Building or ordering a custom high-end gaming PC continues to be an increasingly expensive endeavor thanks to ballooning component prices across the board.
While the GPU takes up the lion’s share of one’s budget thanks to both significant price increases and focus shifting from mid-range to enthusiast-tier options, CPUs still constitute an important component of one’s PC.
While GPUs are at the forefront in terms of performance gains, other components have not kept pace, often resulting in bottlenecks that need to be addressed to get the most out of your gaming PC.
This is true for CPU-bound titles especially when the highest-end GPUs (such as Nvidia’s RTX 4090) are used and what CPUs such as the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D aim to address.
The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is an 8-core 16-thread CPU that is indisputably the fastest gaming CPU money can buy currently – that is if you can find it on a shelf physically or virtually.
It marries AMD’s performance gains on the newer Zen 5 architecture with its proven 3D V-Cache enhancements that offer significantly better performance in games that overwhelmingly benefit from the added cache memory in play.
Finding The Elusive AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
AMD’s fastest gaming CPU to date also holds the slightly less desirable crown of being one of the most price-gouged CPUs at the moment with both retailers and PC builders quoting lead times above three weeks to source one on average.
This has users opting for various approaches to secure one, including camping outside retailers such as Microcenter, using third-party applications, and even Discord servers to stay abreast of the latest availability for the 9800X3D.
While it is the current king of the hill, it also faces off against excellent competition from Intel’s higher-end CPUs as well as AMD’s last-generation offerings.
The former offer higher clock speeds and more cores, which allow them to, at times, surpass AMD’s offerings in certain titles. The latter ups the ante by offering better value for money and in the case of AMD’s last-generation X3D CPUs, similar performance.
So which are best CPU alternatives you should consider right now? Let’s look at a few in detail.
AMD’s Ryzen 7 7800X3D: A More Readily Available Option
Gamers who are unable to find the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D can turn to the next best alternative: its predecessor, AMD’s Zen 4-based Ryzen 7 7800X3D.
It clocks in at approximately 10% slower in most FHD benchmarks designed to show what the 9800X3D is capable of but dips down to low single-digit percentages (2-5%) when one bumps up the resolution or graphics preset.
While AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D remains hard to find, pricing for the Ryzen 7 7800X3D has also gone up considerably as it continues to be the world’s second-best CPU for gaming, edged out only by its Zen 5-based successor.
The AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D has seen its prices push upwards of the $350-400 mark where it routinely traded for most of 2024, to sub-$500 levels.
This is even as it continues to be a bestseller at retailers such as Amazon where it commands fifth place at the time of writing – CPUs that sell better are half of its asking price or lower, proving its strong position in a market hungry for credible 9800X3D alternatives.
The 7800X3D is no longer the fastest CPU that money can buy for gaming but it does hold its own against all of its competition, often within spitting distance of the 9800X3D in benchmarks on most titles, making it a viable, if somewhat expensive alternative to the latter.
Intel’s Core i9 14900K CPU: The Raptor Holding the Line
While Intel’s current-generation Arrow Lake CPUs offer significant improvements in efficiency and do not have the problems that plague older Raptor Lake / Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs, the Intel Core i9-14900K is still the weapon of choice for gamers even as it runs up to 15% slower in some gaming benchmarks.
The 14900K also happens to be trading at a discount at multiple retailers (including Amazon and Newegg). With single-core clock speeds of up to 6GHz (6.2GHz on the 14900KS), it does hold its own in most titles, even as the 9800XD (and its predecessor, the 7800X3D) edges it out in most benchmarks.
The 14900K is more than a one-trick pony, however. The 24-core, 32-thread CPU offers a compromise between AMD’s highest-end Ryzen 9 9950X (which leads in most productivity tasks) and AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D which currently commands a lead in gaming benchmarks.
While it comes a close second in terms of productivity versus AMD’s 16-core Zen 5-based juggernaut and remains Intel’s most performant CPU for gaming (the newer Arrow Lake CPUs are great in terms of efficiency and productivity but fall behind when it comes to playing games).
The 14900K is an excellent option for users wanting to stick to Intel as a platform or wanting a more all-round performer in 2024 even as a 16-core Ryzen 9000 X3D CPU remains under wraps for now. If the pricing convention holds, the yet-to-be-revealed Zen 5-based X3D CPU could go for as much as the $699 the Ryzen 9 7950X3D commanded at launch.
Intel’s best does come with a set of disadvantages, however: the LGA 1700 socket is now due to be sunset and the 14900K happens to be the best chip one can expect to buy on the socket for the foreseeable future. This makes the lack of potential upgrades down the line a particularly sore point for most gamers looking for a future-proof option.
The 14900K is also notoriously demanding, both in terms of power and cooling; while the former does not bother gamers thanks to titles not engaging all cores of the 24-core behemoth, the latter still applies with even the best CPU coolers often being brought down to their knees in a bid to cool what is one of the hottest desktop-class chips this decade.
AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D: A Well-Priced Hexacore Dark Horse
AMD’s Ryzen 5 7500F/7600, and 7600X CPUs are some of the most popular CPUs available to users at the moment.
The latter is the second-best seller on Amazon currently, powering thousands of PC builds each month thanks to a mix of value for money and performance in the same package while allowing for an upgrade path for those who need it down the line thanks to the AM5 socket.
The Ryzen 5 7600X3D is one of AMD’s lesser-known hexacore CPUs and is primarily by design. The AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D retails for $319.99 on Microcenter but has made its way to other retailers such as Newegg, albeit at a premium.
While it holds its own thanks to its extended L3 cache, it does score below both the 9800X3D and the 7800X3D in gaming benchmarks in general, with games requiring beefier multi-core hardware favoring the latter.
It does however come close to, and often narrowly beats intel’s top CPU for gaming, the Core i9 14900K in many games. The Ryzen 5 7600X3D is also, by far, one of the most efficient CPUs for gaming, even routinely beating the 7800X3D and 9800X3D in efficiency benchmarks thanks to its lower power draw per frame in tests.
Despite this, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D isn’t out there to win any performance awards, and given its price positioning, it doesn’t need to.
It offers users excellent value for money at its price point, an upgrade path to the 9800X3D or a next-generation AM5-based CPU, and decent single-core performance, all of which make it a viable alternative to both the 9800X3D and its relatively (to the 7600X3D) more expensive alternatives.
What Other Options Should You Consider?
While other options do exist, such as the best-selling, but dated AM4-based AMD Ryzen 5 5600X3D (and its higher-end sibling, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D), only the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D seems to offer the best of both worlds, with solid performance in gaming and productivity workloads.
It does currently trade for an eye-watering asking price however ($700) as dwindling supply seems to result in price gouging with third-party sellers on Newegg asking as much as $860 for a unit.
Likewise, while the 5600X3D offers excellent value for money for its performance, it does not feature in the same performance class as the 9800X3D by a large margin, and its reliance on the aging AM4 platform makes it a relatively poor choice.
For those who can wait, most rumors point to a 16-core AMD Ryzen 9000 series X3D CPU (Ryzen 9 9950X3D if the nomenclature holds) being in play for CES 2025, which should replace the 7950X3D as a more all-round “for creators” CPU as AMD markets it currently.
All in all, there are no bad choices in a CPU market that is significantly more competitive today, but some options are more compelling than others, especially when one wants to focus on gaming and neither the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, Ryzen 5 7600X3D, or the Intel Core i9-14900K will result in a meaningful bottleneck for most gamers at higher resolutions or graphics presets for the foreseeable future, making them all viable choices with their respective pros and cons.
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Rahimnoorali11@gmail.com (Rahim Amir)
