Two years ago, AMD took the gaming performance crown from Intel with the Ryzen CPUs. But that was two YEARS ago, which is a lot in the PC component market. Since then, Intel and AMD have been in a constant back-and-forth dynamic in fighting to be the best! In the past two quarters, Intel has been ruling the market with its Intel core 12th gen CPUs, but now AMD is back. It promises massive gains and claims that even the entry-level Ryzen 7600X can outperform the Core i9 12900KS for half the price!
Although the manufacturing giant promises simulated results, which are “technically” true, the whole picture says something else, which we will expand on in the article below.
The New AMD Stuff
Probably one of the most noticeable changes that AMD has made is to its socket design. The new Ryzen 7000 series supports the LGA, or Land Grid Array, sockets. While Intel has been using it for quite some time now, AMD is finally launching its first lineup of LGA microprocessors with its brand new ‘AM5’ socket. The LGA socket is known for having pins on the motherboard socket instead of on the bottom of the CPU. So, say goodbye to the fear of bent pins on the back of your expensive CPU!
The company also went all out on memory specifications. With DDR 5 now established in the market, the CPU will only support DDR 5 memory modules, unlike Intel 12th gen Alder Lake CPUs that support both DDR 4 and DDR5 memory. In addition, the new Ryzen 7000 ‘Raphael Zen 4’ CPU lineup also features integrated graphics in all of the SKU. The integrated graphics, AMD Radeon, are tweaked down to enhance CPU performance, but they are now available in all Zen 4 CPUs, unlike the previous generation, where they were limited to some particular models called “APU,” or Accelerated Processing Unit.
About The Ryzen 7000 Series
The SKUs presented by AMD CEO Lisa Su include Ryzen 5 7600X, Ryzen 5 7700X, Ryzen 9 7900X, and Ryzen 5 7950X. The processors are said to provide double-digit gains over the competition and AMD’s previous instalments. To begin with, the CPUs are based on TSMC’s 5-nanometer finFET and have the higher base and boost clocks as well as higher TDP.
Ryzen 5 7600X
The Ryzen 5 7600X is an entry-level but extremely powerful processor with six cores and 12 threads. The processor is said to consume the power of around 105 watts, which is equivalent to the high-end Ryzen 5 5950X from the Zen 3 architecture, which is not good for budget builders. The processor is set to be released for the enthusiast segment with a base clock of 4.7 GHz and a boost clock of 5.3 GHz! Furthermore, unlike the previous Ryzen 5 CPUs, this one does not come with a stock cooler, which will be useless anyway. In addition to this, the processor has two graphics cores with AMD Radeon graphics that are capable of performing everyday tasks.
Ryzen 7 7700X
The Ryzen 7 7700X is also an enthusiast segment platform. The processor comes with 8 cores and 16 threads, which are the sweet spot for gaming, streaming, production work, etc. The Ryzen 7 7700X comes with a base clock of 4.5 GHz and a boost of 5.4 GHz. This Zen 4 CPU also comes with two graphics cores by AMD Radeon and supports DDR 5 memory out of the box.
Ryzen 9 7900X & 7950X
The Ryzen 9 lineup is where things get really heated, literally. Both of these processors come with a whopping 170 watts of TDP and an equivalent amount of power crammed into the chips. The 7900X comes with 12 cores and 24 threads, and the 7950X comes with 16 cores and 32 threads. At this point, it is nothing but a show-off! Both of the processors have a base clock of 4.5 GHz and a boost clock of 5.7 GHz. This is purely the level of power. If you are someone with no restrictions and budget, this is the absolute peak of the enthusiast segment.
The motherboards required for the new Ryzen 7000 series come from 3rd party vendors like Asus, MSI, As rock etc. The series supports the following chipsets: X670E, X670, B650E, and B650. The motherboards come with PCI-E Gen 5, DDR 5 memory slots, and heatsinks, which, to be honest, are absolutely required by these power-hungry CPUs. The company also claims that the CPU-safe temperatures can go up to 95 degrees!
Benchmarks
Testers and reviewers are done testing the Ryzen 7000 series, and this is what they have learned:
While the Intel 12th, with its unbelievable 5 GHz+ clock speeds, has been dominating, AMD responded in kind with a 1GHz bump in all the 7000 series processors! The new series features the TSMC 5nm finFET process and an incredible 13% Instructions per Cycle (IPC) increase over the last generation.
The tests showed incredible results, with the Ryzen 5 7600X topping all of the other last-gen processors, even the Ryzen 9 5950X, an Rs.80,000 processor. Adding to team blue’s fears, every processor showed massive gains over the flagship Core i9 12900 KS with almost no architectural changes at all! But the company has major competition. That’s “AMD” itself.
Although the 7000 series wiped out team blue and its own predecessors, it was defeated by its own 3DX series. The 3DX series has something called a 3D cache that is embedded directly in the CPU. The 5000 series 3DX processors show significant and noticeable improvements over the 7000 series, both in multi-thread and single-thread performance. We do hope that the 7000 series will also get a 3DX upgrade.
Talking about productivity, the 7000 series slays the competition and the previous instalments with a nearly 40% increase over the competition in multi-threaded performance. AMD dominates the high-end segment without an ounce of doubt. The midrange numbers remain somewhat balanced on both ends, with AMD sometimes falling behind the i5 and the i7 SKU from Intel.
Does AMD Ryzen 7000 Make Sense?
Although the 7000 series has lived up to expectations theoretically, the practicality of the series remains unclear. The chips are said to be released in the price segment of the 5000 series, which sounds good until you consider the price you’ll need to pay for a tower or a liquid cooler, an X series motherboard, and DDR 5 RAM, which is double the price of DDR 4.
These promises may look good on paper, but they are sure to turn your pockets inside out practically. The 7000 series may seem like an investment to many, but in the end, if you are a gamer, what matters is FPS, which you will get with the older generation CPUs like the 5800 3DX as well. Yes, the gains are high, but when we hover at 160+ FPS, the difference becomes unnoticeable.
If, however, you are looking at the top-tier 7900X and the 7950X for your workstation, which also acts as a gaming rig, the 7000 series is a good uplift. That is until Intel unveils its Raptor Lake processors, which are said to be a significant improvement over the previous 12th generation.
Edited by Prakriti Arora
