It has the highest base clock of any modern AMD chip (4.3 GHz), plus 16-cores, which is already more than most workloads need.
Can’t wait to see what Zen 6 brings early next year. Rumors say 24-cores and another big jump in single-core performance.
All stated for gaming, that is.
It’s even difficult to find CPU benchmarks that don’t overemphasize 1080p and eSports scenarios.
My upgrade from 5600x3D to 9850x3D felt kind of dumb at the time, but I decided to do it because Micro Center’s bundle deals are so far below market pricing.
I was shocked at how much better it is. Benchmarks and FPS don’t really show things like micro stutters and little performance wrinkles like that. I’m not even sure 1% low FPS counts capture it.
A great example game for this is Oblivion Remastered. Upgrading my CPU alone with the same GPU took away the environment loading slowdown almost entirely.
The benchmark will tell you that I didn’t gain any FPS during gameplay but every time I open a door into the new environment my CPU is positively impacting the experience.
I would have said the exact same thing you are saying until I actually experienced upgrading to the best on the market. For the record, this is the first time in my life I’ve actually owned the best CPU on the market for gaming.
My old advice would have been to buy one of those sweet spot cheaper mid-range gaming CPUs, but my newer advice is really if you’ve already spent all that you’re willing to spend on a GPU (I have a 9070XT, my only upgrade paths are insanely expensive), buy the highest gaming CPU on the list for gaming benchmarks (e.g., I wouldn’t go crazy with a 9950X3D2 since it doesn’t have any gaming improvements above the 9850X3D).
And the thing about CPUs is they’re not insanely expensive like GPUs. We are talking a price delta of $200 between this beast of a CPU and something way more middling.
Given the massive increase in hardware prices lately, we are going to have to get by with mid range or even low end hardware for a lot longer. Studios will be forced to actually optimise games to not run like shit on a sub $8000 PC.
Every game should be targeting the switch 2 and steam deck in terms of power.
Having a powerful rig is the brute force way around the game’s performance problems.
My PC wasn’t $8000. My 9850X3D, 32GB of RAM, and motherboard cost $800 in a bundle. Yes, purchased in 2026 during the RAM crisis. I was also able to sell my previous CPU, RAM, and board for around $500.
Obviously this is not a budget build but about half the cost is the graphics card. I would have saved minimal amount of money if I had gotten a worse CPU.
I think PS5 is a perfectly reasonable spec to be targeting, which was the higher end of mid range about 5 years ago, and still significantly out performs Switch 2 (which significantly out performs steam deck). I’m sure the GTA sales will demonstrate that the install base at this spec is wide enough for broad commercial success.
I grew up with gaming systems that got rapidly better and while it can be argued that we are at a diminishing returns plateau of gaming horsepower, I don’t think the solution is to never get hardware upgrades ever again, even in the current RAM-constrained environment.
GTA VI is coming out with FPS maximum of 30FPS on the PS5 including PS5 Pro. That’s a subpar experience that is limited by hardware.
I think it's limited by their software. The hardware buys them flexibility. Nobody is pushing it like the ps2 days.
We saw with much of the PS5’s lifespan that many of its cross-platform games came out on PS4 and original Switch with minimal compromise.
Not enough of the install base owns those higher end solutions, so for the most part someone with a better performing rig is getting better FPS, higher resolution, and not much else. Even gaining additional draw distance is rare these days, and higher resolution textures are basically impossible to see.
If the console is going to survive rather than decline as a whole I think that Microsoft and Sony will need to get more serious about innovation rather than just making a samey spec bump at a high price that doesn’t motivate their users to upgrade. Nintendo already proved that basic and rather mild level of innovation can excite the market (original Switch).
It's relatively easy to allow powerful hardware to just run the game at 4k 120fps highest settings while weaker hardware runs exactly the same game at lower graphic settings.
Let's not discuss battery life and overall size, however it helps the thermals.
I do a lot of CPU bound engineering and scientific compute on the computer and it chews through it.
I also bought the entire computer for $2500+tax new from Microcenter in December and it's appreciated 25% in value since then.
Does the base clock even mean anything beyond something that may or may not vaguely indicate the performance? Its lower than what these chips can sustain with sufficient cooling from my experience. It's higher than what the chips will clock down to when not sufficiently cooled.
They aren't the maximum or minimum but I think they are the only clocks with the specific guarantee "if you match X, you must be able to get Y". The max boost clocks usually aren't too hard to reach if you're trying though, there is just no guarantee you will in all workloads or how much it takes to get there.