The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D could decide the fate of Arrow Lake if Intel doesn’t cut prices to compete with the 9000 series.

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Jacob Fox, Hardware Writer

This week I was: I’m a hardware geek by day, a philosopher by night as I race to get my PhD. the dissertation was completed within a rapidly approaching deadline. Oh, and updating the Amazon pages for some of the peripherals and other trinkets I’m looking for, always hoping and always disappointed by UK deal prices.

It’s been a while, but we now have official confirmation of the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the first AMD 9000-series processor with 3D V-Cache. We were told everything, including the number of cores, clock speed, TDP and the fact that the processor would sit in its cache rather than wear it like a hat.

Yes, and we were told its price: $479. That’s $30 more than the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D’s launch price, but that’s not too bad, especially since it will be unlocked for overclocking. However, this is especially “pretty good” compared to Intel Core Ultra 200S Arrow Lake chips.

For a little context, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, the flagship processor in Intel’s Arrow Lake lineup, costs $589, more than $100 more than the upcoming 9800X3D. As far as I’m concerned, the 9800X3D’s price seals the deal: Intel’s latest chips just aren’t good enough for gaming. Which is quite a mistake when you think about it, considering AMD’s Zen 5 launch was hardly impressive.

The 285K’s price wouldn’t be such a disaster if it had excellent performance – after all, Intel’s previous generation flagships cost more than the 7800X3D – but it doesn’t. In testing, Nick found that it lags behind the competition in many apps and games (even though it does have low power consumption). Not only does it lose out to the current generation of high-end AMD processors, but it also trades blows with previous generation Intel processors.

$589 seems like a lot of money for a bunch of nothing special.

It even performs on par or worse than the Ryzen 5 7600X in gaming, with the latter currently selling for $208 on Amazon. No one is going to get the 285K for gaming, and given that the Core Ultra 5 245K costs $309 and apparently performs even worse than the 285K, no one is going to get it for gaming either.

The same goes for the $395 Core Ultra 7 265K, which may look a little better for the price, but still can’t match even AMD’s previous generation offerings like the 7700X and 7800X3D.

Now AMD has announced that we’ll soon have a next-gen X3D chip that’s under $500, can be overclocked, and will have higher clock speeds than the 7800X3D. As far as gaming goes, this looks like the death blow for Arrow Lake. However, this depends on whether the AMD chip is really as good as it appears on paper.

And yes, the 7800X3D may look expensive compared to the AMD Ryzen 7 9700X, which currently sells for around $312 at Newegg (with promo code BFDDYA55), but there has always been a premium charge for 3D V-Cache chips. And if anything, it only makes the 9000 series stronger than the Core Ultra 200S series.

Add in prices different from the X3D 9000 series, and there’s little room for Arrow Lake at all—certainly not for gaming. Of course, they’re low-power: that’s a real boon for Intel’s Lunar Lake mobile processors, but not so much for Arrow Lake processors, because people care less about squeezing every ounce of efficiency out of a desktop processor.

Now add in the 9800X3D, which is over $100 cheaper than the 285K, and Arrow Lake starts to look a little silly.

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Especially considering that upgrading means replacing your entire platform to use the new socket, whereas at least some gamers will already be using an AM5 motherboard compatible with the 9000 series. And even if you’re not already using an AM5 board, you might want to purchase one pretty cheap. The cheapest LGA 1851 motherboard I could find on Amazon, for example, costs $180, but on Amazon you can buy an AM5 board for just $70.

If the 9800X3D can stay much cheaper than Intel’s mediocre flagship, and do so with a ton of cache, what’s sure to be some pretty impressive gaming performance, and has a cheaper platform to boot, what should we conclude about Arrow Lake and its price?

It’s hard to get excited about such mediocre gaming processors, especially in light of new, cheaper and potentially faster options from AMD. Given the somewhat disappointing initial improvements to the 9000 series – “Zen 5%”, anyone? – the fact that it looks much more attractive than Arrow Lake really says something against Intel chips.

The only way the Core Ultra 200S line will become a reasonable option for PC gamers is if the prices come down. And at the same time they should be quite significant.