AMD Ryzen 9 7950X vs Ryzen 7 7700X review: Ultimate design

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After reviewing the Ryzen 9 7900X and Ryzen 5 7600X, it’s finally time to look at the two remaining CPUs in AMD’s Ryzen 7000 family: the $449 / £439 Ryzen 7 7700X, a potential gaming value champ, and the $799 / £769 Ryzen 9 7950X. , a sixteen-core behemoth expected to outpace nearly every consumer CPU in content creation workloads. We’ve seen significant price cuts on Ryzen 7000 processors since their launch – so are these CPUs worth buying in 2023?

As a quick recap, Zen 4 processors differ profoundly from AMD’s latest Ryzen 5000 parts. There has been a shift to a new socket, AM5, with an LGA design that can deliver up to 230W of power, as well as a new 6nm I/O die, integrated graphics on all models and support for two major technologies: DDR5 and PCIe 5.0.

These upgrades revealed some impressive gains in the case of the 7600X and 7900X, and there is potential for even greater improvements with the 7700X and 7950X. Since AMD uses a chiplet-based design with up to eight cores per CCD, the eight-core 7700X and sixteen-core 7950X should represent the maximum performance possible from single- and dual-CCD designs respectively – and reports indicate that in some titles, the performance penalty Splitting the gaming workload across multiple CCDs can conflict with the gains from accessing a larger number of threads, which makes the 7700X as a CPU particularly important.

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You can see how each design stacks up in the table below. With a 13 percent increase in instructions per clock (IPC) and more internal improvements, such as an improved execution engine and better branch predictor, we expect the significant frequency boosts and higher power allowances to translate into some serious performance gains across all types of workloads, from gaming to content creation. . This was certainly the case for the 7600X and 7900X – so how do the 7700X and 7950X cope?

CPU Design Boost Base L3 cache TDP RRP Ryzen 9 7950X Zen 4 16C/32T 5.7GHz 4.5GHz 64MB 170W $699 / £739 Ryzen 9 7900X Zen 4 12C/24T 5.6GHz 4.7GHz 64 MB 170W $549 / £579 Ryzen 7 7700X Zen 4 8C / 16TB 5.4GHz 4.5GHz 32MB 105W $399 / £419 Ryzen 5 7600X Zen 4 6C / 12T 5.3GHz 4.7GHz 32MB 105W $299 / £319 Ryzen 9 5950X Zen 3 16C / 32T 4.9GHz 3.4GHz 64MB 105W $799 / £750 Ryzen 9 5900X Zen 3 12C / 24T 4.8GHz 64MB 105W $549 / £509 Ryzen 7 5800X3D Zen 3 8C / 16T 4.5GHz 3.4GHz 96MB 105W $449 / £429 Ryzen 7 5800X Zen 3 8C / 16T 4.7GHz 3.8GHz 32mW 105W $449 / £419 Nia Ryzen 5 5600X Zen 3 6C/12T 4.6GHz 3.7GHz 32MB 65W $299 / £279

To find out, we’ll use the same testing system featured in previous Ryzen 7000 tests – an ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard, G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo DDR5-6000 CL30 RAM (with Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR5-5200 for additional testing), and Asus’ RTX 3090 Strix OC. For the GPU side of things. Cooling is provided with a 240mm Alphacool Eisbaer Aurora AiO, which is happily compatible with the new AM5 socket.

For storage, we use three PCIe 4.0 NVMe hard drives to hold all of 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.

Note that we’re using an older version of Windows 11 here, as the 22H2 update appears to have impaired performance on our Ryzen 7000 processors. This, along with a motherboard BIOS update, means retesting the 7600X and 7900X to make sure our results are still valid – and it may We saw small changes in many games.

Elsewhere, we used the Asus ROG Crosshair 8 Hero for the Ryzen 5000 test, the Asus ROG Maximus Z590 Hero for the 11th-generation Intel test, the Asus ROG Z690 Maximus Hero for the 12th-generation test, and the Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Master for the 13th. Gen test all of these high quality boards for their own platforms. DDR4 motherboards used G.Skill 3600MT/s CL16 memory, sweet spot for DDR4, while DDR5 motherboards used DDR5-6000 CL30 as previously mentioned.

Before we get into the gaming benchmarks that make up pages 2-5, let’s set the scene with some quick content creation benchmarks: Cinebench R20 3D rendering and Handbrake video transcoding.

As might be expected, the 7950X is the one to look out for in the content creation stakes, with top scores in the Handbrake h.264 and h.265 (HEVC) conversion tests—albeit only by a relatively narrow margin compared to the Core i9 13900K, just under One percent in h.264 and about 10 percent in h.265. In the Cinebench test, a historical powerhouse of AMD Ryzen designs, the 13900K retains the top spot by about five percent, but the 7950X is still significantly faster (~46 percent) than the 5950X, for an impressive generation. reinforces.

The 7700X also shows a clear lead over the 5800X design, AMD’s first eight-core design of the Zen 3 generation. Here, single- and multi-threaded scores as tested in Cinebench increase by just under 30 percent, significantly boosting gaming performance. . Handbrake performance is also stronger by a similar margin, though the last-gen 5950X still delivers better performance overall due to its higher core and thread count — and that older CPU is now cheaper than the 7700X, making it a better choice for content creation if not gaming.

CB R20 1T CB R20 MT HB h.264 HB HEVC HEVC Power Usage Ryzen 9 7950X 798 14837 105.15fps 45.10fps 368W Ryzen 9 7900X 791 11324 79.38fps 33.70fps 368X7 7 zen 7 8 788fps 288W 56.69 frames per second 25.95 frames per second 266 watts 60750 x 750 44.35 frames per second 20.28 frames in the second 236 watts Ryzen 9 5950x 637 10165 70.28 frames per second 30.14 frames per second 237 w Ryzen 7 5800x3D 546 5746 42.71 frames per second 19.10 frames in The second 221 watts Ryzen 7 5800x 596 6118 44.18 frames per second 19.50 frames in the second 229 Watt Ryzen 5 5600x 601 4502 31.75K 873 Core 14.43 104.67 frames per second 41.20 frames per second 473 wat 254 W Core i9 12900K 76010416 70.82 FPS 29.26 FPS 373 W Core i7 12700K 729 8683 57.64 FPS 25.67 FPS 318 W Core i5 12600K 716 6598 W 44.219720 W 14.70 fps 190 W Core i9 11900K 588 5902 41.01 fps 18.46 fps 321 W Core i5 11600K 541 4086 29.00 fps 13.12 fps 250 W

The power numbers are also worth looking at here. We’re just testing against a wall, and we already have different motherboards and RAM running, but you can still notice a trend towards higher wattage counts in newer CPUs, with the last generation 5950X and the current generation 7600X. Same amount of power (~236W) – while the 7950X jumps to 368W. That’s still well below the 13900K, which peaked at 473 watts during HEVC encoding while delivering a slightly worse score. So the new AM5 socket is certainly capable of delivering more power, but AMD’s Zen 4 design still appears to be more energy efficient than the closest Intel equivalent. This should make cooling less of a concern, and certainly comes as a relief at a time when GPU wattage is also rapidly escalating on mainstream cards.

Now, let’s get into the fun stuff — the games. We’ve tested a handful of titles, so choose your favorite from the links below or just hit the next page button to continue the journey.

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