AMD's first Ryzen 7000X3D gaming processors arrive on February 28th - Eurogamer.net

By tripling the chip's L3 cache, the 5800X3D was able to compete with Ryzen 7000 and Intel's 12th and 13th-gen designs in many games - despite being bound to older DDR4 memory and the venerable AM4 socket.

With AMD's 65W non-X CPUs having arrived in early January, their Ryzen 7000 lineup has expanded rapidly - which should ensure that there's a good pick available for most people.

The 65W CPUs essentially offer nigh-identical performance at a lower price, based on our testing of the Ryzen 5 7600, so they're the best choice for budget-oriented builds.

That leaves the original launch models in a more diminished role, basically offering slightly better performance at a higher power target than the non-X versions, but they might still be a good fit for content creation workloads - especially as some X models have dropped lower in price than their non-X counterparts as retailers seek to clear out older stock.

These remain expensive, making the likes of the last-gen 5800X3D a good value as it can be paired with cheap, readily available DDR4 RAM and AM4 motherboards and provides a significant uplift over earlier Ryzen designs.

Still, the new socket and faster RAM should also push these new X3D chips well beyond what the 5800X3D is capable of, and could even help AMD reclaim the gaming crown from Intel's 13900K - so it'll be fascinating to see how performant they turn out to be.