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Desktop PC Application Benchmarks on Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X — The TLDR:
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.
| Tom's Hardware | Multi-Thread | Single-Thread |
| $699 — Ryzen 9 7950X | 100% | 100% |
| $549 — Ryzen 9 7900X | 79.3% | 98.7% |
| $589 — Core i9-12900K | 69.4% | 99.6% |
| $409 — Core i7-12700K | 59.4% | 96% |
| $399 — Ryzen 7 7700X | 57.2% | 97.6% |
| $299 — Ryzen 5 7600X | 45.1% | 95.7% |
| $430 — Ryzen 7 5800X3D | 41.7% | 74.9% |
| $285 — Core i5-12600K | 46.2% | 94.5% |
Rendering Benchmarks on AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X
It was initially surprising to see Alder Lake’s hybrid architecture largely beat Ryzen in threaded workloads after AMD had dominated these types of benchmarks for years, but the Ryzen 9 7950X quashes that uprising — at least until Raptor Lake arrives.
For instance, the 7950X is 40% and 21% faster than the 12900K in the multi-threaded Cinebench and POV-Ray benchmarks, showing that Ryzen 9’s advantage isn’t small. We see an even bigger difference in the Blender renders, where the 7950X is from 55% to 63% faster than the 12900K, and overclocking the Intel chip isn’t enough to change the picture.
The 12900K fares better in single-threaded Cinebench but it still trails the 7950X slightly. The Zen 4 architecture shows great gains over the Zen 3 chips in the single-threaded POV-Ray benchmark, but Alder Lake maintains the lead — the 12900K is 14% faster than the 7950X.
Turning to the Core i5-12600K vs Ryzen 5 7600X battle, we see that Core i5 either matches or exceeds the 7600X in nearly every rendering benchmark, be it single- or multi-threaded. Aside from the LuxMark and POV-Ray benchmarks, most of the deltas between the two chips in threaded workloads aren’t overly large.
Encoding Benchmarks on AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X
Most encoders tend to be either heavily threaded or almost exclusively single-threaded, but Ryzen 7000 takes the lead in both types of applications.
The Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X take meaningful leads in the single-threaded LAME, WebP, and FLAC encoders. The 7950X also dominates the threaded HandBrake and SVT-AV1 benchmarks, but here we see the 7600X and the 12600K again locked in a tight battle that can go either way depending upon the benchmark.
Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop and Lightroom on AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X
We've integrated the UL Benchmarks Procyon tests into our suite to replace the aging PCMark 10. This new benchmark runs complex Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Lightroom workflows with the actual software, making for a great real-world test suite.
The Ryzen 7000 chips beat Alder Lake handily in Premiere Pro and the entire Lightroom and Photoshop benchmark, though the Ryzen 5 and Core i5 chips are more closely matched in the Lightroom batch processing sub-test.
Web Browsing, Office and Productivity on AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X
The ubiquitous web browser is one of the most frequently used applications. These latency-sensitive tests tend to be lightly threaded, so a fast response time is critical. Intel typically dominates these benchmarks, but Ryzen 7000 flips the tables and takes the lead in every browser test. The Application Start-up benchmark compares how long it takes to open various applications, thus serving as a great measure of system snappiness. Ryzen 7000 goes a long way to improving AMD’s performance here.
Compilation, Compression, AVX-512 Performance on AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X
This selection of tests runs the gamut from the exceedingly branchy code in the LLVM compilation workload to the massively parallel molecular dynamics simulation code in NAMD to encryption and compression/decompression performance.
Y-cruncher computes Pi with the AVX instruction set, making for an exceedingly demanding benchmark. We employed the latest version of y-cruncher that has added support for Zen 4, and here we can see the benefits of AVX-512 become apparent in the single-threaded benchmark. Spreading the workload out among the cores in the threaded portion of the y-cruncher test reduces the magnitude of the lead over Intel (per-core memory throughput and/or fabric throughput are likely barriers here), but both Ryzen 7000 chips take a tangible lead over Alder Lake. Even more importantly, we see that this represents a massive generational increase over the Zen 3-equipped Ryzen 5000 chips.
We’re accustomed to Ryzen displaying bipolar performance in compression/decompression workloads, with decompression being a strength while compression suffered compared to other chips. The Zen 4 architecture makes big strides here, delivering incredible performance in both workloads with the Ryzen 9 7950X. Understandably, the gains aren’t as large with the 7600X, but we still see a much more balanced performance profile than we’ve seen with prior-gen Ryzen chips.
The Ryzen 9 7950X takes a pronounced lead over the Core i9-12900K in the NAMD benchmark, but the Ryzen 5 7600X can’t keep pace with the 12600K. We see that same trend play out in the LLVM Compilation benchmark, which bodes well for the 7950X as we head into our suite of professional benchmarks.
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