(lighthearted guitar music)
- [Linus] AMD played you all for suckers.
Played us all for suckers, really.
I mean, look at this.
They're releasing basically the same Ryzen 7000 CPUs,
but for way cheaper.
Not only that, but they run way cooler
and they draw way less power.
I wouldn't blame you for feeling pretty bad right now,
but don't feel bad.
This is exactly
the kind of sucker punch that we've gotta love
because it means the whole market
is moving in a less costly direction.
And it means that AMD is putting heavy pressure on Intel
in a way that we wish they would do to NVIDIA.
I mean, it's a good thing.
Same-ish CPUs, lower price,
which, mm
I mean, there's gotta be more to this, right?
What are we giving up in exchange?
And is it worth the buyer's remorse
that I know some of you are feeling right now?
Let's find out
right after I give you buyer's remorse
for not checking out our sponsor.
- Build Redux.
Build Redux makes it easy to configure your new build
with support guides to help along the way.
They also offer competitive pricing
as compared to building a PC yourself.
Head to buildredux.com/linus
and start your new build today.
(upbeat techno music)
- [Linus] Where the X labeled Ryzen 7000 chips
enjoyed TDP ratings of 170 and 105 watts,
taking the, uh, X away leaves us with
essentially the same CPUs
with the same core specs,
but at lower base clock speeds,
slightly lower boost clock speeds,
and a friendly 65 watt TDP,
with a stock socket power of just 88 watts.
The cache, thread counts,
and most importantly, overclocking support
are all identical.
And the accompanying 600 series platform
keeps all of its capabilities
no matter which CPU you plunk into it.
You're still getting TDR 5, PCI Express Gen 5,
and the same RDNA2 integrated graphics cores.
Although, as with the X series chips,
those two GPU compute units aren't gonna do much more
than light up your display
and handle hardware video encoding and decoding,
all of which sounds pretty good though.
What's the competition up to then?
Good question.
We couldn't help noticing that Intel has already
launched their non-K competitors to these chips.
We noticed when we read about it in the news.
And it looks like we weren't the only ones
who got completely blindsided by this launch.
As far as we can tell,
there aren't any proper reviews for these chips anywhere
as of the time of recording this.
Could it be that Intel made an oopsie-whoopsie,
underestimated AMD,
and doesn't really want anyone to talk about these?
Honestly, it kind of looks that way.
Not only did Intel cut out over clocking support
and cut down base and boost clocks,
but these chips dramatically exceed their 65 watt TDP
in a way that we didn't observe with AMD,
and they won't opportunistically boost forever
like the K series will.
And like AMD's entire 7000 series will.
What's worse? The core i5-13600
inexplicably loses a big chunk of level 2 cache.
That might not sound like a huge deal,
but cache can make a huge difference in performance
across a wide variety of workloads including,
you guessed it, gaming.
So did they kneecap this chip on purpose?
Unfortunately, we don't have any of them on hand,
so we're gonna have to look into them at a later date.
And we will look into them, Intel,
even if I have to personally camp out
in front of the store to buy one.
I'm kidding.
Nobody's camping out for these. Bleh.
(scoffs)
Coming back to Team Exciting though, AMD.
They claim that by simply dropping the TDP,
they're able to achieve
industry leading performance-per-watt,
which obviously we're going to be putting to the test today.
We're gonna be using a Noctua NH-D15 for cooling
in order to let all of our chips stretch their legs.
But it should be noted
that the entire non-X lineup ships with a box cooler.
And you should expect to get maximum performance
out of these ones without spending any extra money
on an exotic cooling solution.
As with our previous Ryzen 7000 review,
our Intel bench is using DDR5 6800,
and our AMD bench will be using DDR5 6000.
This is not to give Intel an advantage,
but rather to keep our comparison fair.
AMD benefits more from running tighter timings
and keeping the Infinity Fabric clock
synced to the RAM even if that is a little lower.
