Skip to main content

AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X3D pricing keeps the pressure on Intel

AMD announced pricing and availability for its upcoming Ryzen 9 7950X3D, Ryzen 9 7900X3D, and Ryzen 7 7800X3D on Tuesday. The two Ryzen 9 chips arrive on February 28, while the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is arriving later on April 6. More importantly, though, the flagship doesn’t come with a price increase.

Ryzen™ 7000 Series Processor with AMD 3D V-Cache™ Technology Pricing and Availability

The suggested retail prices are $700, $600, and $450 for the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, Ryzen 9 7900X3D, and Ryzen 7 7800X3D, respectively. The Ryzen 9 7950X3D is debuting at the same price as the base Ryzen 9 7950X, while the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is $50 more expensive than the Ryzen 7 7700X that’s available now. The Ryzen 9 7900X3D carries around a $40 to $50 price increase as well.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!

Although the two Ryzen 9 models don’t come with a price increase over AMD’s suggested rates, they are more expensive. AMD’s Zen 4 processors have seen poor sales, leading the Ryzen 9 7950X to sell for $550 to $600 and the Ryzen 9 7900X to sell for closer to $400.

This shift almost cements base Ryzen 7000 processors at lower prices. AMD hasn’t made any official announcements, but we don’t expect prices to climb back up once the 3D V-Cache processors are here.

These have been hotly anticipated processors from AMD since the company announced them at the beginning of the year. The 3D V-Cache technology behind the chips led last-gen’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D to top the charts as the best gaming processor you can buy, and it remains there even with next-gen processors making the rounds.

Ryzen 9 7950X3D Ryzen 9 7900X3D Ryzen 7 7800X3D
Cores/Threads 16/32 12/24 8/16
Base/Boost clock 4.2GHz/5.7GHz 4.4GHz/5.6GHz 4.XGHz/5GHz
Cache size 144MB 140MB 104MB
Power draw 120W 120W 120W

This time around is different, though. In the previous generation, AMD only released a single processor with 3D V-Cache. The company is expanding the tech up its product stack now, with the Ryzen 9 7950X3D packing 3D V-Cache alongside the full 16 Zen 4 cores seen on the base processor.

AMD claims the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X3D is up to 24% faster than Intel’s Core i9-13900K in games, as well as anywhere from 4% to 52% faster in productivity apps. The latter was the Achille’s heel of the previous generation, with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D being pummeled by other processors outside of gaming (read our Ryzen 7 5800X3D review for more details).

This processor, according to AMD, is built to counteract the problems of the previous generation. Gaming remains the main focus, however. Compared to the previous generation, AMD says the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is up to 30% faster and that gamers can expect a 15% boost on average.

Although it’s clear AMD is gunning to top the list of the best processors, we’ll have to wait until we get our hands on these processors to test them ourselves. As we recently saw with the Ryzen 5 7600, AMD’s cheaper Ryzen 7000 processors can have unexpectedly high performance.

The new processors are included in AMD’s Ryzen 7000 game bundle promotion, which provides a free digital code for the upcoming Star Wars Jedi Survivor. Although the promotion is still on, this game was recently bumped into late April from its original March release date.

Jacob Roach
Lead Reporter, PC Hardware
Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…
AMD’s new Ryzen 8040 CPUs aren’t all that new
AMD revealing its Ryzen 8040 CPUs.

AMD new Ryzen 8040 CPUs aren't as new as they seem. During its Advancing AI event, AMD announced that Ryzen 8040 chips are coming to laptops, and you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a new generation of processors. AMD doesn't call them next-gen CPUs, rather referring to them as "the next step in personal AI processing." And that's because these aren't next-gen CPUs.

Ryzen 8040 mobile chips will replace Ryzen 7040 mobile chips, and based on that fact alone, it's easy to assume that the Ryzen 8040 CPUs are better. They have a higher number! From what AMD has shared so far, though, these supposedly new chips look like nothing more than a rebrand of the CPUs already available in laptops. AMD set itself up for this type of confusing, misleading situation, too.
New name, old cores
First, how do we really know these are just rebranded Ryzen 7040 chips? I've included the full product stack below that spells it out. These chips, code-named Hawk Point, are using AMD's Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA 3 GPU cores, which the previous-generation Phoenix CPUs also used. There's also the NPU, which I'll circle back to in a moment.

Read more
Intel said AMD’s Ryzen 7000 is snake oil
AMD CEO Lisa Su holding an APU chip.

In what is one of the most bizarrely aggressive pieces of marketing material I've seen, Intel compared AMD's Ryzen 7000 mobile chips to snake oil. Over the weekend, Intel posted its Core Truths playbook, which lays out how AMD's mobile processor naming scheme misleads customers. The presentation has since been deleted, according to The Verge.

There's an element of truth to that, which I'll get to in a moment, but first, the playbook, which was first spotted by VideoCardz. Intel starts with claiming that there's a "long history of selling half-truths to unsuspecting customers" alongside images of a snake oil salesman and a suspicious used car seller. This sets up a comparison between the Ryzen 5 7520U and the Core i5-1335U. Intel's chip is 83% faster, according to the presentation, due to the older architecture that AMD's part uses.

Read more
AMD is valiantly keeping its word to gamers
Someone holding the Ryzen 7 5800X3D in a red light.

AMD's aging AM4 platform has been around since 2016, and it's a socket that AMD has promised to support for "for many years." We thought we'd waved goodbye to AM4 for good, but a new leak says that AMD has two new 3D V-Cache chips in the works, namely the Ryzen 7 5700X3D and the Ryzen 5 5500X3D. If the rumor is to be believed, AMD may not be done with AM4 yet, which is great news for those hoping not to have to upgrade their entire PC just to get the latest performance.

As per the user @g01d3nm4ng0 on Twitter, the new chips will serve up the same massive L3 cache we've come to expect from AMD's X3D chips, making them solid options for gamers on a tighter budget. No one expected that AMD would keep releasing new versions of last-gen chips well over a year since the launch of the Ryzen 7000, and yet, it seems that they're in the works.

Read more