AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 Specs, Release Date, Benchmarks, Price Listings
The five fives: DDR5, PCIe 5.0, 5nm, AM5, and 5.7 GHz
As you can see in our Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X review, AMD has released its first four new Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 series "Raphael" processors. We've collected all of the most relevant performance benchmarks and info into this article to give you a broader view. The Zen 4 lineup touts the 16-core $699 Ryzen 9 7950X flagship, which AMD claims is the fastest CPU in the world, to the six-core $299 Ryzen 5 7600X, the lowest bar of entry to the first family of Zen 4 processors. According to our benchmarks, these chips deliver competitive performance, and that's a needed return to form.
AMD's previous-gen Ryzen 5000 processors accomplished what was once thought impossible: The chips unseated Intel's best in every CPU benchmark, including taking the top of our list of best CPUs for gaming, as the company outclassed Intel's Rocket Lake in every regard.
But then Alder Lake happened. Intel's new hybrid x86 architecture, featuring a blend of big and powerful cores mixed in with small efficiency cores, pushed the company into the lead in all facets of raw performance and even helped reduce its glaring deficiencies in the power consumption department. But, perhaps most importantly, Alder Lake started a full-on price war with Intel's new bare-knuckle approach to pricing, particularly in the mid-range that serves as gamer country.
Row 0 - Cell 0 | Price | Cores / Threads (P+E) | Base / Boost Clock (GHz) | Cache (L2+L3) | TDP / Max | Memory |
Ryzen 9 7950X | $699 | 16 / 32 | 4.5 / 5.7 | 80MB | 170W / 230W | DDR5-5200 |
Ryzen 9 7900X | $549 | 12 / 24 | 4.7 / 5.6 | 76MB | 170W / 230W | DDR5-5200 |
Ryzen 7 7700X | $399 | 8 / 16 | 4.5 / 5.4 | 40MB | 105W / 142W | DDR5-5200 |
Ryzen 5 7600X | $299 | 6 / 12 | 4.7 / 5.3 | 38MB | 105W / 142W | DDR5-5200 |
But AMD isn't standing still, and its Ryzen 7000 chips have taken the race for performance leadership to the next level. Ryzen 7000's frequencies stretch up to 5.7 GHz - an impressive 800 MHz improvement over the prior generation – paired with an up to 13% improvement in IPC from the new Zen 4 microarchitecture. The chips also come loaded with new tech, like a new integrated Radeon RDNA 2 graphics engine and support AI instructions based on AVX-512.
Here's a quick preview of how the Zen 4 chips stack up to Intel's Alder Lake, based on our own more extensive tests that you'll see below. Going head-to-head with Intel’s Core i9-12900K in 1080p gaming, the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X is 5% faster. In threaded applications, the 7950X is a whopping 44% faster than the Core i9-12900K, and the two chips effectively tie in single-threaded benchmarks.
The Zen 4 Ryzen 5 7600X is equally impressive, being 12% faster than the $289 Core i5-12600K in 1080p gaming, with the lead narrowing to 6% after overclocking both chips. More impressively, the stock 7600X is 4% faster than Intel’s flagship Core i9-12900K in gaming, bringing a new level of value to the $300 price point — with the caveat that you’ll have to deal with higher platform costs.
Both chips beat Intel’s flagship in gaming. However, as impressive as they are, they aren’t perfect: The Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 series has a high $300 entry-level price point and only supports pricey DDR5 memory instead of including less-expensive DDR4 options like Intel. That muddies the value proposition due to the expensive overall platform costs. AMD also dialed up power consumption drastically to boost performance, inevitably resulting in more heat and a more power-hungry system. You do end up with more performance-per-watt, though.
Ryzen 7000 takes the lead in convincing fashion, but its real competitor, Raptor Lake, doesn’t come until next month. Nevertheless, Intel claims its own impressive performance gains of 15% faster single-threaded, 41% faster threaded, and a 40% ‘overall’ performance gain, meaning we’ll see a close battle for desktop PC leadership.
