This gamer’s secret to playing Valorant at 1,200 FPS is AMD’s X3D processors

Good lord, those are some high framerates. Content creator @connorjaiye, best known for playing the fast-paced competitive shooter Valorant, put together a custom gaming PC with the help of AMD – and was able to net upwards of 1,200 fps in his favorite shooter.

The most fascinating part of the whole endeavor is that Connor didn’t even do this using the most high-end parts available; he used a previous-gen Radeon RX 6950 XT as his graphics card of choice, with a relatively bog-standard B650 motherboard from MSI pulling the build together.

The secret sauce? It’s the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor, the latest next-gen CPU from AMD to offer Team Red’s nifty 3D V-cache technology. This allows for cache memory to be ‘stacked’ on the CPU die, producing far more memory for the CPU to instantly draw on without needing to access your system RAM.

With this, Connor was able to achieve a stable 900+ frames per second in Valorant, with peaks in excess of 1,200. It’s the sort of framerate that would’ve been unheard of just a few years ago, and a testament to the gaming capabilities of AMD’s X3D chips – even though they typically lose out to Intel’s competing CPUs in non-gaming workloads.

Is 3D V-cache the new frontier for PC gaming?

I already knew that AMD’s X3D chips were an exceedingly solid choice for custom gaming PCs, but this is probably the most impressive showcase of the technology to date. Intel’s i9-13900K might still rule the roost in terms of overall performance, but it’s hard to recommend anything but the 7800X3D as the best processor for gaming right now.

Sure, the CPU shouldn’t get all the credit; the RX 6950 XT was the most powerful card from AMD’s RX 6000 generation, although you can snap one up for around $580 / £585 / AU$900 right now, making it a lot cheaper than either AMD’s current flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX or Nvidia’s competing powerhouse the RTX 4090.

Overall, chances are Connor’s build wasn’t that expensive – at least, not by gaming PC standards. I ran the numbers, and buying from Newegg in the US you’d be spending around $1,250 for his listed components – then using PCPartPicker, I calculated the total build cost assuming 32GB of DDR5 RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a liquid cooler for the CPU, and it ran to just shy of $1,700 (about £1,350 / AU$2,550)

If I was looking to achieve similar framerates, I could probably do it for a bit less – in fact, if you wanted to build a budget version of Connor’s framerate-blitzing PC, you could use the newly-released AMD Ryzen 5 5600X3D along with a cheaper graphics card and other lower-spec components to get that sweet sweet 3D V-cache goodness for a little over a thousand bucks. Be warned, though – the 5600X3D is a limited-edition chip only available from Micro Center in the US, which is kind of a bummer.