Following our Ryzen 9 7900X and Ryzen 5 7600X reviews, it’s finally time to take a look at the two remaining CPUs in AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series: the $449/£439 Ryzen 7 7700X, a potential gaming value champion, and the 799 The $/£769 Ryzen 9 7950X, a 16-core behemoth, is expected to outperform nearly every consumer CPU in content creation workloads. We’ve seen massive price cuts on Ryzen 7000 processors since launch – so are these CPUs worth buying in 2023?
As a quick recap, these Zen 4 processors are very different from AMD’s previous generation Ryzen 5000 parts. There has been a move to the new socket AM5, featuring an LGA design that can deliver up to 230W of power, and a new 6nm I/O die, all models have integrated graphics and support for two key technologies: DDR5 and PCIe 5.0.
In the case of the 7600X and 7900X, these upgrades unlock some impressive generational gains, and the 7700X and 7950X have the potential to deliver even greater improvements. Since AMD uses a chiplet-based design with up to eight cores per CCD, the eight-core 7700X and sixteen-core 7950X should represent maximum performance for single-CCD and dual-CCD designs, respectively — and reports suggest that, in some titles, will game work The performance penalty of load splitting to multiple CCDs may offset the gain in accessing more threads, making the 7700X a particularly interesting CPU.
You can see how each design stacks up in the table below. Citing a 13% increase in instructions per clock (IPC) and more internal improvements such as an improved execution engine and a better branch predictor, we expect a significant increase in frequency and higher power margins to translate into some significant performance Gain benefits across a variety of workloads from gaming to content creation. That’s certainly the case with the 7600X and 7900X – so how do the 7700X and 7950X fare?
| CPU design | Promote | according to | L3 cache | thermal design plan | Suggested retail price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 | 64MB | 170W | $549/£579 |
| Ryzen 7 7700X | Zen 4 8C/16T | 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 | 3.7GHz | 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 | 32MB | 105W | $449/£419 |
| Ryzen 5 5600X | Zen 3 6C/12T | 4.6GHz | 3.7GHz | 32MB | 65W | $299/£279 |
To find out, we’ll be using the same test system as our previous Ryzen 7000 tests – an ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard, G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo DDR5-6000 CL30 RAM (complementary testing with a Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR5-5200) and an Asus RTX 3090 Strix OC for the GPU side. The cooling unit is equipped with a 240mm Alphacool Eisbaer Aurora AiO, which is compatible with the new AM5 socket.
For storage, we use three PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs to hold all our games – a 4TB Kingston KC3000, a 1TB PNY XLR8 CS3140, and a 1TB Crucial P5 Plus. Our rig came with a 1000W Corsair RM1000x power supply.
Note that we’re using an older version of Windows 11 here, as the 22H2 update seems to be causing poorer performance on Ryzen 7000 processors. This, combined with a BIOS update for our motherboard, meant retesting the 7600X and 7900X to make sure our results were still valid – we did see minor changes in many games.
Elsewhere, we use the ASUS ROG Crosshair 8 Hero for the Ryzen 5000 test, the ASUS ROG Maximus Z590 Hero for the 11th Gen Intel test, the ASUS ROG Z690 Maximus Hero for the 12th Gen test, and the Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Master for the 13th Gen Test the genetic test; all of these are high-end boards for their respective platforms. DDR4 motherboards use G.Skill 3600MT/s CL16 memory, which is the best choice for DDR4, while DDR5 motherboards use DDR5-6000 CL30, as mentioned earlier.
Before we get into the gaming benchmarks that make up pages two through five, let’s set up some quick content creation benchmark scenarios: Cinebench R20 3D rendering and Handbrake video transcoding.
As expected, the 7950X is the one to watch when it comes to content creation, achieving record-high scores on the Handbrake h.264 and h.265 (HEVC) transcoding tests — albeit just ahead of the Core i9 13900K’s The difference is relatively small, less than 1% in h.264 and about 10% in h.265. In the Cinebench test, the historical advantage of AMD’s Ryzen design, it’s the 13900K that holds the top spot with about a 5% margin, but the 7950X is still significantly faster than the 5950X (by about 46%), which is an impressive generation boost.
The 7700X also shows a clear improvement over the 5800X, AMD’s first octa-core design in the Zen 3 generation. Here, both the single-threaded and multi-threaded scores tested in Cinebench increased by just under 30%, which should be a huge boost to gaming performance. Handbrake performance is also boosted by a similar amount, although the previous generation 5950X still offers better overall performance due to its higher core and thread counts – and this older CPU is now less expensive than the 7700X, making it an excellent choice for content creation Better choice, if not a gamble.
| Expo R20 1T | CBRE R20 Metric Ton | Harvard h.264 | High-quality HEVC | HEVC power usage | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 9 7950X | 798 | 14837 | 105.15 frames per second | 45.10fps | 368W |
| Ryzen 9 7900X | 791 | 11324 | 79.38 frames per second | 33.77 frames per second | 288W |
| Ryzen 7 7700X | 768 | 7894 | 56.69 frames per second | 25.95 frames per second | 266W |
| Ryzen 5 7600X | 750 | 6063 | 44.35 frames per second | 20.28 frames per second | 236W |
| Ryzen 9 5950X | 637 | 10165 | 70.28 frames per second | 30.14 frames per second | 237W |
| Ryzen 7 5800X3D | 546 | 5746 | 42.71fps | 19.10fps | 221W |
| Ryzen 7 5800X | 596 | 6118 | 44.18 frames per second | 19.50fps | 229W |
| Ryzen 5 5600X | 601 | 4502 | 31.75 frames per second | 14.43 frames per second | 160W |
| Core i9 13900K | 873 | 15570 | 104.67 frames per second | 41.20fps | 473W |
| Core i5 13600K | 767 | 9267 | 62.37 frames per second | 26.44 frames per second | 254W |
| Core i9 12900K | 760 | 10416 | 70.82 frames per second | 29.26 frames per second | 373W |
| Core i7 12700K | 729 | 8683 | 57.64 frames per second | 25.67 frames per second | 318W |
| Core i5 12600K | 716 | 6598 | 44.27 frames per second | 19.99 frames per second | 223W |
| Core i5 12400F | 652 | 4736 | 31.77 frames per second | 14.70fps | 190W |
| Core i9 11900K | 588 | 5902 | 41.01 frames/second | 18.46 frames per second | 321W |
| Core i5 11600K | 541 | 4086 | 29.00 frames per second | 13.12 frames per second | 250W |
The power figures here are also worth a look. We’re just testing on the wall we do have different motherboards and RAM playing around but you can still see a trend towards higher wattage with newer CPUs the latest generation 5950X and the current 7600X are both around the same wattage (~236W) – while the 7950X jumps to 368W. That’s still significantly lower than the 13900K, which peaked at 473W during HEVC encoding, but scored slightly worse. So the new AM5 socket is certainly capable of delivering more power, but broadly speaking, AMD’s Zen 4 design still appears to be more energy-efficient than its closest Intel counterpart. This should reduce thermal issues a bit, and is certainly a relief in an era when GPU wattages are also climbing rapidly on flagship cards.
Now, let’s get into the fun stuff – games. We’ve tested a range of titles, so choose your favorite from the links below, or simply hit the next page button to continue the journey.
