Ryzen 5 9600X vs Ryzen 7 7800X3D: Which is best for gaming?
AMD's Ryzen 5 9600X launch is just around the corner. The company has built up immense excitement regarding the performance and capabilities of this chip. The Ryzen 5 9600X was supposed to be launched on July 31 but unfortunately, it has gotten delayed by a week. AMD has stated that they discovered an issue that went under the radar for AMD's first batch of chips and has thus recalled all of them globally.
They do not want to take any risks after Intel's incident with their 14-generation chipsets. To win the race of the fastest, chips like the Intel i9 14900K drew close to 400 Watts of power. This generated a massive amount of heat and currently, no AIO cooler is advanced enough yet to successfully cool this CPU. Intel's reputation dropped massively as a result and people started preferring AMD.
AMD wants to run some extra tests to iron out the issues and launch the CPU by the 8th of August. AMD is positive that there won't be any further delay. This delay could be a good opportunity for you to weigh out your CPU options if you were waiting for the 9600X release to build a PC.
According to TechRadar's coverage of the price leak, the Ryzen 5 9600X will debut with a price tag of around $300, which is $83 less than AMD's current apex gaming CPU, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. Therefore, the Ryzen 7 could also be a strong consideration.
In this article, we will compare the Ryzen 5 9600X and the Ryzen 7 7800X3D to determine which CPU becomes evident as the gaming champion. We will evaluate both the hardware and performance to ultimately name the winner among the two for PC gaming.
Note: Some aspects of this article are subjective and reflect the writer's opinion.
Can the Ryzen 5 9600X dethrone the Ryzen 7 7800X3D?
The Ryzen 7 7800X3D is based on the Zen 4 architecture, the previous iteration of the newer Zen 5 on which the 9600X is based. The Ryzen 7 chip uses a 5nm process while the new Ryzen 5 chip uses the 4nm process. Thus the Ryzen 5 chip is slightly more efficient meaning it will draw less power from the wall thus saving your electricity bill.
The specialty of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is its vertically stacked cache which allowed AMD to cram in three times more L3 memory. The advantage of this becomes apparent while gaming. Games that can use this feature, output great performance. The 7800X3D is also good for productivity because it has 8 cores allowing it to handle CPU-intensive tasks.
Specs comparison
The Ryzen 5 9600X is a faster CPU than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D clocking 5.4 GHz while the latter clocks 5 GHz. However, judging by their specs, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D seems more powerful. The 96 MB L3 cache is massive and will greatly contribute to higher FPS. It has 8 cores and 16 threads which is great for loads other than gaming.
Furthermore, it can draw up to 162 Watts of power from the wall which means this CPU will run very fast and process quicker than the 9600X. You would however need to pair a good cooler with this CPU to keep the temperatures down. From the specs sheet, we can easily infer that the Ryzen 7 7800X3D will come out on top in this comparison.
Performance comparison
These are the synthetic benchmark scores of the two CPUs. The data was fetched from Nanoreview.
Ryzen 5 9600X holds a significant advantage here owing to its new architecture, as AMD has promised a 16% improvement per core with Zen 5 over previous generations. Now let's get into the gaming performance of the two chips.
There are no statistics available about the gaming performance of the Ryzen 5 9600X so we will pit the 7800X3D with the stock Intel i9 14900K in gaming because without XMP limits, the i9 scores similar to that of the Ryzen 5 9600X. Gaming is more single-core centric so both these chips are expected to put up equal numbers in games.
The above data was taken from the Testing Games YouTube channel. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D performs closely against the i9 14900K, using an RTX 4090 GPU for testing at 1080p resolution. This means there could be some CPU bottlenecking, potentially giving the i9 14900K an edge.
The performance difference is minimal in some games whereas in others the Ryzen 7 7800X3D leaps ahead by a 10%-20% margin. Thus we can conclude that while the 9600X is a considerably strong contender for the top spot, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is expected to lead, albeit by a small margin.
This is a testament to the impressive performance of the "Zen 5" 9600X. We won’t have to wait long for more detailed gaming performance data. Hardware Unboxed has announced that their review of the 9600X will be available on their YouTube channel by August 7th. Once we have that information, we’ll have a clearer understanding of its performance. ͏
Ryzen 5 9600X vs Ryzen 7 7800X3D: Final take
There is no clear winner between the two chips. Right now without seeing the actual benchmarks, we will declare Ryzen 7 7800X3D as the gaming champ. Nevertheless, there is a high chance that the Ryzen 5 9600X could beat it or even come close. Only time will tell whether the 7800X3D continues its reign as the ultimate gaming champion or hands down the crown to its newer brethren.