by After earlier this week providing the initial Linux benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D across many Linux gaming tests as well as nearly 400 other tests, in today’s article I look at the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D as a 12-core / 24-thread processor with the hefty 128 MB L3 cache on this Zen 4 desktop processor. Due to having less time with the 7900X3D so far, today’s article is just to get things started by looking at Linux gaming performance – both native Linux games as well as many Windows games running on Linux thanks to Valve’s awesome Steam Play (Proton + DXVK / VKD3D-Proton) software.
Ryzen 9 7950X3D is AMD’s top-end 3D V-Cache Zen 4 desktop processor with 16 cores / 32 threads, 5.7 GHz boost, 144 MB total cache and only a 120 Watt TDP. That’s a lot of power for $699 USD especially for gaming, but there are many technical computing workloads where 3D V-Cache is beneficial such as OpenCFD computing fluid dynamics, some AI related workloads and more as shown in the previous Phoronix article. But there are also cases where the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D is not as competitive as the 7950X due to the lower TDP and then the 3D V-Cache found on only one of the two CCDs while the other is frequency optimized. As mentioned in the previous article, the Linux kernel has not seen any optimizations yet around the AMD cache vs. frequency-optimized handling of tasks – with the exception of Linux users who manually limit tasks to given sets of cores. Regardless, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D was great for Linux gaming, mighty impressive in performance per watt, and also showed gains for some of the other Linux workloads that could take advantage of the large cache.
AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D is very much in the same boat as 7950X3D: Due to cache vs. frequency-optimized CCDs only have half of the cores/threads access to the large cache, which for the 7900X3D comes to a total of 140MB. Ryzen 9 7900X3D has 12 cores / 24 threads, up to a 5.6 GHz boost clock, 4.4 GHz base clock, 768KB L1 cache, 12MB L2 cache and 128MB L3 cache via 3D V-Cache. Like the 7950X3D, the 7900X3D also has a 120 Watt TDP. In comparison, the Ryzen 9 7900X (non-3D) has a 170 Watt standard TDP which again has a 4.7 GHz base clock with up to 5.6 GHz boost clock, and 64 MB for the L3 buffer size.
The AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D was launched for $599 while the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X retails for around $450 USD. The Ryzen 9 7900X3D was available on launch day, but at the time of writing it appears to be sold out at some US internet retailers and in limited quantities at others such as NewEgg, which lists a $795 price tag from third-party sellers.
As mentioned, today’s article only looks at the Linux gaming performance, while next week the rest of the (non-gaming) Linux benchmarks for the Ryzen 9 7900X3D and others will be published on Phoronix.
