AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D review: An unbeatable value gaming CPU

You shouldn’t expect much on the application front with the Ryzen 5 7600X3D. It offers decent performance for a CPU in this price bracket, and it doesn’t suffer major penalties compared to the Ryzen 5 7600X, due to its inclusion of 3D V-Cache. The fact remains, however, that this is a six-core chip that’s downclocked compared to the base version, and it’s a generation behind where AMD is at right now.

In multithreaded performance, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D manages to marginally outperform Intel’s Core i5-14400, and falls short of the base Ryzen 5 7600X by about 8%. Compared to the newer Ryzen 5 9600X, it’s behind by 16% in that chip’s default 65W TDP mode and by 20% at the 105W TDP. Even the Core Ultra 5 225, which is probably the weakest current-gen CPU available, is around 5% faster.

For applications, the threat to the Ryzen 5 7600X3D aren’t these chips near the bottom of the chart. It's the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus that easily tops the multithreaded rankings in our test pool. Intel’s latest CPU is ahead by a remarkable 114%, doubling the application performance of the Ryzen 5 7600X3D with room to spare.

Particularly among Zen 3 and Zen 4 X3D chips, application performance takes a backseat, which is an issue that’s only compounded by the fact that these chips have locked multipliers and can’t be manually overclocked. The issue with the Ryzen 5 7600X3D is that the Ryzen 5 7600X is already on the weaker end for productivity performance. Add the X3D penalty on top, and you’re left with a chip that’s nowhere near the other options in its price bracket.

The situation is worse in single-threaded performance, with the Ryzen 5 7600X3D posting the lowest average result in our geomean. The limited boost clocks really show up here. While most chips in our test pool are within a few points of each other, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D can’t even surpass the lowly Core i5-14400.

Productivity performance is not good here, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise to most Tom’s Hardware readers. We’re going to quickly run through our individual benchmarks for completion’s sake, but this is really only a CPU you should consider if you’re squarely focused on gaming. If you want gaming and productivity performance in equal strides, something like the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is a better option.

Rendering Benchmarks

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Our rendering tests largely mirror what we can see in the geomeans above, with the Ryzen 5 7600X3D taking the bottom slot in Cinebench 2024 single-core, POV-ray single- and multi-core, and Cinebench 2026 single-core. On the plus side, the margin between the Ryzen 5 7600X3D and its non-X3D counterpart isn’t massive, and in some cases, the Zen 4 chips actually beat the newer Ryzen 5 9600X with its default 65W TDP.

In Blender, the Ryzen 5 7600X is between 4% and 8% ahead of the X3D version, depending on the scene. And in Embree, both CPUs managed to outpace the Ryzen 5 9600X with its 65W TDP with the same score (the Ryzen 5 9600X is able to achieve a higher score with its 105W TDP, however).

The big blue elephant in the room here, though, is obviously the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, which manages superior single-threaded performance compared to AMD’s Zen 5 competition, as well as running away with multithreaded performance.

Encoding Benchmarks

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Video encoding is heavily threaded, so it’s not surprising to see the Ryzen 5 7600X3D struggle to keep pace with higher-clocked, eight-core chips, not to mention the competition from Intel, with far higher core counts that are tailor-made for workloads like this. Here, once again, we see the Ryzen 5 7600X and its X3D counterpart outclass the Ryzen 5 9600X with a 65W TDP, which is a positive result.

The chip did particularly well in our FLAC encoding test, which is lightly threaded, completing the workload just a touch faster than the Core i5-14600K, and finishing more than two seconds faster than both the Core i5-13600K and Core i5-14400. The competition is much fiercer between the Ryzen 7 9700X, particularly in its 105W TDP mode, and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus near the top of the pile.

Creator App Benchmarks

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All-out workloads like rendering and encoding exaggerate the differences between CPUs, and they’re a good indicator of performance when a chip is pushed to its limits. In broader applications like the Adobe suite, you’ll push rendering and encoding workloads, but these apps ground that performance in a broader application that can stress your CPU in various ways.

The Ryzen 5 7600X3D is still near the bottom of our rankings, but the margins are tighter. Photoshop favors AMD CPUs, and you can see the Ryzen 5 7600X3D matching the Core i5-14600K and falling 5.7% short of the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus. Although the margins are thinner, they’re still present. In DaVinci Resolve, for instance, the base Ryzen 5 7600X offered a 4.8% bump over its X3D counterpart, and the Ryzen 5 9600X boosted performance by around 6% and 9% in its 65W and 105W TDP, respectively.

Web and Office Benchmarks

In basic productivity apps, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D is passable, though newer Zen 5 and Arrow Lake chips take the performance cake. In Microsoft Office via Procyon, the 7600X3D is able to match the Core i5-13600K in Excel, but it’s beaten by 10% by the base Ryzen 5 7600X, and by nearly 26% by the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus.

In WebXPRT4, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D ranked second from the bottom in our test pool when looking at overall HTML and JavaScript performance in the browser. The Ryzen 5 9600X and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus both offer around a 19% jump. Perhaps the most concerning result here is PCMark’s application start-up test, where the Ryzen 5 7600X3D fell 12% short of the base Ryzen 5 7600X and nearly 20% below the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus.

Chess Engines, Compilation, Compression, AVX, and Other Benchmarks

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Rounding out our benchmarks is a range of tests covering everything from chess engines to data science workloads. Although the overall narrative about the Ryzen 5 7600X3D’s application performance remains unchanged, there are some select workloads where the additional L3 cache comes in handy, particularly in data science.

Primesieve, for example, is very intensive on a CPU’s cache by generating prime numbers, and we can actually see the Ryzen 5 7600X3D marginally outperform the base Ryzen 5 7600X due to its extra-large cache pool. In DaCapo, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D is also marginally faster than the base Ryzen 5 7600X with the tradebeans workload, which simulates a financial workload with simulated stock traders.

Still, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D is at the bottom of the stack in most of these benchmarks, often beating the Ryzen 5 9600X with its 65W TDP before taking a distant backseat with that chip’s 105W mode.

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