The first four standard desktop PC chips are now available at retail, but the company will also launch at least one 3D V-Cache model by the end of the year. Intel has its Raptor Lake processors poised on the starting blocks, ensuring that AMD's Ryzen 7000 will have stiff competition when it arrives on October 20. We've gathered all of the information we know into this article.
AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 Series at a Glance
- Codename Raphael, first four models launched on September 27
- Up to 16 cores and 32 threads on TSMC 5nm process (N5 used for compute die)
- 5.7 GHz peak clock speed
- Ryzen 9 7950X, Ryzen 9 7900X, Ryzen 7 7700X, and Ryzen 5 7600X at launch
- 6nm I/O die, DDR5 memory controllers, PCIe 5.0 interface
- DDR5 only (no DDR4 support), up to 125% more memory bandwidth per core
- RDNA 2 integrated GPU (present on IOD, very basic and low power)
- Zen 4 architecture has a 13% IPC gain
- AM5 Socket LGA 1718, backward compatible with AM4 coolers
- 600-Series Chipset: X670E Extreme, X670, B650E Extreme, and B650 Motherboards
- up to 170W TDP, 230W peak power
- Support for AVX-512, VNNI
- At least one 3D V-Cache Zen 4 model will come to market this year
AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 Release Date
The first four Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 processors arrived on September 27, 2022, accompanied by the high-end X670 and X670E chipsets, while the B650E and the B650 chipsets will arrive in October. New EXPO (EXtended Profiles for Overclocking) DDR5 memory kits are also available, but PCIe 5.0 SSDs will come to market in October.
The Ryzen 7000 chips will mark just the first step of the Zen 4 journey as the company delivers on its CPU roadmap and brings them to the desktop and notebook markets. AMD will also use the Zen 4 architecture for its data center CPU roadmap.
AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 Specifications and Features
The Ryzen 7000 processors come with the N5 TSMC 5nm process node for the core compute die (CCD) and use the TSMC 6nm process for the I/O Die (IOD). We have a deeper breakdown of the architecture further below. The chips will drop into Socket AM5 motherboards.
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Row 0 - Cell 0 | Price | Cores / Threads (P+E) | Base / Boost Clock (GHz) | Cache (L2/L3) | TDP / PBP / MTP | Memory |
Ryzen 9 7950X | $699 | 16 / 32 | 4.5 / 5.7 | 80MB (16+64) | 170W / 230W | DDR5-5200 |
Ryzen 9 5950X | $546 ($799) | 16 / 32 | 3.4 / 4.9 | 74MB (8+64) | 105W | DDR4-3200 |
Ryzen 9 7900X | $549 | 12 / 24 | 4.7 / 5.6 | 76MB (12+64) | 170W / 230W | DDR5-5200 |
Ryzen 9 5900X | $398 ($549) | 12 / 24 | 3.7 / 4.8 | 70MB (6+64) | 105W | DDR4-3200 |
Ryzen 7 7700X | $399 | 8 / 16 | 4.5 / 5.4 | 40MB (8+32) | 105W / ? | DDR5-5200 |
Ryzen 7 5700X | $268 ($299) | 8 / 16 | 4.6 | 36 (4+32) | 105W | DDR4-3200 |
Ryzen 5 7600X | $299 | 6 / 12 | 4.7 / 5.3 | 38MB (6+32) | 105W / ? | DDR5-5200 |
Ryzen 7 5600X | $199 ($299) | 6 / 12 | 3.7 / 4.6 | 35MB (3+32) | 65W | DDR4-3200 |
Here's the generational comparison with both the current retail pricing for AMD’s Ryzen 5000 chips and the original launch pricing in parenthesis.
Overall, we see the same core counts as the previous-gen models but 16% to 17% higher clock rates across the new range of Ryzen 7000 SKUs. In addition, the chips all have more L2 cache but the same L3 cache capacity.
The 16-core 32-thread Ryzen 9 7950X is $100 less than the original launch pricing of the Ryzen 9 5950X, while the 12-core 24-thread Ryzen 9 7900X has the same launch pricing as its predecessor, the 5900X.
