AMD’s popular new Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU is back in stock at Amazon and Best Buy. Released in November, the 9800X3D has earned widespread praise and has been called the best gaming CPU on the market by many reviewers. Unsurprisingly, the high-performing processor has been challenging to find in stock. The 9800X3D has been a bestseller since its November launch, and AMD’s reveal of its new 9070-series graphic cards at CES 2025 has made the CPU even more challenging to secure.
$479
The Ryzen 7 9800X3D is one of the newest in the burgeoning line of 3D V-Cache CPUs, with each one proving to be an essential part of an enthusiast-gaming PC. It was the first to feature AMD’s 2nd-generation 3D V-Cache technology, with AMD saying that the 9800X3D is, on average, 8% faster than the previous generation’s 7800X3D, which itself was widely viewed as the best CPU on the market for gaming.
The 9800X3D has a base clock speed of 4.7GHz, with a boost to 5.2GHz and a TDP of 120W. It was the first X3D chip with overclocking, allowing enthusiasts to squeeze even more out of the silicon with meaningful tweaks. The processing cores were redesigned using AMD’s Zen 5 architecture. In addition to top-notch gaming performance, the 8-core, 16-thread CPU offers a marked improvement in productivity performance.
The 9800X3D is currently AMD’s fastest gaming CPU, but it will soon be joined by another AMD processor. In March, AMD will release the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D processors. No price points have been revealed, but AMD says gaming performance for the 9950X3D benchmarks within 1% of the 9800X3D. The new Ryzen 9 processors aim to be better all-around solutions for productivity and creators.