With last week seeing the release of the much-heralded 9800X3D, AMD is riding high. Such was the demand for units of their latest CPU that many online retailers ran out of stock within minutes, and initial sales figures, industry testing results, and reviews have all been positive. Well, almost all.
Tech website UserBenchmark has returned a withering review of the 9800X3D, suggesting they believe it ‘pointless’ to spend big on a gaming CPU, as ‘games are generally limited by the GPU’. UserBenchmark wasn’t finished, however, going yet further to claim the i5-13600K and i5-14600K are at least as good as the X3D, leaving many readers scratching their heads.
We’ve reviewed the 9800X3D, i5-13600K, and Intel’s latest-gen Core Ultra 5 245K. AMD’s Ryzen CPU is the clear winner of the three and if you are looking for gaming performance more than anything, it’s worth the investment. Yes, it’s pricier than its predecessor, but only by $30; we opted for a 5/5 star rating for the new X3D processor.
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- Cores: 8
- Threads: 16
- Boost clock speed: 5.2GHz
- Base clock speed: 4.7GHz
- L3 cache: 96MB
- TDP: 120W
- Platform: AM5
What do they dislike about the 9800X3D?
Although the write-up seems to go against the grain, compared with the many positive noises around AMD’s new CPU, perhaps it shouldn’t come as a total surprise that UserBenchmark has decided on a less-than-favorable take on the X3D, having previously referred to AMD as “Advanced Marketing Devices” and consistently rating AMD’s products low in its CPU rankings.
Another example of the website making interesting claims was when UserBenchmark stuck to its guns after controversially ranking the i3-8100 above the i9-9980XE purely based on clock speeds, and the same appears to be the case with their take on the 9800X3D. In their review, UserBenchmark focuses on the X3D’s design having a negative 6% impact in boost clock speeds but does not mention AMD’s innovations in stacking design which mitigates the impact of this reduced clock speed – nor the potential for overclocking.
UserBenchmark appears to claim the 9800X3D’s immediate popularity is purely down to “aggressive marketing rather than delivering real-world performance”, despite retailers running out of stock on release due to demand, and the 9800X3D being roundly lauded as currently the world’s fastest gaming CPU. AMD themselves claim that their new processor outperforms Intel’s latest generation CPU offering 20% better gaming performance than the Core Ultra 9 285K, and recent benchmarks on Geekbench show the new 9000 series chip overclocked and outperfoming the 7800X3D by 24%, showing a sizeable uplift on its predecessor.
We put the 9800X3D through its paces in our testing lab too, with some incredible results. Sticking with gaming, one popular benchmark is Cyberpunk 2077 – it’s one we run every time we review a CPU. The same goes for Counter-Strikes 2. As you can see below, the 9800X3D delivered excellent performance at 1080p in our rig.
Perhaps most impressively, it demonstrates a significant advantage in the 1% lows to keep the game running as smoothly as possible, substantially so over the 9700X for example. You can also see a massive advantage compared to Intel’s Core Ultra 7 265K, a processor that should be seen as the successor to the i7-14700K, never mind the i5-14600K or i5-13600K.
Intel’s i5 (now Ultra 5) processors aren’t bad by any means, but the results clearly demonstrate why the 9800X3D isn’t pointless if you’re all about achieving the best gaming performance possible. GPU performance does come more into play for many games, especially at resolutions like 4K, but the X3D chip will make a big difference in CPU-intensive games and with those 1% lows.
Do Intel need a lesson in marketing?
You can’t fault a company for running aggressive, and successful marketing campaigns for their new product, especially when the product itself performs well after release, but UserBenchmark whilst on one hand denouncing AMD’s product as marketing spin, seems concerned in their review that Intel’s own marketing team ‘remain asleep (terminally?) at the wheel’ and apparently now ‘face the very real risk of bankruptcy’.
That seems like an extreme scenario for a company that earlier this year was reported to have a 77% market share in desktop PCs by CPU market tracker Mercury Research, but perhaps Intel does need to take a leaf out of its rival’s book when it comes to creating a buzz about their new products. Recent weeks have certainly left Intel with a bloody nose, and it will be interesting to see what the tech giant does next; those whispers of Core Ultra instability are exactly what they don’t need right now.