However, AMD raised the launch pricing of the eight-core 16-thread Ryzen 7 7700X by $100 over the 5700X. AMD also kept the entry-level pricing at the same $299 with the Ryzen 5 7600X, but that isn’t a complete win – this same high entry-level pricing wasn’t well-received with the Ryzen 5000 family. There's no mention of a Ryzen 7 7800X to replace the outgoing 5800X. Perhaps AMD is leaving a spot for its V-Cache-enabled X3D model here.
Year / Processor | Peak Frequency | Frequency Gain | Process, Architecture |
2017 - Ryzen 7 1800X | 4.1 GHz | - | 14nm Zen 1 |
2018 - Ryzen 7 2700X | 4.3 GHz | +200 MHz / +5% | 12nm Zen+ |
2019 - Ryzen 9 3950X | 4.7 GHz | +400 MHz / +9% | 7nm Zen 2 |
2020 - Ryzen 9 5950X | 4.9 GHz | +200 MHz / +4% | 7nm Zen 3 |
2022 - Ryzen 9 7950X | 5.7 GHz | +800 MHz / +16% | 5nm Zen 4 |
As you can see, AMD has increased clock speeds across the breadth of its four new SKUs, a benefit of both the 5nm process and an architecture tuned for higher clock rates. For instance, the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X will have a 16% higher clock rate than the Ryzen 9 5950X, with its 5.7 GHz boost clock rate marking an incredible achievement for a 16-core chip — that's 800 MHz faster than its predecessor, setting a record as the largest frequency increase in the Ryzen era. The Ryzen 9 7900X is also impressive, with the 12-core chip also featuring an 800 MHz clock speed improvement.
As with all of AMD's latest chips, that will only occur on two cores: AMD has confirmed that Ryzen 7000 still features Precision Boost 2 to expose the maximum boost frequencies possible at all times. We also know that Intel's Raptor Lake will boost to 5.8 GHz, though, and perhaps higher.
AMD has also bumped up its TDP ratings, with a 65W increase in the base TDP for the Ryzen 9 models and a 45W increase for the Ryzen 5. The Ryzen 7 7700X doesn't see a TDP increase. Additionally, the peak power consumption (PPT) for the AM5 socket is now 230W. That's a significant increase over the previous-gen Ryzen 5000's 142W limit. We have a further breakdown of AMD's new TDP ranges in a section below.
AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 vs Intel 13th-Gen Raptor Lake
Row 0 - Cell 0 | Price | Cores / Threads (P+E) | P-Core Base / Boost Clock (GHz) | E-Core Base / Boost Clock (GHz) | Cache (L2/L3) | TDP / PBP / MTP | Memory |
Core i9-13900K / KF | $589 (K) - $564 (KF) | 24 / 32 (8+16) | 3.0 / 5.8 | 2.2 / 4.3 | 68MB (32+36) | 125W / 253W | DDR4-3200 / DDR5-5600 |
Ryzen 9 7950X | $699 | 16 / 32 | 4.5 / 5.7 | - | 80MB (16+64) | 170W / 230W | DDR5-5200 |
Core i9-12900K / KF | $589 (K) - $564 (KF) | 16 / 24 (8+8) | 3.2 / 5.2 | 2.4 / 3.9 | 44MB (14+30) | 125W / 241W | DDR4-3200 / DDR5-4800 |
Ryzen 9 7900X | $549 | 12 / 24 | 4.7 / 5.6 | - | 76MB (12+64) | 170W / 230W | DDR5-5200 |
Core i7-13700K / KF | $409 (K) - $384 (KF) | 16 / 24 (8+8) | 3.4 / 5.4 | 2.5 / 4.2 | 54MB (24+30) | 125W / 253W | DDR4-3200 / DDR5-5600 |
Core i7-12700K / KF | $409 (K) - $384 (KF) | 12 / 20 (8+4) | 3.6 / 5.0 | 2.7 / 3.8 | 37MB (12+25) | 125W / 190W | DDR4-3200 / DDR5-4800 |
Ryzen 7 7700X | $399 | 8 / 16 | 4.5 / 5.4 | - | 40MB (8+32) | 105W / 142W | DDR5-5200 |
Ryzen 5 7600X | $299 | 6 / 12 | 4.7 / 5.3 | - | 38MB (6+32) | 105W / 142W | DDR5-5200 |
Core i5-13600K / KF | $319 (K) - $294 (KF) | 14 / 20 (6+8) | 3.5 / 5.1 | 2.6 / 3.9 | 44MB (20+24) | 125W / 181W | DDR4-3200 / DDR5-5600 |
Core i5-12600K / KF | $289 (K) - $264 (KF) | 10 / 16 (6+4) | 3.7 / 4.9 | 2.8 / 3.6 | 29.5MB (9.5+20) | 125W / 150W | DDR4-3200 / DDR5-4800 |
Core i5-13400 / F | ? | 10 / 16 (6+4) | 3.4 / ? | ? | 24MB | 65W / ? | DDR4-3200 / DDR5-5600 |
