A Return to Gaming Dominance with AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X Leave a comment

The Zen 4 architecture and additional connectivity options including PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 are brought by the Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X. The Ryzen 5 7600X is without a doubt the fastest gaming CPU on the market, while the Ryzen 9 7950X is the performance king for PCs overall.

AMD was caught off guard by Intel’s hybrid Alder Lake processors, which outperformed AMD at every price point in terms of performance and value. The Ryzen 7000 CPUs respond with the new Zen 4 architecture, etched on the TSMC 5nm technology, which AMD claims increases IPC by 13%. This combination produces astounding peak rates of 5.7 GHz, which is a record for AMD’s Ryzen family and an increase of 800 MHz. It has a surprise higher clock speed than even Intel’s best chips, at least until the 6 GHz Raptor Lake chips from the manufacturer hit the market.

AMD’s process and architecture improvements enable genuinely explosive performance benefits when combined with significantly enhanced power delivery, which is made possible by a new platform. The new AM5 socket, which AMD has promised to support until 2025, is compatible with the company’s newest CPUs. Additionally, the new architecture fully supports the most recent interfaces, including DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, broadly matching Intel’s connectivity possibilities. To compete with Intel’s XMP standard, AMD has even created its own EXPO DDR5 memory profiles for overclocking. Along with support for AVX-512 and AI instructions, the Ryzen 7000 CPUs also include a new Radeon RDNA 2 iGPU for basic display output.

As a brief sample of the in-depth testing on the following pages, the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X achieves remarkable improvements, outperforming its predecessor by up to 15% in gaming performance, 21% in single-threaded work, and 45% in threaded work. This raises the bar for mainstream high-end CPUs. In actuality, the Threadripper Pro 5975WX, which costs $3,299, performs threaded tasks only 17% quicker than the 7950X. Not to mention that the 7950X outperforms the Core i9-12900K on every front.

The Ryzen 5 7600X is equally amazing, providing up to 18% quicker gaming performance than its predecessor in addition to 25% and 34% increases in single- and multi-threaded tasks, respectively. This processor ushers in a new, unequalled level of performance.

Both chips outperformed Intel’s top gaming chip. Although they are outstanding, they aren’t flawless: The Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 series has a high $300 entry-level price tag and excludes less expensive DDR4 memory options in favour of more expensive DDR5 memory. Due to the high total platform costs, this clouds the value proposition. In order to increase performance, AMD also dramatically increased power consumption, which consequently produced greater heat and a more power-hungry system. However, the performance-per-watt does increase.

Ryzen 7000 takes the lead convincingly, but Raptor Lake, its true rival, doesn’t launch until the following month. We’ll still witness a tight race for supremacy in desktop PCs, as Intel asserts its own strong performance enhancements of 15% faster single-threaded, 41% faster threaded, and a 40% ‘overall’ performance gain. Here is how the existing chips compare in the interim. (Also take a look at our complete boost, thermals, power, and IPC testing.

In addition to information we’ve gathered regarding Intel’s next Raptor Lake processor, this is how Ryzen 7000 compares to the company’s current Alder Lake CPUs. Please note that the information on Raptor Lake in the table above is preliminary.

With the Ryzen 7000 family, AMD didn’t increase the number of cores; instead, it concentrated on architectural and process node improvements that raise performance per core. We’ll get into this a little bit later, but the business also worked on enhancing power delivery to unleash additional performance.

With a 4.5 GHz base frequency and a 5.7 GHz boost, 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X has the highest boost frequency of the four Ryzen 7000 CPUs. The chip’s L2 cache is double the size of previous-generation versions at 16 MB, and its L3 cache is 64 MB. This chip consumes the most power of any Ryzen chip to date with a maximum power demand of 230W and a TDP rating of 170W. The 7950X competes with Intel’s Core i9-12900K for the time being, but later on it will compete with the Core i9-13900K, which will have eight more efficiency cores for a total of 24 cores.

The Raphael CPUs are compatible with the same PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 interfaces as Alder Lake and install into a new AM5 socket. Up to 24 PCIe 5.0 lanes can be made available to users by Socket AM5 motherboards.

If you install one DIMM per channel (1DPC), Ryzen 7000 supports DDR5-5200; however, for 2DPC, it only supports DDR5-3600. To counter Intel’s XMP, AMD also unveiled a brand-new memory overclocking specification. The brand-new EXPO profiles resemble the familiar XMP profiles that are currently in use. They still provide one-click RAM overclocking to predetermined speeds and are tailored exclusively for AMD processors. The company anticipates that at least 15 EXPO kits, with speeds of up to DDR5-6400, would be available at launch thanks to AMD’s collaboration with the leading memory providers. The implementation is up to the motherboard vendor, however AMD continues to enable ECC memory by default.

The Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 9 7950X processors do not come with cooling. AMD recommends using a 240-280mm liquid cooling system or something like with Ryzen 9 CPUs. Specifically, you’ll need a mid-frame tower cooler for the Ryzen 7 and 5 models (or an equivalent). The chip won’t be harmed by loaded temperatures, which should normally range from 90 to 95 degrees Celsius.

With their current offerings, both chipmakers are pushing their consumer processors to the greatest clock speeds we’ve ever seen. This generation of chips finds the chipmakers once again entangled in a frequency battle. We also see larger TDP estimates from both chipmakers as they increase frequencies because that results in increased power consumption.

Naturally, we must consider the processor’s performance per watt while evaluating the increased power usage. Thanks to improvements in the architecture and process nodes, AMD has achieved significant progress in this area. In the section on power consumption, we’ll go into further detail.