AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D review: obliterating the competition

RAM gaming benchmarks: Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 6, Flight Sim 2020.

Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on Nov. 6, 2024

We performed the bulk of our testing with DDR5-6000 CL30 RAM, but it's worth quickly looking at how the 9800X3D fares with bog-standard DDR5-4800 CL40, the cheapest option available. (We're also interested in testing faster RAM, but we didn't have a significantly better AMD EXPO set available for this review.)

To do this, we tested three games at 6000MT/s CL30 and 4800MT/s CL40 on both the 9800X3D and 9700X. This should give us an indication of whether the larger amount of L3 cache makes the new CPU a little less reliant on fast RAM, or whether both benefit to around the same degree.

As usual, our results are presented in two ways - mobile viewers get a table summary, while full-fat internet browsers on desktop-class machines get an embedded YouTube video of our test scene. Press play to see the metrics play out in real time, or check the bar graph below to see how the three RAM speeds compare on the 285K. Remember that you can hover to see various metrics and click to switch the chart from absolute to percentage mode.

Cyberpunk 2077

DDR5 test - Cyberpunk 2077 2.0, RT Ultra, DLSS Performance

Cyberpunk 2077 in the busy night market is heavily CPU-limited, especially with an aggressive DLSS setting, but fast RAM can really speed up frame-rates. Here, we saw a 12 percent lead moving from base spec DDR5 to the DDR5-6000 CL30 sweet spot on the 9700X, versus 11 percent on the 9800X3D. Clearly that faster RAM is working well on both CPUs, but there's not enough of a difference to say that the 9800X3D is less reliant on fast RAM based on this result alone.

Far Cry 6

DDR5 test - Far Cry 6: Ultra, TAA

Far Cry 6 is another title that tends to scale well with faster memory, and we often see around a three percent improvement from DDR5-4800 to DDR5-6000. That's reflected in the 9700X, which gets 2.8 percent faster, but the 9800X3D is less than a percentage point faster, potentially suggesting that the much larger cache means that data needs to be fetched from RAM less frequently.

Flight Sim 2020

DDR5 test - Microsoft Flight Simulator, Ultra, DLSS Quality

Flight Sim 2020 is perhaps the most convincing argument this time around, with a 10 percent improvement for the 9700X from faster RAM but just a seven percent uptick for the 9800X3D. Again, this is still a relatively small margin, but it could point towards that super-sized L3 cache reducing the amount of data fetched from RAM.

Regardless, it's clear that DDR5-6000 CL30 can provide quite a nice performance lift in some CPU-limited scenarios, so if you're building a high-end machine I'd suggest it's worth the extra cost.