Gradually, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is making its way back into stores. According to AMD, demand is unexpectedly high due to poor Intel products.
AMD unveiled its best gaming processor, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, in November 2024 – but since then it has only been moderately available. Only now, in January 2025, are German retailers taking orders at okay prices (from €589) again. However, the shops continue to exceed the official recommended price of 529 euros.
In a round with the US press at the CES 2025 tech fair, AMD managers said that demand for the Ryzen 7 9800X3D was unexpectedly high. And Intel is also to blame for this:
“We knew we had built a great part. We didn’t know that the competitor [Intel] had built a terrible one,” Tom’s Hardware quotes AMD’s chief architect for gaming solutions Frank Azor in a joking tone. “So the demand was a little higher than we had predicted.”
Intel Arrow Lake-S weakened
Azor refers to Intel’s Core Ultra 200S processor series aka Arrow Lake. The initial models such as the Core Ultra 9 285K already had a difficult entry because they clock lower than the previous Core i-14000 due to a new manufacturing process. In addition, there were several problems that reduced gaming performance.
AMD also messed up the market launch of its first Ryzen 9000, but was then able to score points as the fastest gaming processor with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which was introduced later. Like all X3D models, it uses extra stacked Level 3 cache, which increases the frame rate in most games.
Production capacity increased
David McAfee, responsible for the client channel business at AMD, says that demand for both the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and its predecessor, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, is “unprecedented”. AMD has significantly increased the production capacity of both processors. “It’s crazy how much we’ve gained from our planning,” McAfee says.
However, it takes some time after ordering for the increased production capacity at chip contract manufacturer TSMC to be noticeable in the trade: “Normal” chips often need three months from the first wafer exposure to arrival at the dealer. According to McAfee, the X3D processors need even more time because of the additional production steps for the stack cache.
In the coming weeks and months, a further improvement in the market can therefore be expected. Then the prices should also go back in the direction of AMD’s recommended price.
Meanwhile, the upcoming 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X3D should have fewer start-up problems. According to McAfee, the eight-core variants 9800X3D and 7800X3D sell about ten times more often than the other X3D models with more cores combined.
