
Performance comparison
Here's how framerates differ between the gaming CPUs at 1080p (the most CPU-bound resolution) when paired with an RTX 4090. We have sourced these numbers from the YouTube channel Testing Games.
Quite surprisingly, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D beats the Ryzen 9 9900X3D across all the games tested. The cheaper 8-core chip scores 247.6 FPS on average while the other CPU gets 231.0 FPS. That's a 7.2% difference across all titles, both CPU-heavy and graphically demanding ones. The difference is largest in Counter-Strike 2, on which the 9800X3D gets a 40+ FPS gain over the costlier processor.
In terms of performance per dollar, the 9800X3D thus scores 0.517 FPS/$, while the costlier 9900X3D lags at 0.386 FPS/$. That's a solid 34% better value.
The eight-core Ryzen 7 9800X3D is faster and cheaper, making it the clearly better choice for gaming. This makes sense given the popularity of the eight-core processor. It's arguably the hottest chip in 2025, offering solid performance, future-proofing, and platform support.
