To say that AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series launched to a lukewarm reception would be like saying
the corruption in the South African government is barely even an inconvenience. High prices,
high temps, somewhat underwhelming performance, and a very steep price
of entry all made jumping ship to the new gen a bit of a hard sell.
But things changed a lot when AMD decided to chop off those Xs at the end of their chips. The non-X
Ryzen 7000-series chips (and the X3D versions) I think finally gave all of us more than a few valid
reasons to actually want to get in on the action. And that’s why in today’s video we’ll
be taking a look at what could very well be my favorite chip of the bunch, the Ryzen 9 7900.
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Now, if you’ve already watched my review of the 7900X, then there are no big surprises waiting for
you with the non-X. We’ve got the same 12 cores and 24 threads, the same cache layout, the same
native memory speed support, and almost everything else including the same built-in Radeon Graphics.
The differences between the two chips are mostly centered around clock speeds, TDP,
and the fact that the 7900 non-X ships with the surprisingly capable Wraith Prism cooler.
Clock speed-wise, the non-X part takes a big hit to base clock speed landing at 3.7GHz,
a full GHz lower than its X-adorned brother, but luckily when it comes to max boost clock,
the non-X lands at 5.4GHz, just 200MHz lower than its X counterpart. The lower clock speeds along
with a few other tweaks enable the 7900 non-X to barely sip power, being rated for a TDP of
just 65W, which seems like a drop in the bucket when compared to the 7900X’s ludicrous 170W.
Oh, and I know I’ve already mentioned that the 7900 comes with the Wraith Prism cooler,
but I think it’s worth mentioning again since if you already have a better cooler or an upgrade
in mind, you can sell the included one. And you’ll probably want to do that considering
that both chips have been spotted selling for around $420 blaze it at the time of filming.
And at that price it should be kind of easy to recommend the 7900X, right? I mean it’s faster
and you might already have a cooler, but I’m going to be the weird one here and not do that.
I think the 7900 might still be the better all-around pick. Not only can you more than
get away with a much less beefy cooling setup and can sell the included one to cut costs,
but you’ll also be pumping a lot less hot air into the rest of your case, making it ideal for
small form factor builds. And you can unlock it to go even faster, but we’ll get to that later.
But that’s only really going to be an attractive option if the 7900 is able to at least somewhat
keep pace with its X-blessed sibling, so you know what time it is. Benchmarks, assemble!
Now for testing, both new and old systems were equipped with MSI’s RX 6900 XT Gaming Trio Plus,
Antec’s Signature 1000W power supply, Cooler Master’s ML240 AIO,
and both were running Crucial’s P5 Plus as their main drives.
The 7900 system was built around MSI’s Pro X670-p motherboard along with a 32GB kit of
Geil’s monstrous EVO V DDR5 modules running at 6000MHz with CL34 timings, while the AM4 system
used an equally capable X570 board, and 32GB of Crucial’s Ballistix RGB running at 3600MHz, CL16.
Now, as the benchmarks start popping up, you’ll notice a stark lack of Intel chips in the mix,
and that’s not because Intel can’t compete - they absolutely can - it’s just that Intel
hasn’t sent me any of their chips in a while so I don’t have updated numbers for them.
Okay, let’s get into it. Starting as always with a couple of production
benchmarks with Cinebench R23 kicking us off. And as expected,
the two higher core count parts make absolute mincemeat of both the 3800XT and the 5800X3D,
and also unsurprisingly, the “X” in 7900X definitely seems to be doing its job.
Then, in the Blender benchmark, we see pretty much the same story play out again,
so nothing too interesting to see there.
Moving on to Pugetbench’s Photoshop and Premiere Pro benchmarks, uhm, yeah,
again nothing too interesting to see here, though keep in mind that if I was benchmarking with an
Nvidia card the numbers would’ve been a heck of a lot higher for all of the chips involved.
And to round us out is the 7-Zip benchmark where the 7900X takes
top honors again without even really trying all that hard.
Clearly, if you do end up paying more for an X attached to your 7900,
then you’ll be getting your money’s worth,
at least when it comes to productivity tasks. But what about gaming? Well, let’s find out.
In Unigine’s Superposition, it’s a pretty tight race for all of the chips except the poor 3800XT,
and surprisingly it’s the 7900 that walks away with the dub though by just a tiny margin.
In 3DMark’s TimeSpy, the universe corrects itself mighty quick with the 7900X walking
away with a pretty decisive victory over the rest of the chips in the stack,
but not exactly blowing the non-X chip entirely out of the water either.