Core i5-12400 / F | $199 - $167 (F) | 6 / 12 (4+0) | 4.4 / 2.5 | - | 25.5MB (7.5+18) | 65W / 117W | DDR4-3200 / DDR5-4800 |
This is how Ryzen 7000 stacks up against Intel’s existing Alder Lake chips, along with information that we’ve collected about Intel’s yet-to-be-announced Raptor Lake. Be aware that the Raptor Lake specifications in the above table are not yet official.
Intel’s Alder Lake Core i9-12900K is faster in most workloads than the current Ryzen flagship, but its next-gen 13900K adds in eight more E-Cores, which will deliver substantially more performance in heavily-threaded workloads. Intel has also sprinkled in four more e-cores for its 13700K and 13600K.
Intel has also brought E-cores to its value-centric 13400 SKU for the first time, which will make for a significantly more competitive chip on the lower end of the market where AMD isn't nearly as competitive. Again, pricing and performance are the wild cards, and Intel has yet to make any official announcements. However, it is clear that Intel will use a combination of higher clock speeds and more E-Cores to combat Ryzen 7000.
In many respects, this generation of chips finds the Zen 4 vs Intel Raptor Lake competition returning to an outright frequency war, with both chipmakers pushing their consumer chips to the highest clocks we've seen with their modern offerings. That also brings higher power consumption, and we also see higher TDP figures from both chipmakers as they turn up the frequency dial. Naturally, higher peak power figures will be more useful in threaded workloads, so we can expect more from each core with the Zen 4 processors.
AMD's Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 chips only support DDR5 memory, while Raptor Lake supports DDR4 and DDR5. That gives Intel a leg up in the overall system cost category, as DDR5 still commands a price premium. However, we no longer see DDR5 shortages, and prices continue to plummet as more supply comes online and demand recedes.
The Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 chips seem to have exceptional overclocking headroom, at least according to several early tests made available to the public. We've seen the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X set four world records with standard liquid cooling, beating out liquid nitrogen-cooled chips. If you want to go subzero, the chips also appear to have exceptional headroom when you go sub-ambient, with the chips hitting 7.2 GHz on a single core and 6.5 GHz on all cores with LN2.
AMD shared a block diagram of the standard Ryzen 7000 chip, and we took a close-up snip of a bare Ryzen 7000 chip during the company's Computex keynote. The chip houses two gold-colored 5nm core chiplets, each sporting eight cores. AMD says these are based on an optimized version of TSMC's high-performance 5nm process technology called N5, and they are placed much closer together than we've seen with previous Ryzen core chiplets. In addition, we see what appears to be a shim between the two core chiplets, likely to maintain an even surface atop the two dies. It is also possible that this close orientation is due to some type of advanced packaging interconnect between the two chips.
We can also see a clear outline around the top of each CCD, but we aren't sure if this is from a new metallization technique. We do know that the gold color is due to Backside Metallization (BSM), which includes an Au coating to prevent oxidation while improving TIM adhesion and lowering thermal impedance. We also see quite a few empty spots for capacitors, which is interesting and could imply heftier designs down the road.
