The Ryzen 9 7950X3D 16-core/32-thread and the Ryzen 9 7900X3D 12-core/24-thread, AMD’s top two new desktop CPUs, will be available for purchase later today (starting 3 PM Central European time, 9 AM EST). The company’s 3D Vertical Cache technology, found in the two “Zen 4” processors, greatly enhances gaming performance. Particularly in terms of gaming and multi-threaded productivity, the 7950X3D equals the Intel Core i9-13900K in performance.

One of the two CCDs in these processors has a 32 MB on-die L3 cache that is supplemented with a 64 MB SRAM die known as the 3D Vertical Cache. The combined 96 MB cache has a significant effect on gaming compute latencies. The 7950X3D equals the gaming performance of the i9-13900K “Raptor Lake” in our testing, proving AMD finally has a CPU that is really competitive with Intel’s newest. It also has an I/O feature set that is equal to or better than the competition’s, including DDR5 memory, PCIe Gen 5 (including for the CPU-attached NVMe slot), and an iGPU, however it lacks DDR4 memory support. The MSRP for the Ryzen 9 7950X3D is USD $700, while that for the 7900X3D is USD $600.