AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D vs Ryzen 7 5800X

Introduction

One of the most important things to bear in mind when thinking about a future system is your primary use. It’s probably fair to say that we all use ours for browsing the internet and some gaming, but how much time you spend gaming will affect your build. Additionally are you the type of creative person who uses your rig for some 3D modelling, perhaps for game modding, or do you share your gaming exploits regularly enough that being able to render videos quickly is important? These are all things to take into account.

What has that to do with today’s comparison? Well as we’ve seen from our review of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D it is a processor that has been designed specifically with the 3D V-Cache on top of the CPU die, to give the fastest possible response in random requests. Random requests, things that cannot be predicted, are the cornerstone of gaming responsiveness and the all-important frames per second. This design, however, has meant that AMD have had to limit what you can do with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and how high it will boost of its own accord.

Enter the Ryzen 7 5800X, the CPU upon which the 5800X3D has been based, but without the limitations of the 3D V-Cache it is able to run faster and thus is a better all-rounder. Although that probably leads to the rather obvious conclusion that if you’re the type who does many things with their PC then the OG Ryzen 7 5800X will be your choice, or if you’re a gamer the new 5800X3D is the way to go, we were curious as to how they compare to each other. How much do you give up for that extra gaming performance, and can the extra clock speed of the vanilla Ryzen 7 be enough to counteract the faster Cache of the X3D?

When we were recently testing the PCSpecialist Topaz Exige we thought it would be the perfect chance to compare the two. On the same day, with the same patches and OS updates, the same games, the same weather, the same system. Everything. We do our best to keep as many things identical as possible, but obviously even tiny OS updates, drivers, or game patches can make a difference so this is the ultimate apples to apples comparison. Let’s see how they stack up.

Test Setup

Both processors are basically the same, being Zen 3 CPUs, 8C16T, 105W TDP. The differences are to be found in the L3 Cache, where the Ryzen 7 5800X has 32MB and the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with it’s V-Cache has 96MB. The other change is the aforementioned boost speed, where the Ryzen 7 5800X3D only hits 4.5 GHz when compared to the 4.7 GHz of the Ryzen 7 5800X.

Beyond those we’re using the PCSpecialist Topaz Exige which has a Strix X570-F and XFX RX 6800 XT alongside 16GB of 3600MHz Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR4. We’ll be running through our usual suite of system benchmarks to give a likely use case, so that’s gaming with all the detail up @ 1440P, rather the 1080 we stick to when testing processors. We want to find out how most people would use it and which they should opt for, rather than synthetically testing the processors as separated from the rest of the rig as possible.

Ryzen 7 5800X

  

Ryzen 7 5800X3D