The flagship 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X, which costs $699, and the entry-level six-core Ryzen 5 7600X, which costs $299, are the bookend models in the new Ryzen 7000 “Raphael” lineup. With performance that surpasses that of Intel in nearly every category, including gaming and applications, the Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X lead our list of the
AMD was caught off guard by Intel’s hybrid Alder Lake processors, which outperformed AMD in both performance and value at every price point. On the TSMC 5nm process, the Ryzen 7000 processors fire back with the new Zen 4 architecture, which AMD claims increases IPC by 13%. That combination results in phenomenal peak clock speeds of 5.7 GHz, an 800 MHz increase that sets a new AMD Ryzen family record. In addition, it has a clock speed that is unexpectedly higher than that of even Intel’s fastest chips, at least until the company releases its 6 GHz Raptor Lake chips.
AMD’s process and architecture advancements result in truly explosive performance gains when combined with a new platform’s vastly improved power delivery. On motherboards of the 600-series, AMD’s new chips fit into the brand-new AM5 socket, which the company has pledged to support until 2025. In addition, the new platform fully complies with Intel’s connectivity options by offering support for the most recent interfaces, such as DDR5 and PCIe 5.0. To compete with Intel’s XMP standard, AMD has even created its own EXPO DDR5 memory profiles for overclocking. Additionally, the Ryzen 7000 chips include support for AVX-512 and AI instructions as well as a brand-new Radeon RDNA 2 iGPU for basic display output.
The flagship Ryzen 9 7950X outperforms its predecessor by up to 15% in gaming, 21% in single-threaded work, and 45% in threaded work—setting a new standard for the highest-end mainstream chips—as a quick preview of our extensive tests on the following pages. In fact, the Threadripper Pro 5975WX, which costs $3,299, is only 17% faster in threaded work than the 7950X, but it costs almost six times as much. In addition, the Core i9-12900K is outperformed overall by the 7950X.
The Ryzen 5 7600X is just as impressive. It performs gaming up to 18% faster than its predecessor and gains of 25% and 34% in single-threaded and multi-threaded work, respectively, ushering in a new level of performance that is unmatched at the $300 price point.
In gaming, both chips outperform Intel’s flagship. Even though they are impressive, they are not perfect: The Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 series only supports expensive DDR5 memory at its entry-level price of $300 and does not include less expensive DDR4 options like Intel does. Due to the high overall platform costs, that muddles the value proposition. In addition, AMD increased power consumption significantly in order to improve performance. This unavoidably led to more heat and a system that used more power. However, you achieve greater performance per watt.
Despite Ryzen 7000’s convincing victory, Raptor Lake, the real rival, will not appear until next month. Despite this, Intel asserts that its own impressive performance gains—15 percent faster single-threaded, 41 percent faster threaded, and a 40 percent “overall” performance gain—mean that the desktop PC race will be close. Here is a comparison of the current chips in the interim. Check out our comprehensive boost, thermals, power, and IPC testing as well.)
As a reminder, the N5 TSMC 5nm process node for the core compute die (CCD) and the TSMC 6nm process for the I/O Die (IOD) are included in the Ryzen 7000 processors. In our Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 all we know article, you can see and learn more about this design.
This is how Ryzen 7000 compares to Intel’s existing Alder Lake chips and the data we have gathered about Intel’s Raptor Lake, which has yet to be fully announced. Keep in mind that the Raptor Lake specifications listed in the table above are not yet officially recognized.
The Ryzen 9 7950X, which has 16 cores and 32 threads, costs $100 less than the Ryzen 9 5950X at launch. AMD also kept the Ryzen 5 7600X’s entry-level price at $299, which is a high threshold for joining the Ryzen 7000 family. In contrast, Intel has stated that economic factors will cause it to raise the price of its chips. As a result, we won’t be able to evaluate the 7600X’s position until we see its official pricing.
With the Ryzen 7000 family, AMD focused on architectural and process node enhancements that increase performance per core rather than increasing core counts. In order to unleash even more performance, the company also worked to improve its power delivery, which we will discuss in a moment.
The $699 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X has a base frequency of 4.5 GHz and a boost frequency of 5.7 GHz. This boost frequency is the highest of the four initial Ryzen 7000 processors. In comparison to the models of the previous generation, the chip comes with 64 MB of L3 cache and 16 MB of L2 cache. The highest power consumption of any Ryzen chip to date is achieved by this one with a TDP rating of 170W and a maximum power draw of 230W. For the time being, the 7950X competes with Intel’s Core i9-12900K, but it will eventually compete with the Core i9-13900K, which has an additional eight efficiency cores for a total of 24 cores.
The base clock of the six-core Ryzen 5 7600X is 4.7 GHz, while the boost clock is 5.3 GHz. This chip has 32MB of L3 cache and 6MB of L2 cache—double that of its predecessor. A new Ryzen 5 record is set with the Ryzen 5 7600X’s 125W TDP and 181W peak power draw. For the time being, the 7600X will compete with the Core i5-12600K. However, the Core i9-13600K should arrive next month with four additional e-cores, giving it a total of 14 cores. We also have a review of the Ryzen 9 7900X, which has 24 threads and 12 cores.
