AMD's new Ryzen 7 9850X3D unveiled

AMD's new Ryzen 7 9850X3D unveiled - here's how it stacks up

The team at AMD brought some new silicon to CES 2026 in Las Vegas this week, and one of the most exciting is a new addition to the company's Ryzen lineup of desktop CPUs.

The new AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D looks like a slightly souped-up version of what's arguably AMD's best desktop chip to date, the AMD Ryzen 9800X3D. This is a big deal because the 9800X3D is generally regarded as the best CPU for gaming PCs right now thanks to its winning combo of killer speeds and a hefty L3 memory cache for rapid loads.

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In fact, the current AMD Ryzen 9800X3D ($479) is so good for gaming that it's what we put in the RTX 5090 gaming PC we built and it's what our old contributor Dave Meikleham put in the high-end gaming PC he built last year. So the fact that AMD just released a slightly better version at CES 2026 is a big deal.

I'm afraid AMD announced the specs of the Ryzen 7 9850X3D and the general release window (first quarter of 2026), but the company hasn't yet confirmed pricing for the new CPU. We'll update this article with that fact as soon as we have it, but in the meantime let's dive into the specs and talk about what's new!

AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D specs and where it fits in the Ryzen lineup

Chip	MSRP	Cores / Threads	Max boost	Cache	TDP
Ryzen 9 9950X3D	$699	16 / 32	5.7 Ghz	144 MB	170 W
Ryzen 9 9950X	$649	16 / 32	5.7 Ghz	80 MB	170 W
Ryzen 9 9900X3D	$599	12/ 24	5.5 Ghz	140 MB	120 W
Ryzen 9 9900X	$499	12/ 24	5.6 Ghz	76 MB	120 W
Ryzen 7 9850X3D	?	8 / 16	5.6 Ghz	104 MB	120 W
Ryzen 7 9800X3D	$479	8 / 16	5.2 GHz	104 MB	120 W
Ryzen 7 9700X	$359	6 / 12	5.5 GHz	40 MB	65 W
Ryzen 5 9600X	$279	6 / 12	5.4 GHz	38 MB	65 W

The best Ryzen desktop CPU for gaming just got an upgrade

AMD provided this chart of the new AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D's performance in various agmes benchmarked (in 1080p at high settings) against the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and the older Ryzen 7 9800X3D. (Image credit: AMD)

As you can see from the specs chart, there isn't a huge difference between the 9800X3D and the new and improved 9850X3D.

The big upgrade is the clock speed, as AMD has juiced the max boost up from 5.2 Ghz on the old chip to 5.6 Ghz on the new CPU. According to performance testing conducted by AMD that appears to deliver a small but noticeable improvement over the old 9800X3D when benchmarking games at 1080p, though of course we'll need to wait for data from use in the wild before we know for sure.

And since the AMD Radeon 7 9850X3D is slated to ship in the first few months of this year, I don't expect we'll need to wait too long.

Outlook

Knowing what we do now about AMD's new desktop CPU, I think there are only two major questions left to answer: what will it cost and how much better is it, under real-world conditions, than the 9800X3D?

Because right now as I look at the tiny performance improvements that AMD claims its new CPU offers over the old top model, I don't see much reason to buy this over the 9800X3D unless they're very close in price.

On the other hand, after years of watching PC component prices bounce up and down due to the intricacies of global commerce I think it's great that AMD is expanding its desktop CPU line around presumably the most popular product, so having another attractive Ryzen 7 gaming CPU option is a good thing for anyone building a gaming PC in the years ahead.

Since we're in Las Vegas covering CES 2026 live all this week I hope we'll have a chance to go more hands-on with an AMD Ryzen 9850X3D system and tell you all about it—stay tuned!

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