If you wanna learn more about
the Infiniti Fabric's relationship with RAM,
we did a whole video on RAM speed on Ryzen
a little while ago
that is still relevant to the current Gen
In CPU bound 1080p gaming, Shadow of the Tomb Raider
starts the non-X chips off pretty decently
with the Ryzen 9 7900 and Ryzen 7 7700
falling behind their X cousins by about 8%,
while the 7600 managed exactly the same performance.
We tested CS: GO next,
but modern chips have actually gotten so fast
that it's quickly becoming irrelevant.
The lowest result is 450 FPS,
meaning that the differences basically don't matter
and sometimes the results are even contradictory.
Moving on then, Cyberpunk is a slightly worse story
for our X free chips than Tomb Raider was.
With the dip in performance sitting at anywhere
between 8% and 15% for the higher core count parts
and between 2% to 3% for the Ryzen 5 7600,
it's clear then that demanding multi-core optimized games
are going to take better advantage of the X series'
much higher All Core Turbo characteristics.
F1 22 brings better news to the non-X chips though
where the 7900 comes within 5% to 6% of its X counterpart.
While the Ryzen 5 meanwhile
manages once again to match its X counterpart,
which at this point is becoming a bit of a pattern.
Far Cry 6 shows a bit more of a gap
between the non-X and X chips though,
with the 7700 in particular falling behind an average FPS,
while the 7900 falls behind in minimums.
And Forza Horizon 5 sees the 7900 falling further behind
thanks to its higher core count,
and thus lower relative clock speeds
compared to the 7700 and the 7600,
which are mostly in line with their X counterparts.
Modern Warfare 2 evens the playing field a lot though,
hinting that perhaps the game is a little more GPU bound
at 1080p than we initially realized.
Still, the Ryzen 5 7600 seems to fall behind
a little here compared to the others.
Hinting that perhaps thread count to a point
is more important for this title.
The same can't be said for Total War: Warhammer III though,
where we actually got some weird data that looks like a bug
with high thread count chips.
The 7950X ends up slower than the 7900 for example.
And look at the 13900K.
But it seems like it's okay on the lower core count chips
where we see about a 2% to 9% performance gap
between X and non-Xs.
Perhaps the most interesting game we tested though
is Factorio, which is lightly threaded,
but still highly demanding.
In this, the non-X chips performed admirably
within 5% of their X counterparts
and nearly on par with Team Blue.
Keep in mind as you're looking through these charts, guys,
that we don't have the price competitive Intel chips
on our charts because they paper launched them.
You can't actually get them.
Overall then, none of our tested CPUs performed poorly.
I counted only 17 occasions where any frame rate
dipped below 120 FPS.
These are all capable gaming CPUs.
But more importantly for these new Ryzen processors,
the 7900 came within 5% of its X counterpart,
with the 7700 coming within 4%, and the Ryzen 5 7600 being,
on average, bang on with the 7600X.
That is incredibly impressive.
Now, the 5800X3D still stands out
for the impressive performance that it delivers
on a last gen DDR4 platform.
But with the way that DDR5 has come down in price,
and not to mention the upcoming X3D 7000 series chips,
AM5 is starting to look like the place to be
if you want an upgrade path.
Kind of like our plaid flannel shirts are the place to be.
They're super comfy and warm
and they come in more fun colors than ever.
If you're less concerned with gaming
and more concerned with work though,
you might be a little disappointed.
Cinebench puts the Ryzen 9 7900 at just 88% of its X variant
and the 7700 manages just 80% compared to the X.
Thankfully, with fewer cores to feed, the 7600 manages to
stick closer to its unthrottled counterpart,
which is a pattern that you'll see repeated
through a lot of these tests.
Well, a lot of them. Not all.
Blender is another bloodbath for the new chips.
Clearly they're power constrained except for the 7600.
And Handbrake's AV1 encoder has all the non-X chips
trailing their almost equivalents.
Our Chromium Compile is an example of one of those, um,
for the most parts where the 7600's shorter
power leash does hold it back.
And it took a good seven minutes longer to finish.
Meanwhile, the rest of the non-Xs stayed
within spitting distance of the X series.
None of them, it should be noted,
are going to threaten Intel since,
as we'll see, their chips are very liberal
with power consumption even compared to the Ryzen X series.