The new I/O die uses the 6nm process and houses the PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 memory controllers along with a much-needed addition for AMD — the RDNA 2 graphics engine. The new 6nm I/O die also has a low-power architecture based on features pulled in from AMD's Ryzen 6000 chips, so it has enhanced low power management features and an expanded palette of low-power states. AMD says this chip now consumes around 20W, which is less than it did with Ryzen 5000, and will deliver the majority of the power savings we see in Ryzen 7000.
Surprisingly, the new I/O die appears to be roughly the same size as the previous-gen 12nm I/O die. However, given that the 6nm die is far denser than the 12nm die from GlobalFoundries, meaning it has far more transistors, it's safe to assume the integrated GPU has consumed a significant portion of the transistor budget (possibly due in part to onboard iGPU cache). The large 6nm I/O die will inevitably add to the cost of the chips, as it will be far more expensive than the mature 12nm I/O die that AMD used in the Ryzen 5000 chips.
AMD has officially confirmed that the Ryzen 7000 series chips will come with at least one model armed with the company's 3D V-Cache this year, enabling incredible L3 cache capacity through its innovative 3D-stacked SRAM tech that fuses an L3 chiplet on top of the compute cores. We've seen this technology give the Ryzen 7 5800X3D a total of 96MB of L3 cache, providing it with industry-leading gaming performance. We might have already seen signs of this — memory maker TeamGroup recently mentioned the Raphael-X processors in a press release. AMD hasn't divulged 'Raphael-X' as the official name of the 3D V-Cache Ryzen 7000 chips, but it does follow the same naming convention as the Milan-X server chips that have the same tech. It's certainly possible this is merely a mistake on TeamGroup's part, but speculation is intense that this will be the codename for the consumer Zen 4 3D V-Cache chips.
The stock memory frequencies for Ryzen 7000 weigh in at DDR5-5200, though the company has touted that it expects to have exceptional DDR5 overclockability. The new AMD EXPO (EXtended Profiles for Overclocking) tech is an alternative to Intel's XMP branding. Simply put, AMD will support pre-defined memory profiles with dialed-in memory frequencies, timings, and voltages to enable one-click memory overclocks. Several reports indicate that AMD will have 'high-bandwidth' and 'low-latency' EXPO profiles, which would likely denote the difference between coupled (1:1) and uncoupled (1:2) modes, just like Intel's Gear 1 and Gear 2 memory modes. That's a positive development, and it appears that you'll be able to dial in higher 1:1 memory overclocks — new BIOS revisions have support for a 3GHz fabric frequency, whereas that mostly topped out at 2 GHz with Ryzen 5000. However, these could just be pre-assigned settings that aren't attainable, so we'll have to wait for the chips to hit our labs.
AMD has said that DDR5-5600 memory is the 'sweet spot' for the Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 chips. We've seen several new kits, like TeamGroup's Vulcana modules, that are tuned for this speed.
The Ryzen 7000 chips support up to 24 lanes of the PCIe 5.0 interface directly from the socket (further details in the motherboard section). AMD is busy enabling the PCIe 5.0 SSD ecosystem with Phison, Micron, and Crucial. Crucial and Micron will have their first PCIe 5.0 SSDs and the constellation of third-party SSDs will also use Phison's E26 PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers, meaning we'll soon see wide availability of even speedier drives. That will come in handy for Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 systems — AMD claims a 60% performance gain in sequential read workloads with PCIe 5.0 SSDs. The first PCIe 5.0 SSDs come to market in October.
PCIe 5.0's sequential performance potential will be great for Microsoft's DirectStorage because it relies heavily upon read throughput to reduce game loading times to roughly a second. AMD also says Ryzen 7000 will support Smart Access Storage (SAS), which appears to be a slightly tweaked version of DirectStorage that's built on the same APIs. You can see more information about AMD's PCIe 5.0 SSD enablement here. Unfortunately, not all of the leading-edge PCIe 5.0 SSDs will fully utilize the bandwidth of the faster interface — Micron's leading-edge flash doesn't operate at full speed, constraining SSD performance, but that will be rectified early next year. We expect even faster models to arrive then.
