AMD simply took one thing that Intel’s Arrow Lake processors offered and knocked it right out of their hands.

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New AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is out today, following yesterday’s full review with fanfare of ratings, and with it, the best gaming processor is now available to anyone looking to build the ultimate gaming rig. And the final nail has been hammered into the coffin of the new generation of Intel Arrow Lake processors, taking the only thing it has left, which is gaming efficiency, and easily stealing it.

Intel must be looking at the CPU market with an ashen face right now, because when it comes to helping the GPU hurl frames across the screen at impressive speeds, its once seemingly unassailable lead in gaming performance has now completely evaporated. Almost entirely TSMC-produced latest Intel processors codenamed Arrow Lakearrived recently, putting all their efforts into low-power and efficient work.

Unfortunately, this came at the expense of almost everything. Of course, in some highly multi-threaded applications Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and him impressive efficient cores do a solid job and deliver excellent benchmark results, but when it comes to gaming, the chips often lag far behind previous generations of processors.

But they turned out to be incredibly effective and therefore very cool.

This was some consolation for Intel loyalists (of which there are few left), especially after successive generations of processors that relied almost exclusively on higher clock speeds and increasingly higher power consumption to achieve performance targets.

But now AMD says, “Hold my pint,” releasing the Ryzen 7 9800X3D with the highest gaming frame rates of any processor tested this generation, the lowest gaming power consumption, and the lowest operating temperature.

In our latest set of CPU tests, we used Baldur’s Gate 3 as our temperature and gaming performance benchmark; it scales very well across different processors and can really highlight the highs and lows of a given chip. In this test, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D delivers nearly 50% higher frame rates in games, as well as lower temperatures and power consumption.

This was the last thing Intel had to offer gamers – a potential mini-beast of a small form factor processor. But even this is no longer possible thanks to the new 3D V-Cache chip. Where does Intel go next? I think let’s go back to the processor circuit board.

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