And in spite of their power chugging ways,
they don't manage to win everywhere anyway.
Even the X-less variants manage to outperform Intel
in very light tasks like Flac encoding.
Other more lightly threaded workloads
such as those in Procyon
are a little easier on the X-less CPUs,
with the 7900 dropping just over 10% in photo editing,
and coming within 3% in video, which isn't bad at all.
The 7700 does even better.
And the 7600 manages to evenly match its X series equivalent
in video editing performance.
Pretty cool.
Now let's take a detour into synthetics,
to look at 7-Zip, where that same pattern we saw
with heavily threaded loads makes a return.
It's worth noting though that in the real world
this would be a lot more limited by storage speed
than it would by your CPU.
So it's mostly academic like Y-Cruncher.
Hey, hey. Segue. Y cruncher is interesting though
because it lets Ryzen flex its AVX-512 muscles.
While Intel's chips only have AVX2,
they still manage to beat the lower power Ryzen chips.
And this is in part thanks to the absurd amount of energy
that AVX-512 requires, causing them to throttle hard
to their comparatively low base clocks.
Now let's head back to the real world with SPECworkstation.
I'm not gonna lie. None of these tests are exactly a win
for the new lower end chips
and a lot of the performance differences
are similar across the field.
But there are some cases where they at least come close
to their high performance Intel counterparts like Calculix.
Overall then, the productivity performance
for the 7900 and 7700 are only slightly better
than their price difference would suggest.
But the 7600 manages to stand out at an impressive 96%
of the 7600X's performance,
effectively making the 7600X obsolete.
It seems like six Zen 4 cores are perfectly happy then,
running at under 100 watts.
Speaking of which, are you ready for a magic trick?
What do you get when you have two processor dies
and a power target that's under 100 watts?
40 degrees in Prime95. That's what.
That is ridiculous.
Yes, before you ask, CPU utilization was at 100%.
And as you'll see, the power draw was as expected.
That's just how it is.
The Ryzen 9 7900 then would make an awesome
small form factor CPU,
not that the others are slouches either.
The 7700 does get a bit toastier
thanks to its higher core clocks and single CCD,
but it's absolutely in another class
than its X labeled twin and the Core i7-13700K.
The Ryzen 5 7600 is very much the same story as the 7700,
embarrassing both of its competitors in our lineup here,
even though it has slightly higher thermals.
Again, thanks to its high core clocks and single CCD.
Here's all of them on the same graph.
That is hilarious. I mean, why does the scale even
need to go up to 120 degrees?
Right. Because of the Core i9. Yeesh.
Core clocks are interesting
because while thermals were very low
clocks remained at or above base clock on all of our chips.
The Ryzen 9 7900, while much lower than its X twin,
managed to hover around 3.9 Ghz
before dropping to base clocks
after the first half of the run.
That is frankly really impressive.
The Ryzen 7 7700 meanwhile
is significantly closer to its twin
and hangs around the 4.5 GHz range
or about 700 MHz over base.
That is phenomenal.
Remember guys, that Prime95 is an unreasonably heavy load.
It's a stress test that is designed to make chips choke.
The Ryzen 5 7600 meanwhile
has the same base clock as the 7700,
but manages to boost 200 MHz above and beyond
even that chip, which you can see when we stack them
all together on the same graph like this.
It's hard to believe that these are
all staying within 90 watts, but they are.
Here's the Ryzen 9 7900
just embarrassing the 13900K when you consider
the relatively small difference in performance.
I mean, is that a spike to 350 watts?
This same story keeps playing out
because each of these chips maxed out
their 90 watt power target while Intel shot to the moon.
The Core i5 is a little less of a power gremlin
and managed to keep things under 200 watts.
But I mean, just look at this combined graph here.
It's just a single line.
All things considered,
especially with the energy crisis going on right now,
this is an absolute win for AMD.
- How could we forget performance per watt?
Well, we did.
But at F1 22, the Ryzen 9 7900
remained at its maximum power throughout the run,
which just happens to be much lower
than either of the other 9 series CPUs.
And when we capped it to 100 FPS,
its power consumption drops even further,
while remaining roughly the same distance away
from its X counterpart.
