Two years ago, AMD took the gaming performance crown with Ryzen 5,000 but that was two years ago. And since then Intel has changed their position from punching bag to punching down. But AMD promised us big gains today. Even going as far as to say that their entry level Ryzen 5 7600X will outperform Intel's core I9 12900 K in gaming at just half the price. So then what's with the title of this video? Well, let's put it this way. Now that I have the data back from our labs team, it's clear that while AMD's spin on the story here is technically true. Coming at us with the launch of Ryzen 7000 is a host of changes, starting with AMD switch to a brand-new land grid array, or LGA socket. Hooray! Say goodbye to the fear of bent pins on your expensive CPU and hello to the fear of bent pins on your expensive motherboard. They've also made the switch to DDR five though unlike Intel's 12th gen, there will be no DDR4 support to help ease the transition. And now everything is in APU. That's right. Integrated graphics are no longer restricted to a select few team read SKU's and now come standard with all the new chips for testing today. About those tests. Thanks to the extra horsepower afforded to us by our labs team. This will be one of our most thorough CPU reviews, ever. Data nerds, rejoice, and as for everyone else do stick around. There's a lot of cool stuff to learn. Enough preamble though let's get to the numbers. While Intel has long held the gaming crown, thanks in no small part to 12th gen's wild five gigahertz plus clock speeds. AMD has responded in kind every chip top to bottom got a nearly one gigahertz bump to both base and boost clocks with single core boost on the 7950X reaching an eye watering 5.7 gigahertz. Additionally, they have doubled their level two cache to one megabyte per core and AMD showed us just how impactful large caches can be even without other architectural changes. Except we did get architectural changes.
Ryzen 7000 marks the debut of AMD's all new Zen four core architecture built on TSMC's cutting edge five nanometer finlet process and boasts a 13% increase in instructions per clock or IPC. And this is immediately apparent in our first gaming test where we see the Ryzen 7950X rip out the gate with an 11% increase in average FPSs over AMD's previous flagship in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. That is impressive, but the real gains are in the minimums where we see a whopping 30% improvement. That means functionally no stutter when you are playing this game. Adding insult to injury for team blue, every single new Ryzen chip won in average frame rates over the 12900KS. Wow, but AMD does have a problem here. It's called AMD. And we see a similar story in F1 2022 where these new Ryzen 7000 chips are huddled together at or around the performance of the 12900KS yet still get beat by their own last gen cousin the 5800X3D. In the great equalizer that is flight simulator, We see the scores all get closer with the new lot beating all of last gen except the 5800X3D who soars above the competition and the same goes for Overwatch but there are some exceptions. In CS GO, AMD's redlined 7000 series does dominate all, but the 12900KS which seeks out a small win. And in Hitman 3 we see the new chips just barely squeak past the 5800X3D. That's a lot of numbers. So let's summarize compared to Intel's flagship 12900KS the 7950X manages a small but measurable 5% lead in gaming. That's pretty good, but more impressively, the 7600X, the very bottom tier is just 3% shy of a CPU that retails for nearly two and a half times the price. As for the 7,700X, well, it ends up in a somewhat awkward position. On the one hand, it is cheaper than the 5800X3D, but on the other hand, last generation AM four motherboards and DDR4 memory are affordable and plentiful. So, you'll be spending an awful lot more on the accompanying components to get worse performance almost across the board. And awkwardly the same thing can also be said for Intel's 12 gen mainstream chips which get the benefit of using DDR4 if you want to save a buck. Fortunately, when it comes to productivity, these new chips slay. Look at this display of sheer dominance in Cinebench. Not only do all the new chips, nearly match the 12900KS in the single threaded test, but good gravy, these multi multi-threaded numbers. A nearly 40% increase over last gen Ryzen and Intel's latest and greatest. And the rendering smack down continues in Blender where we see similarly large generational leaps. However, while Intel might be getting bullied on the high end, where they rely on weaker E or efficiency cores to pad out their numbers, the 12700K and 12600K end up trading blows with these next gen AMD counterparts. And we see the same thing in V-Ray, where AMD does live up to their promises, but doesn't really impress at the price points that most users can afford.
