As the title of this post indicates, AMD has now announced pricing and availability for its better, faster X3D flagship. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D will be officially available for sale starting January 29, and the list price is $499 USD.

Via AMD:

What you need to know about the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D:

• Building on the legacy of the 9800X3D, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D features a +400MHz improvement to the boost clock, making the world’s fastest gaming processor even faster.
• The Ryzen 7 9850X3D provides up to an average 27% gaming performance improvement vs the Intel Core Ultra 9 285k.
• Thanks to 2nd Gen 3D V-Cache technology, high-frequency memory is not required. Across an average of 30+ games, the FPS difference between DDR5-4800 and DDR5-6000 was <1%.

The last bullet point above is of particular interest, as AMD is pointing out what many of us in the hardware review industry already know: faster RAM makes almost no difference for gaming. Apparently 3D V-Cache technology further mitigates the impact of slow DDR5, so you really don’t need to spend as much on the memory as you would on the Ryzen 7 9850X3D itself.