AMD’s ongoing efforts to improve its processor technology have resulted in the company’s new Ryzen 9000-series family of desktop CPUs, which were first detailed at Computex earlier this summer. This generation, instead of leading with a power-hungry flagship, AMD has kicked things off with its Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X. (Two higher-end Ryzen 9 entries will launch a week after these, on Aug. 15.) These CPUs won't be the fastest in AMD’s Ryzen 9000-series lineup, but they do a fine job of showing the improvements of the new Ryzen 9000 series over their last-generation Ryzen 7000-series counterparts. The subject of this review, the Ryzen 7 9700X, priced at $359, may not wow you on raw performance for the price, but it's a step up from its direct predecessor the Ryzen 7 7700X. We especially laud AMD's efficiency gains here, which will make this chip far better suited to cheap air cooling or use in compact desktops than Intel's fire-breathing equivalents.
Ryzen 9000: Faster, Leaner, More Efficient
AMD’s Ryzen 9000-series processors are based on the company’s new "Zen 5" microarchitecture, and these processors are, in most ways, better than their predecessors. You might think, "Of course they are! The Ryzen 9000 series was explicitly designed to replace the Ryzen 7000 series, so they should be better in every way." But it's not always the case.
You'll always see an emphasis on improving performance with each new processor generation. (Otherwise, you wouldn’t have much incentive to upgrade.) That performance bump doesn’t always come for free, though. Sometimes, we see prices or power consumption rise, too, or we may see little to no change in other parts of the processor.
AMD has claimed that its new Zen 5 architecture has an average increase in performance per clock of 16% versus equivalent Zen 4 implementations, but this varies from one test scenario to another. According to AMD, you could see up to a 35% performance boost, but that only in scenarios leaning heavily on the floating point unit (FPU) inside the processor.
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The overall core counts and clock speeds have changed little between the Ryzen 9000 and the Ryzen 7000 lines. The Ryzen 7 9700X and its predecessor, the Ryzen 7 7700X, have eight simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) enabled CPU cores that support 16 total threads. They also both have 32MB of L3 cache, but the Ryzen 7 9700X has a higher amount of L1 and L2 cache and wider internal bandwidth. In terms of clock speeds, we see both processors top out at about the same place, with the Ryzen 7 7700X peaking at 5.4GHz and the Ryzen 7 9700X hitting 5.5GHz.
The similar core counts and clock speeds mean that the performance differences between these processors will mostly come down to differences in the underlying architecture. In truth, some aspects of the Ryzen 9000-series processors remain unchanged from the Ryzen 7000 series, but the processors are still better in almost every way. I'll dig more into performance later, and you can find more details about the architecture in articles we wrote earlier focused on Ryzen 9000 processors and AMD's Zen 5 architecture.
For now, let’s cover the notable secondary characteristics of the processor. Like previous generations of AMD Ryzen processors, the Ryzen 9000 series uses components called core chiplet dies (CCDs) that contain the CPU cores, plus an I/O die containing the memory controller, PCIe controller, and other important components. The I/O die on the Ryzen 9000 series is entirely unchanged from the Ryzen 7000 series and is based on a 6nm process with an identical feature set.
This means that Ryzen 9000-series processors like the Ryzen 7 9700X have a built-in integrated graphics processor (IGP) based on AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture. This IGP contains two AMD compute units with 128 total shaders clocked at 2,200MHz. The memory controller in the I/O die is also unchanged, but it officially supports DDR5 clocked at 5,600MHz now, up from 5,200MHz on the Ryzen 7000 series.
The CCDs transitioned to a new 4nm TSMC manufacturing process, down from the 5nm used on most Ryzen 7000-series chips. This, along with architectural changes, has helped make the Ryzen 9000-series processors more energy efficient, arguably their most promising characteristic. The thermal design power (TDP) rating on the Ryzen 7 9700X is just 65 watts (W), which is a huge reduction from the 105W TDP rating on the Ryzen 7 7700X.
It's not a design change, but it’s worth noting that the Ryzen 7 9700X is less expensive, too. (Or at least it is, going by the list price/MSRP at launch.) The Ryzen 7 9700X debuts at $359, roughly 10% cheaper than the Ryzen 7 7700X going by MSRP. Regarding street pricing, the Ryzen 7 7700X will cost less, as you can find it for as little as $259 today at Micro Center. Nonetheless, it’s nice to see prices heading down for a change instead of up, especially in the era of high inflation we’ve all been living through.
