AMD's 7900X3D processor has dropped to $439 at Ebay in the US
An incredible price for a CPU that debuted at $599.
I feel a little bad for the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D. This 12-core 3D V-Cache processor sits in the middle of the 8-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D (that ranks as the fastest gaming processor) and the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D (that combines excellent gaming and content creation performance).
However, being overshadowed by your siblings is no bad thing, as the 7900X3D has fallen significantly further in price, bringing it back into contention for users that want a lot of cores for content creation tasks and excellent gaming performance. It launched at $600 and now retails for $510, but today on Ebay you can get this processor for just $439 - an amazing price. You even get a free copy of Starfield in the bargain.
The 7900X3D has the same asymmetric setup as the 7950X3D - that means one chiplet has the higher L3 cache levels permitted by the 3D V-Cache design, while the other chiplet gets the marginally higher clocks of the original Ryzen 7000 design. Special software helps the Windows scheduler run games and other tasks that benefit from the extra cache on the V-Cache chiplet, while a handful of games (like League of Legends) and most productivity and content creation apps run on the chiplet with the higher clocks.
It's a sensible system that works well, although on occasion we see worse gaming performance than the simpler 7800X3D, which has just one chiplet with the 3D-Vache, so there's no extra software component. In my testing for Digital Foundry, that happened in just a handful of games, so the 7900X3D is still a reliable performer that is significantly faster in games than the already-impressive 7900X.
Otherwise, the only deficit here is that as the 7900X3D uses six cores from each chiplet, you have a smaller number of V-Cache enabled cores than the two other X3D chips, resulting in slightly lower performance in games that use up that many cores (normally between 5 and 15%). However, what you lose in terms of gaming performance versus the 7800X3D you more than make up for in improved multi-threaded performance, on account of having 50% more cores and threads - and that translates into a strong advantage in any task that can be run in parallel, from transcoding video to 3D rendering and compiling programs.
In short then, do consider the 7900X3D - especially at this reduced price.
