AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and Ryzen 5 7600X in review: Welcome to the future

AMD’s Ryzen 7000 processors are here, with a new 5nm processing node and an AM5 socket that unlocks higher clock frequencies, higher power consumption and therefore better performance. The four new CPUs launching on September 27th also include a new 6nm I/O die, integrated graphics and support for DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 – it’s a significant feature upgrade that regained parity with Intel’s 12th Gen CPUs.

Of course, features often come second to fps, so performance testing has been the bulk of our effort. Two chips have landed on our desks so far – the $549/£579 Ryzen 9 7900X and the $299/£319 Ryzen 5 7600X – and we’ve compared them against our range of hand-picked games and a sprinkling of productivity benchmarks. The question we want to answer is simple: how do these Zen 4 designs compare to Intel’s 12th Gen Core counterparts and AMD’s older Ryzen 5000 series?

The move to DDR5 also raises a secondary question – what is the current price/performance RAM sweet spot with Ryzen 7000? AMD suggests in its documentation that DDR5-6000 is ideal for now, so we’ve got their CPUs – and the closest equivalents from Intel – at both 6000 MT/s (AMD’s recommendation) and 5200 MT/s (where we’re using ours test Intel 12).

Before we dive into our CPU benchmark results, let’s take a quick peek under the hood to understand what AMD has accomplished here.

First, AMD saw a 13 percent improvement in IPC, instructions per clock, thanks to a larger L2 cache, improved execution engine, better branch prediction, and other internal changes. This should result in a similar increase in single-core performance at the same frequency, so when combined with some significant frequency improvements and the move to higher clocked DDR5, Ryzen 7000 should offer an above-average generational improvement.

The new AM5 platform is also fascinating. AMD has switched from a “PGA” to an “LGA” design for its processors, meaning these are now on the motherboard rather than having gold pins on the bottom of the CPU – so it’s now much harder to damaging a CPU but easier to break a motherboard. The pin count has also increased significantly, allowing more power to be delivered to the CPU – up to 230W, with Ryzen 9 designs moving from a standard TDP of 105W last gen to 170W this gen.

This puts more focus on CPU cooling, but some existing AM4 CPU coolers should also work with AM5, which is nice for anyone investing in a high-end option. Basically any cooler that bolted into the standard AMD AM4 backplate can also bolt into the new AM5, but designs that required the installation of a custom backplate are not compatible. Fortunately, our test rig uses Alphacool’s Eisbaer Aurora 240mm AiO, which uses the standard AMD backplate, and therefore we can maintain cooler compatibility across the generations – nice.

It’s also worth bringing up the rest of the dyno we use. AMD provided ASRock’s X670E Taichi motherboard, which features an abundance of M.2 slots, beefy power delivery, and conveniences like onboard power and reset buttons, as well as an LED display for error codes and current CPU temperature .

This is combined with G.Skill’s highly specialized Trident Z5 Neo DDR5-6000 CL30 RAM, Corsair’s Dominator Platinum DDR5-5200 CL40 for additional testing, and of course Asus RTX 3090 ROG Strix OC for the all-important GPU side. For storage, we use three PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs for all our games – a 4TB Kingston KC3000, a 1TB PNY XLR8 CS3140, and a 1TB Crucial P5 Plus. Our rig was completed with a 1000W Corsair RM1000x power supply.

Elsewhere, we used an Asus ROG Crosshair 8 Hero for Ryzen 5000 testing, an Asus ROG Maximus Z590 Hero for 11th Gen Intel testing, and an Asus ROG Z690 Maximus Hero for 12th Gen testing; All of these are high-end boards for their respective platforms. DDR4 motherboards used G.Skill 3600MT/s CL16 memory, the sweet spot for DDR4.

Before we dive into the gaming benchmarks that make up pages two through five, let’s whet our appetite with some quick-and-dirty content creation benchmarks: a Cinebench R20 3D rendering and a Handbrake video transcoding.

As with the last two Ryzen generations, we get a nice performance increase in productivity, which also expresses the maximum gains that we can expect while gaming. There’s a healthy 25 percent jump in single-core speeds from the 5600X to the 7600X as measured by Cinebench R20, and we’re seeing a similar range at the top end too. Impressively, this boost allows the 7900X to outperform the 5950X in the multithreaded Cinebench test despite having four fewer cores and eight fewer threads; The 7950X should be an absolute titan. Moving on to the Handbrake transcode results, the 7900X is 13 percent faster than the 5950X when it comes to H.264 encoding and just a tad shy for H.265. For its part, the 7600X outperforms the 5800X and 5800X3D with an average transcode framerate of 20 fps, compared to ~19 for the last-gen Ryzen 7 parts.

The power consumption, measured on the wall for a quick comparison, is higher with the Ryzen 7000 compared to its predecessor – but to be honest it is quite modest. The new 6900X + X670E system drew a maximum of 288W, compared to 237W for the 5950X + X570 – a 21 percent increase that’s more or less consistent with the higher speeds we’re getting here. It will be interesting to see if mammoth coolers and additional power unleash significant performance gains; With Ryzen 5000, the chip appeared to be out of the box, but a switch to a new socket, higher performance targets, and so on could mean there’s some overclocking headroom to discover.

Now let’s move on to the fun stuff: see how the 7600X and 7900X stack up in a range of games. Click the quick links below to jump to the titles that interest you most, or click the next page button to read it all!

AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and Ryzen 5 7600X analysis

To see this content, please enable targeting cookies.
Manage cookie settings