The AMD Ryzen 7 X3D has just reached 6.9 GHz with thousands of in-game frames per second and barely broke a sweat.

The AMD Ryzen 7 is officially here. Dave, PC Gamer's hardware guru and conqueror, has been testing it and thinks it is "the new king" of gaming CPUs. We expected it or at least hoped that this would be the case, given the Ryzen 7 7800X3D was the previous king of gaming CPUs for a long time. We're now seeing how far the Ryzen 7 7800X3D can be pushed. The answer is very far indeed.

Asus China's GM Tony Yu showed (via Wccftech), that the 9800X3D could reach a whopping 6,9 GHz with just over 100W and achieve--at certain points--over 1,00 fps in CS2 or Valorant on max settings. It's 1080p but these are esports games and we prefer frames to pixels for competitive gaming.

The 6.9 GHz boost is the most important thing to take away, not the frame rates. For reference, the stock clock on the 9800X3D is 4.7 GHz with a boost clock of 5.2GHz. That's a 1.7GHz increase.

The 9800X3D is AMD's first 3D V cache CPU that is unlocked. The V-Cache was located on top of the processors in previous generations, which prevented adequate heat transfer to cool the chip when overclocking. Therefore, the chip had to be locked. PBO was the only way to get a little overclocking, but not much.

The cores of the Ryzen 7 are positioned on top of the V-Cache. This allows the IHS to be flush with the silicon beneath. This allows for better heat transfer, which in turn means a CPU that can be overclocked. Plus, clock speeds can now be increased even without manual overclocking.

We've never been able properly overclock an X3D processor, so the Ryzen 7 is the first time that we see what X3D technology is capable of. We've been able to get the new Ryzen chip almoststable, at 5.6 GHz and rock solid, at 5.57 GHz. This is without the curve optimizer, but with only 400 MHz added to the standard 5.2GHz boost clock, you won't see much of an increase in frame rates and will require a lot of power.

Even so, these overclocks are impressive. This is a chip which, even without overclocking, easily outperforms other non X3D 9000 series chips and Intel Arrow Lake chips in gaming performance.

There's no reason to choose Arrow Lake now that we know how well the Ryzen 7 can overclock. The Ryzen 7 is cooler, performs better, and uses less power. This is the only thing that Arrow Lake had to offer before the Ryzen 7 was released. Big oof.

Intel may not be thrilled, but the rest of us are. Who would have thought that an X3D processor could be overclocked to 1.7 GHz?