Our Chromium Compile test will have managers rejoicing and developers crying as their compile time coffee breaks fall to as short as just 38 minutes. In 7Zip the 7000 series extends AMDs already commanding lead in data compression and in our single thread sensitive FLAC Encode all, but the weakest of AMD's new generation wipes the floor with the rest of the competition. And what about AVX-512 performance AMD felt compelled to bring this up, so I guess we'll talk about it. In Y-cruncher the 512-bit extension allows AMD to calculate PI to 5 billion digits, 30 seconds faster than the 12900KS and over 75 seconds faster than the previous 5950X. Why calculate PI to 5 billion digits? I guess, for nice circles. No, in all seriousness though, AVX-512 mostly doesn't affect desktop users much but when it does like for PS3 emulation it can make a big difference. We can see that Ryzen is a rendering powerhouse but what's impressive is the substantial leap in encoding performance and Handbrake over all previous gen CPUs. Guys, this is not hardware accelerated. This is pure software encoding where those front end and branch prediction enhancements are paying off for AMD big time in product development and life sciences, while the pricier AMD chips fare well, the mainstream 7700X and 7600X are bested by Intel, which is becoming a bit of a troubling pattern. As for financial services though, well that's AMD's game and they win over their team blue counterparts every single time with energy and general operations ending up a little closer. So, things are looking pretty good by this point, but don't worry, I am going to explain the title. First up these performance enhancements do not come for free and the price will be paying besides cash is counted in watts. Every Ryzen 7000 saw a significant bump in TDP over its 5000 series counterparts. So gone are the delightful 65-watt power targets of their mainstream chips, which have now been bumped to 105 Watts and the 7900X and 7950X leap from 105 Watts to 170, which obviously influences thermals. Using Prime 95's throughput benchmark, we can see AMD's careful thermal management in action here. Watch the behavior's of the 7700X. During high load periods we see temperature spikes up to 95 degrees with clock speeds, dialing back accordingly. Then once our sustained load hits, we settle in at around 5.1 gigahertz average across all cores. That is well above AMD's advertised base clocks which is both a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, AMD has really dialed in their throttling behavior's to help you get the most out of your new rig. But on the other hand, if you, or the manufacturer of your computer skimp on the cooling, you could end up with significantly lower performance than you might expect. For those of you who are worried about AMD's 95-degree target here, by the way, my gut feeling is that it's probably okay, even if it makes me uncomfortable. Cause here's the thing, if you opt for a manual overclock instead of using performance boost overdrive which is what targets that 95 degrees these 7000 series chips will allow you to target as high as 115 degrees Celsius. Isn't it hot in here? Is it just me? Anyway, Prime 95 is a worst-case scenario and our 105 Watts 7700X flattened out at just 63 degrees after 10 minutes of F1 2022 with all cores pegged to their highest boost rates.
Not too shabby, looks like our
NHD15 is happily overkill for at least gaming loads unless you plan to upgrade
to a 170-watt chip like the 7900X which hits 70 degrees in our air-conditioned
room. Digging into power consumption, we find that as has become customary in
the tech industry the TDP's on the tin are more like pirate code guidelines. Do
you want to enable precision boost overdrive and blow past the hundred 70-watt targets?
Like this 7950X that's sitting 190 watts in Prime 95 or are you the kind of
person who drives exactly the speed limit to maximize your fuel economy? I
think I know what kind you guys are. And to be clear, even with the auto
overclocking hacks that drive up power consumption AMD's chips are hitting much
higher clock speeds on much lower power budgets than the 12900KS. And even the
top tier 7950X peaked at 208 watts leaving a solid 22 watts of headroom for
some manual overclocking before you'll hit the rated power delivery limit of
socket AM five. Perhaps my favorited upgrade though is the integrated GPU. Like
yeah, most gamers are not goanna use them day to day, but they are super nice
to have, even if the ones in these chips are not that exciting. Ryzen 7000 APUs
or wait, are we just calling them all CPUs now? AMD? No? APUs have better
onboard graphics. Okay. Well, whatever they are, CPUs or APUs they have the
same old, RDNA two graphics which does still unlock some cool tricks like
hardware and code and decode and the ability to build a capable little rig without
a discrete GPU or limp along while your GPU's being RMAed or whatever else. Just,
you got to keep your expectations in check. We're talking eSports at 1080p, 45
to 50 FPS, maybe 60 if you're willing to drop down image quality a little which
looks great. I mean, yeah, you need a new motherboard and DDR five is literally
twice the price of DDR4, but Linus, you might say the platform is an investment
and AMD says they're going to support it beyond 2025. Well, yeah but this is
where things start to get a little complicated. First, don't purchase a promise.
AMD certainly has a better track record than Intel for supporting multiple
generations of CPUs on their motherboards. But they've also broken these
promises before too like with socket sTRX 40 and it's possible they'll do it
again. Also, I think it's fair to say that a big portion of our audience,
that's you, are gamers. And if you're a gamer, Zen4and DDR5 and PCIE gen five
might dazzle you. But what really matters is frames per second and Ryzen 7000
hasn't really given us a clear reason to upgrade over a 5800X3D. Unless, you
know you're looking to the 12 and the 16 core chips because maybe your gaming
rig is also your workstation? The last big wild card here is Intel's impending 13th
gen Raptor Lake launch. AMD's mainstream Ryzen five and Ryzen seven fail to
stand out in the same way that the top tier chips do today. And if Intel
manages even a modest five to 10% generational uplift, and it's rumored to be
substantially higher, AMD could find themselves scrambling to bring out a mid-generation
refresh with maybe the same 3DV cache that turbocharged to the 5800X3D.