AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X Review: A Return to Gaming Dominance

Boost Frequencies, Power, and Thermals

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As part of our normal test regimen, we tested performance in lightly-threaded work to record the peak boost speeds and thermals. We ran through our standard series of lightly-threaded tests (LAME, PCMark10, Geekbench, VRMark, and single-threaded Cinebench).

As with the previous-gen chips, some Ryzen 7000 chips can boost above their rated speeds if they have sufficient cooling and power. As always, the silicon lottery could apply. The Ryzen 9 7950X regularly peaked at 5.85 GHz, above the rated 5.7 GHz, showing that AMD is again being conservative with its peak boost clock estimates. The Ryzen 5 7600X also exceeded its spec with a solid 5.5 GHz.

We also ran through a spate of standard heavily threaded applications (Cinebench, HandBrake, POV-Ray, Blender, AVX-heavy y-cruncher) to measure power and thermals. We used a Corsair H115i 280mm AIO with the fans cranked to 100% to keep the chip as cool as possible during this test run.

The 7950X hovered around 5.2 GHz through some workloads but dropped to 5.0 GHz when all cores were fully loaded. Peak power consumption reached 231W, which naturally generates quite a bit of heat. The 7950X regularly hit 95C during the test run, which AMD assures us is expected behavior - the chip is designed to consume all available thermal headroom to provide faster performance. The 95C thermal threshold is within safe operating limits, so it won’t result in degradation. 

It’s often forgotten, but the Ryzen 5000 processors also operate in a similar fashion - 95C is a normal operating condition, which we wrote about in our original Ryzen 5000 reviews. By design, Intel’s latest chips also often run at 100C for extended periods. Both vendors are locked in intense competition for performance leadership, so we can expect this trend to continue. 

As a result of these aggressive tactics, more powerful coolers can often extract even more performance. We conducted an experiment to see if the 280mm AIO cooler resulted in constrained performance by employing our 720mm custom loop to test the Ryzen 9 7950X at both stock and PBO settings. As you can see in the slide, we received the same performance with the custom loop in our multi-threaded test suite as we did with our 280mm AIO, so its safe to say a 280mm is sufficient - at least if you're willing to live with the fans running at 100% during heavy work.

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