One last note before moving on: The Ryzen 7 9700X does not come with a stock cooler. That's too bad, because AMD could have offered one with this processor; its Wraith Prism is adequate for cooling a processor with a 65-watt TDP. But AMD typically doesn't include boxed coolers with its processors that have an "X" suffix. The reason: These chips target enthusiasts who may overclock and want more extreme cooling, or at least want to select their own air cooler.
Test Setup and Competition
Our test platform for the Ryzen 9000 series is unchanged from the one we used for the Ryzen 7000-series processors. (AMD is not launching new chipsets for the Ryzen 9000 series until September, earliest, but the new chips work with existing current chipsets and AM5 motherboards.) The Ryzen 7 9700X was tested on an ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard with a Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL240 Flux 240mm water cooler. The system was built into a Praxis WetBench open-air chassis for optimal cooling during testing, and a SilverStone DA850 power supply powered it.
The RAM used for the tests was a G.Skill DDR5 memory kit supplied to us by AMD that has two 16GB sticks of RAM. This RAM was used to test all processors with the memory set to the max officially supported memory speed for each processor. This speed is 4,800MHz for Intel’s 12th Gen "Alder Lake" processors, 5,200MHz for AMD’s Ryzen 7000-series processors, and 5,600MHz for all 13th and 14th Gen Intel "Raptor Lake" processors, as well as AMD’s new Ryzen 9000-series processors.
The test system was also equipped with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition graphics card, which was used as a display adapter for all processor benchmarks and most game tests. This was removed only to test the IGP of the processors that feature an IGP.
But First, a Word About Intel's 'Raptor Lakes'...
Before diving into the test results, it's important to acknowledge the current turmoil in the desktop processor market. Intel’s 13th Gen and 14th Gen desktop processors (dubbed "Raptor Lake" and "Raptor Lake Refresh") in-market as boxed CPUs and in prebuilt PCs have been experiencing issues with voltage delivery and stability, leading to potential chip degradation. (It's complicated; see the details in our explainer.) Intel is working on fixing this issue, but it may come at the cost of performance.
In light of this, at this writing, it’s difficult to recommend any 13th and 14th Gen Intel desktop processors. It also makes it challenging to compare those processors against AMD's fairly, as we don’t know what the performance impact of Intel’s patch may be (or that of any underclocking you may perform to avoid damaging your own processor). We have retained the scores achieved by the affected Intel processors, unaltered, in our results here. Until Intel’s patch comes out and we can test it, this is our fairest means for evaluating these processors.
However, given Intel’s current issues and the likelihood that a patch controlling the voltage in its affected chips will degrade performance at least a smidge, we will give AMD the benefit of the doubt here in the event of any near ties. We'll also expand our margin of error for what we consider to be a tie to 5% versus our usual 3%.
AMD Ryzen 7 9700X Tests: CPU Performance
AMD’s increased performance per clock cycle helps to give it an edge over last-gen Ryzen 7000-series processors, though by a smaller margin than expected. Instead of AMD's touted potential up-to-16% increase in performance over the Ryzen 7 7700X, the Ryzen 7 9700X was just 3% faster in Cinebench R23’s multi-threaded test. This is inside the margin of error and not statistically significant, but we saw a more notable 9% increase in single-threaded performance. The reason for this performance difference between single-threaded and multi-threaded tests is likely due to the reduced TDP. Simply put, to maintain the 65-watt TDP the processor is restricted from using too much power and generating too much heat. When just one core is active this isn't an issue, but you run into this limit with all cores active; this causes the cores to throttle so as not to exceed the TDP limit. From this, we get the sharp difference between single-threaded gains and multi-threaded gains.
Things look less promising against the Intel competition in Cinebench. The Intel Core i5-14600K was 24% faster than the Ryzen 7 9700X in the multi-threaded tests, and the Intel Core i7-14700K was even faster. You aren’t going to remove that performance gain even if you have to downclock the Intel chips to ensure they don’t get damaged. The Core i5-14600K's performance advantage comes from its higher core count, with its 14 cores (some of them low-power E-Cores) and support for 20 concurrent threads enabling it to outpace the Ryzen 7 9700X by such a large amount. Dialing back the clock speed would reduce this advantage, but the clocks would need to be reduced a lot for the Ryzen 7 9700X to gain the lead.