The 7700 isn't that much less power hungry in gaming
than its X sibling,
and we can see that in action when we cap the frame rate.
The lines match up pretty well.
The Ryzen 5 7600 was already very close
in terms of power and performance to its X sibling.
And capping the frame rate gives us basically the same line,
which just so happens to be roughly half
the power draw of the Core i5.
This all works out to a watts per FPS,
nearly three quarters that of the X series
for both the Ryzen 9 and 7,
while the Ryzen 5 7600, somewhat predictably,
is roughly the same as the 7600X.
- [Linus] For enthusiasts though,
stock performance is only part of the story.
We couldn't run our entire test suite
on all of the new chips,
but we did run the 7900 in a handful of applications
to see if you can simply save a few bucks
by altering the power targets in the BIOS yourself
and then scribbling your own little X
onto the heat spreader.
And it looks like you kind of can.
Is that a 1% difference in Cinebench?
Considering the fact that we are not even
manually overclocking the chip.
All we're doing is letting it draw more power.
(claps)
This is phenomenal.
I mean, I can't speak to what overclocking potential
above and beyond stock boost operation,
whatever you wanna call that, would be there.
You know, maybe the Xs are better binned chips.
But if all you want is for it to run out of the box?
Whoa, these things look great, especially for the money.
Although, it should be noted that cost comparisons
are complicated somewhat
by the underlying platforms today.
While the non-X 7000 series chips
are significantly less expensive than even Intel's KF SKUs,
not to mention they come with coolers,
Intel does still hold the crown here in raw performance.
And maybe more importantly,
the LGA 1700 platform supports both DDR5 and DDR4,
making it somewhat more versatile and cheaper to build on
especially if you go with an older
600 series Intel chipset motherboard
instead of a 700 series one.
DDR5 may no longer be a scalper item
and its price premium has been coming down,
but a kit of DDR5 6000 is still gonna set you back
about double what a low latency DDR4 3600 kit would.
If your angle is the F word, future proofing,
AMD's Socket AM5 platform is newer
and AMD has committed to supporting it through 2025
and beyond, which normally is the kind of claim
that I wouldn't take at face value.
But with AMD's history with Socket AM4, and AM3 before that,
I at least want to trust them.
Intel's pattern meanwhile though,
is to just release two CPU generations per platform
and that is it.
So that money that you're saving today
by going DDR4 on Intel
could end up costing you down the road
if you're a frequent upgrader.
So then is this the shot in the arm
that AMD needed post Raptor Lake?
I think so.
While it's a step in the opposite direction to computing
in terms of performance,
it is a leap in the right direction in terms of value.
Not only that, but the thermal output of these CPUs
is low enough that you could put any one of them into
a small form factor rig with a low profile cooler
and get stock performance out of them.
I mean, you'd need to drop to a non-K SKU
to do that on Intel right now.
And even then things could get pretty toasty.
We don't know for sure because Intel
evidently doesn't want anyone to look too closely.
Hopefully that changes. For now though,
I guess it doesn't really matter what Intel's doing
because with these new chips
AMD has something in their lineup for just about everyone.
Just like I have this segue for everyone.
To our sponsor, Squarespace.
If you're building your brand online in 2022,
you should absolutely have a website.
And if you need a tool to help build that brand and website,
look no further than Squarespace.
Squarespace is the all-in-one platform
to make expanding your brand online easy.
You can make a beautiful website, engage with your audience,
and you can sell anything and everything
from products to content.
We love Squarespace so much
we use it here at Linus Media Group.
Its custom templates make it easy to stand out
with a beautiful site that fits your needs.
And you can maximize your visibility
thanks to their suite of integrated SEO features.
Their analytic insights help you optimize your performance
so you can see what's going well
and what needs a little work.
So get started today
and head to squarespace.com/ltt
to get 10% off your first purchase.
If you guys enjoyed this video, go check out
our review on Intel's 13th Gen K series Core processors
for more details on the Raptor Lake platform.
Here's to hoping that Intel and AMD keep
one-upping each other like this.
Man, even low-cost processors are cool again.
It's great.