AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D benchmark has leaked on Geekbench and may have just overshadowed the Intel Ultra launch

It was quite a day. With Intel's Core Ultra CPUs finally hitting the market, we've been hard at work testing these newly launched CPUs and comparing them to their predecessors and competitors. Intel's motto for the Core Ultra series is efficiency, and they have definitely stayed true to these words. Our Intel Core Ultra 9 285K review shows that the flagship CPU does an excellent job of handling thermals under heavy load. However, it clearly lacks performance in single-core productivity, and the improvements in games are mediocre.

Well, just when we thought this day couldn't get any crazier, we discovered some pretty good news on Geekbench about the upcoming Ryzen 7 9800X3D. The CPU is listed in Geekbench 6 as tested on the ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero and Biostar X870 Valkyrie motherboards, and the numbers look pretty good.

The 9800X3D is about 20% better than the 7800X3D on Geekbench 6

Based on the Geekbench screenshots above, it looks like we're getting an 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 9800X3D with a base and boost frequency of 4.7GHz and 5.3GHz respectively.

Across the two motherboards, the processor achieves 3,295 to 3,305 points in the single-core score and 18,221 to 18,560 points in the multi-core score. Looking at our Ryzen 7 7800X3D test, we can calculate that this is an improvement of over 20% on the Geekbench scores, which is very good.

Surprisingly, our Core Ultra 9 285K scored 3,085 points in the single-score test and 23,550 points in the Geekbench 6 multi-score test. This means that the 9800X3D is even better than Intel's flagship in terms of single-core performance.

Let's not forget about gaming

The fact that the 9800X3D performs well in productivity benchmarks is a good surprise, but let's not forget why we all love the X3D series – its gaming capabilities. The Ryzen 7800X3D is one of the best gaming CPUs currently available, and unless AMD makes a big mistake with the 9800X3D, our expectations are pretty high for its successor too.

Today, VideoCardz came across a leaked marketing slide for the upcoming 9800X3D, which reveals that the processor will outperform the legendary 7800X3D in gaming performance by around 8%. While there is no confirmed news on the 9800X3D's gaming performance, if the 8% figure is to be accurate, the 9800X3D will definitely be on the list of the best gaming CPUs of the year.