Reports emerged this morning that AMD had raised the MSRP for its immensely popular Ryzen 9 9800X3D at its German webstore, but the change is actually due to AMD constantly updating its official pricing for the Ryzen 7 9800X3D to keep up with changes to the exchange rate. HardwareLuxx reports that AMD recently increased the price of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D from €531 to €542 due to the adjustments.
However, this modest bump in price does not affect the 9800X3D's retail pricing outside of the German AMD store, where the CPU remains out of stock. HardwareLuxx reveals that the Zen 5 X3D gaming champ is still selling at prices of up to €700 at 3rd party retailers. In the U.S., the situation is very similar, with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D out of stock anywhere where the CPU is priced at its $479.00 MSRP. eBay scalper pricing is still in the $600 range, with the most expensive chips priced at nearly $700.
HardwareLuxx discovered that this moderate price change isn't anything that will stick around long term. Apparently, AMD is constantly changing the official price of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D to combat value fluctuations of the euro in relation to the dollar. Apparently, 3rd party retailers also take AMD's adjustments into account since Minfactory purportedly has also adjusted pricing to match AMD.
Unfortunately, there's no way to tell when the CPU will be back on store shelves consistently at MSRP pricing. The 9800X3D took the world by storm when it launched earlier this month, outperforming its predecessor with double-digit improvements in framerates. This has made the Ryzen 7 9800X3D well and away the fastest gaming CPU on the market today, with no competition from Intel. Compared to Intel's fastest gaming chips, which are often its previous generation chips (let alone its latest-gen Arrow Lake CPUs), the 9800X3D is 30% faster in our testing at 1080p Ultra settings on average.
On top of this, AMD has drastically improved the 3D-VCache technology inside the 9800X3D, implementing the cache underneath the compute die rather than on top. This has significantly improved the CPU's performance in productivity work, thermals, and enabled fully unlocked overclocking support for the first time on an X3D chip, giving the 9800X3D an even larger gap to its competitors when overclocked.
