Introduction

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 “Ada” has been out for three weeks now, and is the fastest graphics card you can buy, beating the previous-generation leader by as much as 40 percent. Read all about it, in our main review of the card. The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D is a gift that keeps on giving for users of the Socket AM4 platform, especially since the company extended “Zen 3” architecture support to even 5-year old AMD 300-series chipset motherboards. With the latest BIOS updates you’re even able to run the 5800X3D on a $50 motherboard that’s five years old. The processor is getting renewed attention in the market these days, as it is seen matching the gaming performance of next-generation processors, providing Socket AM4 users with a cost-effective upgrade path.

It’s been a busy Q4-2022 for us, as we’ve covered next-generation processor launches for both Intel and AMD (“Raptor Lake” and “Zen 4”), Intel’s Arc A700 series; NVIDIA’s RTX 4090 “Ada,” and are preparing for AMD’s next-generation GPUs, announced yesterday, and RTX 4080 reviews are coming soon, too. Our graphics card reviews are already comprehensive, with over 25 game tests, but we’ve been doing mega-benches with 53 game tests, comparing the RTX 4090 across various processors over the last few weeks. In this article, we plan to compare Intel’s flagship Core i9-13900K “Raptor Lake” with the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D.

We’ve already taken the 5800X3D for a spin last week, comparing it with the 5800X from our main VGA test bench, paired with an RTX 4090. Before that, we compared the 5800X with a Core i9-12900K Alder Lake. We provided our reasons as to why our RTX 4090 launch coverage test-bench was powered by a 5800X—we were waiting to see what “Zen 4” and “Raptor Lake” offered, before we could make an informed choice on which processor to pick for our next test bench—something that entails re-testing every graphics card in our lab as part of a huge rebench that lasts several weeks, with thousands of individual benchmark runs (30 cards x 25 games x 3 resolutions = 2250. At five minutes each, that’s 187 hours).

The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D is an 8-core/16-thread Socket AM4 processor based on the “Zen 3” microarchitecture, but with a ground-breaking AMD innovation called 3D Vertical Cache. The processor has a massive 96 MB of L3 cache, thanks to 64 MB of additional cache stacked on top of the 32 MB L3 cache local to the “Zen 3” CCD, which is contiguous with it. The additional cache has a significant impact on gaming and streaming data performance. You can read all about the 5800X3D in our main review. AMD launched the 5800X3D in April 2022, so while the underlying architecture and platform may be older, the processor really isn’t.

Unlike the previous megabench articles where we compared the roughly 1-year old configuration of our GPU test system (5800X, 16 GB, DDR4-4000 CL20) with various other configs, this test run is “pure,” we were free to pick any hardware config that made sense, to compare things fairly. So, we selected 2x 16 GB for both platforms, the 5800X3D runs DDR4-3600 CL14—tight timings (you’ve been requesting them), and 1800 MHz Infinity Fabric for 1:1 ratio, and the 13900K runs DDR5-6000 CL36, a decent config, but certainly not the “best possible DDR5” scenario.

Our selection of games spans the past six years of game releases, across a plethora of game genres, game engines, and graphics APIs (DirectX 12, DirectX 11, Vulkan). Our testing data depicts performance gains, as well as losses for either side.

Benchmarks

Among our games, you’ll find titles that have been included in TechPowerUp graphics card reviews over the past years, as well as some of the newer ones joining our bench soon. Going forward, we will of course make changes to the game selection for TPU50. Our goal is to have a rich diversity of game genres, engines, and 3D graphics APIs. Equal settings were used for both platforms, with proprietary features disabled.

All games are tested in custom bench scenes, as the integrated benchmarks often paint a completely inaccurate picture compared to actual gameplay. Also, the GPU vendors actively optimize their drivers to achieve good results in integrated benchmarks.

Test System