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Updated November 8, 2024: Records are made to be broken – as the famous right-wing libertarian Norris McWhirter used to say – and dedication is what you need, if you want to break records, as Roy Castle would sing before blowing his own trumpet . So the 6.9GHz overclock we saw yesterday with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D has now been surpassed by Taiwanese overclocker TSAIK using an MSI MEG X870E Godlike motherboard with a number 1 position in the market. HWBOT ranking for chip CPU frequency (via Video cardz).

This was achieved with a frequency of 7.24 GHz, achieved by disabling SMT (something we found useful for achieving higher frequencies on the Ryzen 7 9800X3D) and using a base voltage of a whopping 1.969 V .

Obviously, it also requires liquid nitrogen to achieve this clock speed, and it’s not a frequency they were able to use when running benchmarks like Cinebench. The summit HWBot Cinebench Score was achieved “only” with an overclock of 6.8 GHz. That’s in contrast to the 6.9GHz achieved by Asus China general manager Tony Yu, who showed apps running at their maximum clock speed.

Original story from November 7, 2024: THE AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is now officially with us. PC Gamer’s hardware conqueror and controller Dave has been testing it for a while and reckons it’s the “new king of gaming processors.” This is what we expected, or at least hoped, given its predecessor, the Ryzen 7 7800X3Dheld the crown the longest. We now see how far this can be taken, and the answer is a long way off.

General Manager of Asus China Tony Yu showed (via Wccftech), the 9800X3D hitting 6.9GHz at just over 100W and hitting – at times – over 1,000fps in CS2 and Valorant at maximum settings. It’s 1080p, sure, but these are esports titles and we like our frames more than our pixels for competitive gaming.

The main takeaway isn’t the resulting frame rates, nice as they are; The main takeaway is that overclock to 6.9GHz. For reference, the 9800X3D comes with a base clock of 4.7 GHz and a boost of 5.2 GHz, which is an increase of 1.7 GHz over the boost clock.

What’s important about this is that the 9800X3D is AMD’s first unlocked 3D V-Cache processor. Previous generation X3D processors had the V-Cache placed on top of the chips, which would prevent adequate heat transfer for cooling when overclocking, so the chip remained locked. You could overclock them somewhat by playing with the PBO, but you wouldn’t be able to get much out of it.

With the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, however, the cores sit proudly on their V-Cache, leaving the IHS relatively flush against the silicon beneath. This means better heat transfer for cooling, which ultimately resulted in an X3D processor finally unlocked for overclocking. Additionally, clock speeds in general, even without manual overclocking, can now increase.

Given that we’ve never managed to properly overclock an X3D chip, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is really the first time we’ve seen what X3D technology is capable of when no controls are off limits. It is obviously interesting to note that this overclock was achieved using liquid nitrogen, although it was through our own manipulations with the overclocking capabilities of the new Ryzen chip that we managed to achieve it . almost stable at 5.6 GHz and rock solid at 5.57 GHz. That’s without getting into the curve optimizer shenanigans either, although obviously with only 400 MHz on top of the standard 5.2 GHz boost clock you don’t see much of an increase in frequency. ‘images and much more power required.

But still, judging by these overclocks, it’s pretty impressive, which says a lot about a chip that, even without any overclocking, already significantly outperforms other non-X3D 9000 series chips and those from Intel’s Arrow Lake in terms of gaming performance.

Speaking of which, now that we know the Ryzen 7 9800X3D can overclock so well, there’s really no reason to go with Arrow Lake for gaming. But I suppose there would be no reason to do that anyway, given Ryzen 7 9800X3D is more efficient, cooler, And consumes less energy. This last point is the only thing Arrow Lake had before the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which has now removed it. Big phew.

Maybe not so much for Intel, but it’s an exciting time for the rest of us. An X3D chip overclocked to 1.7 GHz, who would have thought it?

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