AMD’s 7800X3D and 9800X3D CPUs, priced over $400 USD, are widely marketed as “the best gaming CPUs in the world”. This is demonstrated at low resolutions with a 4090-class GPU, whilst conveniently ignoring 0.1% lows (frame drops). Under cherry-picked cache-bound conditions the X3D chips do excel, but there’s a trade-off: the additional cache results in 6% lower boost clocks and 50% to 80% higher p