Kicking off our real gaming benchmarks is Civilization 6,
where the 7900X just barely edges out its non-X brother.
In games like Spider-Man Remastered, Hitman 3, and The Riftbreaker, the regular 7900 does
falter when facing off with the X-variant by a notable margin, running slower by around 4.5
to 7.1%. And honestly, I kind of expected the difference between the two to be much higher
considering the 7900X drew as much as 186W at its peak, while the 7900 only went as high as 90W.
And those were the games that showed the biggest wins for the 7900X. In games like Shadow of the
Tomb Raider, Borderlands 3, God of War, Both Far Cry titles and F1 22, the 7900X’s lead over the
non-X dropped to between 1.4% and just under 3% in all of them. And meanwhile, the 5800X3D keeps
flexing its muscles by taking the win in more than a handful of games, even outpacing the 7900X.
And as for the rest of the stack including The Witcher 3, Horizon Zero Dawn, Assassin’s Creed:
Valhalla, and Cyberpunk, the max difference between the two 7900 boys landed at a max
of 1.3% or so of each other which is so close that I doubled my benchmark
runs and double checked the system to make sure something wasn’t going wrong.
With all of the numbers tallied up, the regular 7900 only lost to the 7900X by around 3%,
which goes without saying is pretty dang impressive for the non-X part,
and maybe a little embarrassing for the 7900X. It also probably
explains why the two chips are regularly seen selling for around the same price.
What makes things even more interesting is the fact that the race is already
so close before we’ve even set the 7900 loose with some overclocking.
Now because this isn’t an overclocking guide, I’m not going to go through all of my settings,
but if you do want to play around with it when you get your 7900, I recommend checking
out SkatterBencher’s video on the topic. All I will say is that I only overclocked
the chip’s PBO (or Precision Boost Overdrive) settings, and was able to boost its max single
and all-core frequencies by a couple of hundred megahertz, which got us some very decent results.
In Cinebench, the overclock boosted the chip’s all-core score by about 24%,
resulting in it taking the top spot from the 7900X, and even though we didn’t manage to do
the same when it came to single-core, we still saw a very healthy boost there too.
The same goes for the Blender benchmark,
where the overclock put the 7900 head to head with the 7900X in each of the scenes tested.
7-zip also saw some big gains coming from the overclock,
boosting our total score by just over 10% over our stock result.
In Time Spy, even though the overclock wasn’t quite enough to put the 7900 ahead of the 7900X,
it still gave us a much, much closer race.
As for real games though, unfortunately, we didn’t see as dramatic an uplift as we saw in
the synthetic and productivity benchmarks. There were gains to be had for sure, like in games like
Hitman 3 where we got a nice little 8% improvement to average FPS, putting it ahead of the 7900X,
but in most of the other games tested the results were a little underwhelming.
But underwhelming or not, those are still some worthwhile results, especially seeing
as production tasks seem to be a bit of a weak spot for the 7900, and the overclock basically
patches that spot. Of course, you can overclock the 7900X too, but in that case, the chip is on
the verge of redlining already, whereas the non-X should have a little more headroom.
Just keep in mind that removing the 7900’s reigns does come with some
drawbacks. During testing the overclock made the chip draw just under 180W,
double what it was drawing at stock settings, and that obviously meant
more heat too, with our max temp jumping from 63 all the way to a toasty 95 degrees.
So while there are some impressive gains to be had from overclocking this puppy,
it does pretty much eliminate two of the chip’s biggest benefits, unless you take the time to
dial in your OC settings to find a good balance between performance, power draw, and temperature.
So, where does all of this leave us then? Well, I think we’re in kind of a weird
spot. If it was as simple as: “The 7900 is basically the same as the 7900X but less
power-hungry and cheaper” then it’d be very easy to recommend going for the non-X part.
But AMD doesn’t seem all that interested in making any of this easy for us.
During the production of this video, I’ve seen the 7900X selling for cheaper than
the 7900 at least three different times, and at the time of filming,
that’s still the case with the 7900X landing at ten dollars cheaper.
With that pricing in mind, if you’re looking for a great chip for gaming and work applications,
and already have a good cooler lined up, then you should definitely be looking at the 7900X.
But when pricing does go back to normal, or you want a monster of a chip for your
new small form factor build, going with the 7900 starts making a lot more sense. Cheaper,
easier to manage, a lot more power under the hood if you want to try your hand at overclocking,
and with a really decent cooler included right in the box? Done deal.
And done video.
Remember to check out PCBuilder at Computer Mania to buy or build the rig of your dreams,
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And yeah, I’ll catch you all in the next one, cheers.