On the security front, AMD's Ryzen 6000 'Rembrandt' processors arrived with support for Microsoft's Pluton, enabling more robust security to helps prevent physical attacks and encryption key theft while protecting against firmware attacks. Pluton originally debuted in the Xbox and AMD's EPYC data center processors and is complementary to AMD’s other security features, like AMD Secure Processor and Memory Guard, among others. AMD hasn't officially confirmed that Pluton is present in Ryzen 7000, but it is expected.
The Ryzen 7000 processors come with expanded instructions for AI acceleration through its support of AVX-512 instructions, which can be used for functions like VNNI for neural networks and BFLOAT16 for inference. AMD described its AVX-512 implementation as a 'double-pumped' execution of 256-bit wide instructions to defray the frequency penalties typically associated with Intel's processors when they execute AVX-512 workloads. This could result in lower throughput per clock than Intel's method, but the higher clocks will obviously offset at least some of the penalty. We'll have to wait to learn more about the new implementation.
That oddly places Intel's Alder and Raptor Lake chips at a disadvantage as they have disabled AVX-512 functionality due to the hybrid architecture. Software vendors are already preparing for the new functionality — benchmarking and monitoring tool AIDA64 recently added support for AVX-512 with Zen 4 processors, followed by y-cruncher support.
AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 Integrated Graphics
All Ryzen 7000 chips will support some form of graphics, so it doesn't appear there will be graphics-less options, like Intel's F-series, for now. The RDNA 2 engine resides on the IOD (I/O Die) and supports up to four display outputs, including DisplayPort 2 and HDMI 2.1 ports, and Ryzen 7000 has the same video (VCN) and display (DCN) engine as the Ryzen 6000 'Rembrandt" processors. Even though all Ryzen 7000 chips will have baked-in iGPUs, the company will still release Zen 4 APUs with beefier iGPUs. The company will also bring its Smart Shift ECO tech, which allows shifting the graphical work between the iGPU and a discrete GPU to save power, to the Ryzen 7000 models for the desktop PC.
AMD has tried to temper expectations for the integrated graphics engine, pointing out that the RDNA 2 graphics are only designed to 'light up' displays, cautioning that we shouldn't expect any meaningful gaming performance. The RDNA 2 iGPU comes with two compute units, 4 ACE, and 1 HWS, so that should be pretty apparent.
We tried a few games anyway, which you can see if you flip through the album above, and the results weren’t pretty. We couldn’t get Far Cry 6 to load, for instance, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider could render the benchmark at 1280x720 but wouldn’t run at 1080p. Much like Intel’s graphics, we were treated to a slideshow in the few games that did run. The bar charts don't do the poor results enough justice -- check out the frametime over time charts for perspective on just how badly the iGPU performs in gaming.
The integrated graphics do have appeal for troubleshooting and OEM systems, though, and it has a few other redeeming qualities. The iGPU supports AV1 and VP9 decode, H.264 and HVEC encode and decode, USB Type-C with DisplayPort Alt Mode, DisplayPort 2.0 (adaptive sync, DSC, UHBR10, HDR), and HDMI 2.1 (HFR, 48Gbps FRL, DSC, HDR10+, and VRR). You also get support for 4K60 and hybrid graphics.
AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 Benchmarks and Zen 4 IPC
Below you can see the geometric mean of our gaming tests at 1080p and 1440p, with each resolution split into its own chart. Be aware that a different mix of game titles could yield somewhat different results (particularly with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D), but this serves as a solid overall indicator of gaming performance. As usual, we're testing with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 to reduce GPU-imposed bottlenecks as much as possible, and differences between test subjects will shrink with lesser cards or higher resolutions. You'll find further game-by-game breakdowns below.
