It’s been a rough old time when it comes to benchmarking CPUs, I can tell you that. The Ryzen 9000 release back in August was let down by relatively meagre performance improvements and an unready software ecosystem, while Intel’s 285K and 245K launch last month showed a significant performance regression versus 14th-gen – despite a genuinely interesting shift in architectures. Thankfully, AMD is here to save the day with the Ryzen 9 9800X3D.