With the arrival of AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor, the consumer now has a CPU with plenty of L3 cache. Since the cache latency is much lower than the working memory, the chip has the potential to perform much better in games. So AMD offers 5800X3D as the ultimate gaming processor. in our area Full review You can read all about the performance of the new Ryzen processor in the plethora of tests and benchmarks performed.

More cache to increase performance, not a new concept

According to AMD, the workloads involved in games are highly random and highly unpredictable when it comes to cache. If the requested data is not available in the cache, then the working memory must be accessed. Since speed and especially working memory latency is less favorable to cache, (games) performance in such a case depends a lot on RAM speed and latency.

The technology behind 3D V-cache New, but the general concept of adding more cache to increase performance is not. In the enterprise market there are many examples of this, while the Broadwell generation, with the Intel Core i7 5775c as the flagship, is a well-known example among consumer processors. This processor from 2015 had at least 128MB of cache added on a separate chip, even more than the new Ryzen CPU. The big difference is that in Broadwell processors this extra memory was used as an entirely new L4 level cache, while on the 5800X3D it is an extension of the L3 cache. Moreover, the L4 cache can also be used on Broadwell chips for the integrated GPU, which of course is not present in the 5800X3D. In the presentation about the 5800X3D, AMD indicated that it sees possibilities for using the igpu 3D cache in the future.

Ryzen 7 5800X3D: No need for fast RAM anymore?

In this article we look at the effect of 3D cache with working memory speed. Since the 5800X3D has a much larger cache than other Ryzen 7 processors, in theory, less working memory is needed. We have extensively tested for this article whether a 5800X3D with a larger amount of cache is actually less dependent on the working memory speed.

For this comparison, we’re running a selection of our regular tests with both the regular Ryzen 7 5800X3D and 5800X combined with DDR4-3200, the maximum speed of officially supported memory. Additionally, we also tested these two processors with DDR4-2666 and DDR4-3600, in order to include a slower and faster memory option in the comparison. To further the disadvantages of slow working memory and the advantage of fast working memory, we kept the memory timings for these three speeds the same. In this way, we create clear differences between the three transfer speeds and response times associated with working memory.