The $699 Ryzen 9 7950X takes second place in its stock configuration with a 5% lead over Intel’s fastest gaming chip, the Core i9-12900K. The 7950X is another ~2% faster after overclocking the cores and memory, essentially tying the overclocked 12900K. This marks a big generational improvement — the Ryzen 9 7950X is 17% faster than its prior-gen counterpart, the Zen 3-powered Ryzen 9 5950X, which also comes with 16 cores. However, Intel only needs to gain ~5% with Raptor Lake to match the 7950X in gaming, setting the stage for quite the competition next month.
The $299 Ryzen 5 7600X is 12% faster than the $289 Core i5-12600K, with the lead narrowing to 6% after overclocking both chips. More impressively, the stock 7600X is 4% faster than Intel’s flagship Core i9-12900K, bringing a new level of value to the $300 price point — with the caveat that you’ll have to deal with higher platform costs.
Notably, the 12900K is ~7% faster than the 7600X in our 1080p 99th percentile measurements, a good indicator of smoothness. The 7600X’s lead over the 12600K also drops to ~4%. However, we don’t see any egregious outliers in the 99th percentile measurements that would significantly alter our overall impressions of the rankings you see in the average fps chart.
The Ryzen 5 7600X also sports a big generational uplift of 18% over the Ryzen 5 5600X, which was once the darling of mid-range gaming builds. Raptor Lake looks enticing in the mid- and low-end price ranges from afar, but the 7600X will go a long way to shoring up AMD’s defenses. You can also tune the 7600X and eke out an extra ~3% of performance, but as always, gains will vary by title and by the quality of your chip.
The $300 Ryzen 5 7600X represents the entry-level for Zen 4, at least for now, but the Ryzen 9 7950X costs more than twice as much and is only 2% faster in gaming. That means the 76000X is an exceptional value for gaming, and as per usual with Ryzen 9 chips, the 7950X is really for those who need prosumer-class performance in applications.
AMD’s own $430 Ryzen 7 5800X3D remains the fastest gaming chip on the market by a fair margin, but this highly-specialized chip comes with caveats — its 3D V-Cache doesn't boost performance in all games. Additionally, the 5800X3D is optimized specifically for gaming, but it can't keep pace with similarly-priced chips in productivity applications. AMD will bring at least one Zen 4-powered Ryzen 7000 processor with 3D V-cache to market this year, so you might want to consider waiting a few more months if you’re after a specialized gaming chip of this ilk.
Naturally, the differences between the chips shrink when we switch over to 1440p and bring a GPU bottleneck into play, but the story remains largely similar, with scant differences between the chips at the top of the leaderboard. The competition between Intel and AMD is even closer now, so it's best to make an informed decision based on the types of titles you play frequently.
It should come as no surprise that the Ryzen 9 7950X absolutely dominates our cumulative measurement of multi-threaded performance, but the delta is impressive nonetheless. The 7950X is a whopping 44% faster than the Core i9-12900K, and overclocking does little to close the gulf between the chips. The 7950X is also 45% faster than the 5950X, living up to AMD’s performance claims.
For perspective, the beastly $3,299 Threadripper Pro 32-core Ryzen 9 5975WX is only 17% faster than the 7950X in this same cumulative measurement. However, it costs 5 times more, highlighting just how exceptional this amount of threaded horsepower is on a mainstream PC platform. This probably has something to do with AMD’s decision not to bring a Zen 3-powered HEDT platform to market.
That’s a tough act for the 7600X to follow, especially given that the Core i5-12600K is a few percentage points faster in threaded work. That comes on the strength of the 12600K’s e-cores, and overclocking extends the 12600K’s lead to 10%. In either case, the Ryzen 5 7600X still marks a solid generational improvement for Ryzen, as it is 34% faster than the prior-gen Ryzen 5 5600X.
Intel’s Alder Lake took a pronounced lead in single-threaded performance over the prior-gen Ryzen 5000 processors, but the Zen 4 architecture takes a big step forward, slightly edging out the price-comparable Alder Lake chips. In our cumulative measurement of single-threaded performance, the Ryzen 9 7950X and 7600X effectively tie the Core i9-12900K and 12600K, respectively, leveling the playing field.
