Thermals, Power Consumption, and Clocks
Here are some interesting numbers from the benchmarks of the two CPUs captured using CapFrameX in Cyberpunk 2077 and Dying Light 2:
Despite drawing 20% more power, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D has the same average package temperature as the 7800X3D. Furthermore, even though the 7800X3D is faster on average, the game spends more time CPU-bound than the 7950X3D.
Dying Light 2 exhibits similar characteristics. Even though the 7950X3D draws more power, its thermals are almost identical to the 7800X3D. It also results in fewer CPU-bound scenarios compared to the 7950X3D.
Regarding clock speeds, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D runs 100MHz faster than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D in both games. The boost clock of the V-Cache dies was considered in both cases.
Conclusion
The Ryzen 7 7800X3D is clearly the better gaming CPU. It’s faster, more affordable, and power efficient than the Ryzen 9 7950X3D. The reason why it’s faster is two-fold. The 3D V-Cache boosts gaming performance by localizing the game code to the large L3 cache, improving latency and reducing memory accesses.
With the 7950X3D, the OS sometimes assigns a thread to the cores on the second CCD. Since most of the game code is on the (larger) first CCD, this induces a latency penalty as the core accesses it across the interconnect bus.
The extra cores on the Ryzen 9 7950X3D are nice to have, but games are more sensitive to memory/cache bottlenecks. The 7800X3D, with its large, uniform 96MB L3 cache pool, keeps the needed game code close to the cores in one place. Luckily, if you have a 7950X3D, you can technically run it as a 7800X3D in gaming workloads by disabling the second CCD. Just make sure you disable the one with the lower L3 cache.
