AMD announced its new Ryzen 7 9850X3D chip at CES 2026, showcasing a 7% performance uplift over the iconic Ryzen 7 9800X3D, one of the best CPUs. What the company didn't show in that presentation is that you don't necessarily need high-speed DDR5 RAM to achieve those gains. In a marketing slide for the CPU obtained by Videocardz, the company says there's only a 1% difference in FPS between DDR5-4800 and DDR5-5600.
This has been true for X3D chips since the beginning because they leverage the extensive on-die L3 cache, which allows the CPU to access RAM less frequently. Managing latency is key in gaming workloads, so the L3 cache is preferred over system memory in most cases. Since the cache is shared across units of the same SKU, it becomes the bottleneck rather than the RAM you have.