You’ll notice that the overclocked configurations offer little to no benefit for the Ryzen processors, as expected, while both Intel processors actually lose some performance in this metric. It isn’t surprising to see the 12900K lose a tad — the all-core 5.1 GHz overclock is lower than its peak 5.2 GHz boosts on a single core — but the 12600K’s decline is a bit unexpected because the overclock matches its peak clock rate. After quite a bit of analysis and repeated testing, it appears that thread targeting isn’t working as effectively with the overclocked Intel configurations, resulting in quite a bit of thread migration during single-threaded tasks. We’re still troubleshooting this issue, but the results are repeatable so we’re including them.
You can find the benchmarks we used to generate these cumulative measurements in our Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X review.
Measuring IPC is tricky, largely because it varies based on the workload. AMD calculated its 13% IPC improvement from 22 different workloads, including gaming, which seems a curious addition due to possible graphics-imposed bottlenecks. AMD also included some multi-threaded workloads. AMD's results show that the IPC improvements vary, with improvements spanning from 39% in wPrime to a 1% improvement in the CPU-z benchmark.
We tested a limited subset of single-threaded workloads to see the clock-for-clock improvements, locking all chips to a static 3.8 GHz all-core clock with the memory dialed into the officially supported transfer rate. As you can see, Zen 4 does deliver solid IPC improvements in a multitude of workloads. The y-cruncher and Geekbench 5 crypto scores experience rather disproportionate gains, but that comes as a result of Zen 4’s support for AVX-512. However, as we saw in the single- and multi-threaded y-cruncher benchmarks, this performance doesn’t scale linearly to higher core loadings.
AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 Power Consumption
AMD worked with TSMC to tune the 5nm process for its design goals, resulting in a specialized 15-layer N5 process node. Unfortunately, we don’t know the specifics of the custom node. However, TSMC’s N5 generally provides 15% more performance at a given power level, or 20% lower power consumption at any given clock rate compared to the 7nm process that AMD used for its previous-gen Ryzen 5000 chips. Paired with the Zen 4 architectural advances and SoC improvements, AMD says Ryzen 7000 delivers up to 40% more performance-per-watt at its standard TDP levels.
Header Cell - Column 0 | 65W TDP | 105W TDP | 170W TDP |
---|---|---|---|
Socket Power (PPT) Watts | 88W | 142W | 230W |
Peak Current (EDC) Amps | 150A | 170A | 225A |
Sustained Current (TDC) Amps | 75A | 110A | 160A |
AMD has defined a new 170W TDP range, a new high for the mainstream Ryzen family. AMD has also increased the base TDP for the Ryzen 9 models by 65W and increased Ryzen 5 by 45W. Additionally, the peak power consumption (PPT) for the AM5 socket is now 230W. That's a significant increase over the previous-gen Ryzen 5000's 142W limit.
AMD also increased the TDC and EDC amperage significantly, raising EDC by 60A and 30A for the 65W and 105W TDP ranges, respectively. We see smaller 15A increases to the EDC for both the 65W and 105W TDP tiers.
AMD says that it improved the platform power interface from SVI2 to SVI3, allowing it to move from two variable power rails to three, thus enabling better control of the power delivery to the socket. The SVI3 interface provides continuous and more accurate telemetry for voltage, current, power, and temperature for multiple onboard voltage regulators, while SVI2 didn’t allow monitoring of power and temperature. SVI3 also enables enhanced power states that help save power, like phase shifting (shutting off phases when not needed).
Increasing the TDP and PPT will help AMD deliver more performance, particularly for its higher core-count models, during heavy multi-threaded workloads. In many cases, AMD's previous limit of 142W with the previous-gen AM4 socket held back performance, so the additional 88W of power will be particularly helpful with the newer 12- and 16-core models.
In addition, AMD has specified that it will use the standard TDP and PPT calculations for chips that drop into the AM5 socket — you can simply multiply the TDP by 1.35 to calculate the maximum power consumption of the chip (PPT).