Introduction

Today we are reviewing the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition, a re-release of the processor that kicked off AMD's 3D V-Cache dominance back in 2022. The original 5800X3D was the first desktop chip to include an extra 64 MB of additional L3 cache on top of the compute die, and it instantly became the fastest gaming CPU you could buy on Socket AM4. Four years later AMD is bringing it back—same 8-core Zen 3 silicon, same 96 MB of total L3 cache—but this time as a limited 10th Anniversary Edition and, more importantly, at a much lower price. Reviving the 5800X3D might look like AMD selling nostalgia, but it makes real sense given today's market: with DDR5 prices up nearly 5x on the back of the AI-inferencing boom, DDR4 platforms are popular again, and a lot of gamers are still sitting on an AM4 board with memory.



The headline change is price. The original 5800X3D launched at $450; the 10th Anniversary Edition has settled at just $340, which makes it a relatively affordable entry into X3D gaming on Socket AM4. Additionally, AMD includes a Carbice carbon-fiber thermal pad with the 10th Anniversary Edition—a dry, pad-style TIM that AMD is positioning as a cleaner, longer-lasting alternative to thermal paste. We're always skeptical of such goodies, and especially when the claim is that it can handle the cache-stacked chip design well enough that AMD themselves chooses to bundle it. Several reports online talked about terrible temperatures, others about a long burn-in-time needed, so we'll be putting it to the test, and run the pad through many heat-up and cool-down cycles later in this review.

Under the hood, nothing has changed from the 2022 part. AMD configured the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with a 3.40 GHz base frequency and a 4.50 GHz maximum boost. The 8-core/16-thread chip is built on the Zen 3 microarchitecture using TSMC's 7 nm process, and carries 512 KB of L2 cache per core plus 96 MB of shared L3—32 MB on-die plus 64 MB on a stacked 3D V-Cache die, addressed as a single contiguous cache. TDP stays at 105 W, exactly like the original. In terms of I/O, you get a dual-channel DDR4 memory interface and 24 lanes of PCI-Express Gen 4, so no Gen 5 support.

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D drops into any Socket AM4 motherboard with a BIOS update, spanning everything from AMD 300-series to 500-series chipsets—AMD kept even its oldest boards on the support list, so almost anyone with an existing AM4 system has a drop-in path to the fastest gaming CPU the platform will ever get, without touching their memory, cooler, or motherboard. That upgrade case is the easy one to make. The harder question is whether buying into a dead-end DDR4 platform still makes any sense in 2026, when AM5 is the real path forward for everything that comes after this—that is exactly what we'll try to untangle over the course of this review.

Unboxing and Photography

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition ships in a compact box. Just like the original 2022 release, a cooler is not included, but this time you get a Carbice carbon-nanotube thermal pad. The front and back faces of the package carry anniversary branding and clearly mark that the processor features 3D V-Cache technology.


Physically, the 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition is a standard Socket AM4 processor with the familiar gold heat spreader and a pin-grid-array (PGA) underside—no visible change from the original 2022 part. Underneath the IHS sits the feature that started it all: this is AMD's first-generation 3D V-Cache implementation, with the 64 MB L3 die stacked on top of the Zen 3 compute die and structural silicon shims filling the rest of the gap up to the heat spreader.


Socket AM4 uses a traditional pins-on-the-CPU design—the processor drops into the socket and a retention lever clamps the pins in place. AM4 has been around since 2017, so you're spoiled for choice when it comes to aftermarket cooling and motherboards, and since AM5 kept the same mounting geometry, modern AM5 coolers fit as well.


As mentioned before, AMD bundles a Carbice carbon-nanotube thermal pad with the 10th Anniversary Edition. It ships in its own box and is meant to replace traditional paste. Unlike traditional thermal paste it doesn't pump out, so it won't degrade over time. But what's also needed is some settle-in time, so we put it through an extended heat-cycling test on the Temperatures page.

Test Setup

• All applications, games, and processors are tested with the drivers and hardware listed below—no performance results were recycled between test systems.
• All games and applications are tested using the same version.
• All games are set to their highest quality setting unless indicated otherwise.

AIDA64 Cache and Memory Performance

In this first test we're looking at the performance offered by the memory subsystem and the processor's L1, L2 and L3 caches. AIDA64 comes with a great benchmark that provides a nice overview of all these performance characteristics.

Y-Cruncher

Y-Cruncher is a highly optimized piece of software that can calculate Pi and other constants to a huge number of digits. It is fully multithreaded, uses a modern code design and is optimized for all major processor architectures. This ability has made it a popular application, used by the enthusiast community to determine and compare how powerful their overclocked systems are.

Chess Simulation

Creating a worthwhile opponent for the game of chess has been one of the most fascinating tasks for computer programmers for decades. In this test we're using the highly popular Stockfish chess engine to calculate optimal moves in a chess scenario. Each CPU is running at the fastest instruction set supported, including AVX512-VNNI, AVX256-VNNI, AVX512, BMI2 and AVX2.

Web Browsing — JetStream 2

The JetStream 2 browser benchmark combines multiple JavaScript and WebAssembly benchmarks with several advanced workloads to determine how quickly a browser can complete specific tasks. It not only rewards high overall performance, but also fast startup and consistent operation.

Web Browsing — Speedometer 2

Speedometer 2 tests a "to-do list" web application that's implemented using a huge number of popular frameworks. Among the benchmarks are versions built with React, Ember.js, AngularJS, vue.js, jQuery and others—frameworks that are used by the most popular sites in the world.

AI Inference — GPT2

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have enabled us to create applications that are almost magical in their abilities. GPT-2 is a powerful language model developed by OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, that excels at generating human-quality text. It's a key AI workload because it tests the efficiency and capability of AI systems in handling complex language tasks, which is crucial for many real-world applications. We are measuring the time it takes to generate 100 stories starting with the "Once upon a time, there was a" prompt.