By TechPowerUp
Publication Date: 2026-01-28 18:07:00
Introduction
AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D is the company’s new flagship gaming processor. In November 2024 we saw the unveiling of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which instantly became the world’s fastest gaming PC processor. With the 9850X3D they are making small, incremental improvements to the 9800X3D—similar to what Intel does with their “KS” offerings. AMD announced the 9850X3D just a few weeks ago, at CES 2026, it is an 8-core/16-thread processor featuring 3D V-Cache, a critical innovation by AMD that sees processors ship with stacked last-level cache. The processor comes with 64 MB of L3 cache augmenting the on-die 32 MB. What sets the 9850X3D apart from the 9800X3D is a fairly significant increase in maximum boost frequency, and an update to Precision Boost behavior that should improve boost residency across the multithreaded workload scaling spread. Officially, the base clock is the same for both models, at 4.7 GHz, but the maximum boost has increased from 5.2 GHz to 5.6 GHz (+7.7%).
This 400 MHz increase in boost headroom also pulls up boost frequency residency across the core-count, so workloads benefit from higher frequencies. The stated TDP remains unchanged, it remains at 120 W. Each of the eight Zen 5 CPU cores comes with 1 MB of dedicated L2 cache that runs at double the bandwidth of the L2 cache of Zen 4 cores, the eight cores share a total of 96 MB of L3 cache. The Zen 5 CCD is built on the 4 nm TSMC N4P foundry node. The 6 nm client I/O die packs a dual-channel DDR5…