The Ryzen 7 9700X had the upper hand in single-threaded performance, where it was 6% faster than the Core i5-14600K and nearly identical to the Core i7-14700K. While we consider this a win for the Ryzen 7 9700X, it’s diluted by the devastating loss in the multi-threaded test.
The following Adobe test showed stiff competition between the Ryzen 7 9700X and its main competitors. The Core i7-14700K was 6% faster in the Photoshop test, giving it a narrow lead, while the Core i5-14600K and Ryzen 7 9700X were in a close tie, for which we again will give the point to the Ryzen 7 9700X. In Premiere Pro, the Core i7-14700K’s advantage grew to 17%, while the Core i5-14600K and Ryzen 7 9700X remained in a tie.
More than any test so far, HandBrake showed the Ryzen 7 9700X far behind its competitors. The Ryzen 7 9700X completed the test 14% slower than the Core i5-14600K and 26% slower than the Core i7-14700K. This advantage is predominantly due to the higher core counts on those processors, giving them an unmatchable advantage. Things were, if anything, even worse in Blender, with the Ryzen 7 9700X even further behind.
Unsurprisingly, at this point, the Ryzen 7 9700X was obliterated by the Core i5-14600K and Core i7-14700K in the multi-threaded POV-Ray 3.7 test. Its single-threaded performance was more of a tie between the Ryzen 7 9700X and its competitors.
Without going into too much depth, the Ryzen 7 9700X, on average, did show itself to be faster than (or tied with) the Ryzen 7 7700X in all of these tests. Even when it was faster, however, it wasn’t usually by a wide margin.
AMD Ryzen 7 9700X Tests: Gaming Performance
Testing the Ryzen 7 9700X with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card showed the Ryzen 7 9700X was amply fast enough for modern games. It was significantly behind the Intel competition in 3DMark, but it tied or had slight gains in other tests.
In Guardians of the Galaxy, the Ryzen 7 9700X was faster than the Core i7-14700K by about 5% at 1080p resolution. It was also about 5% faster while rendering Total War: Three Kingdoms at 1440p and closer to 9% while rendering the game at 1080p. However, we didn't see any other statistically significant differences between the Ryzen 7 9700X and the Core i7-14700K.
AMD Ryzen 7 9700X Tests: Integrated Graphics Performance
The Radeon RDNA 2 IGP in the Ryzen 7 9700X is unchanged from the one in the Ryzen 7000 series, but it gained a slight advantage from the Ryzen 7 9700X’s slightly higher max memory speed. This edge likely resulted in marginally faster Total War: Three Kingdoms performance.
We observed a performance drop in F1 22. This is a little odd as the IGP tested is the same in all the AMD processors in the list, but it could be down to a driver issue for the new chip. Performance was otherwise consistent on the other game tests, with Intel’s IGPs notably faster in most games.
Power and Thermal Tests: The Best Parts of the Ryzen 7 9700X
To measure each processor's power consumption, we use a Kill-A-Watt wall meter to measure the power consumption of the test system at various points. This is one of the few areas where the Ryzen 7 9700X showed a significant change from its predecessor.
The Ryzen 7 9700X's idle power consumption was higher than expected, but its power draw under load was quite low compared with most competing chips. The Core i5-14600K used even less power in the Adobe Premiere test, but it used far more in Cinebench. As the Adobe test also uses the graphics card, the Cinebench power numbers are likely more representative of the Intel chip's true power draw.
The lower power consumption translated nicely to reduced operating temperatures, too. All of these processors were tested with the same cooler, making the Ryzen 7 9700X one of the coolest-operating processors we’ve tested to date. Due to this processor's lower 65-watt TDP and lower operating temperature, you could likely cool it sufficiently well with an air cooler instead of the 240mm liquid cooler we used. Many air coolers support processors with TDPs of 65 watts, and these tend to cost a fair bit less than water coolers that are borderline required for most Intel CPUs above Core i5 these days.
Verdict: Getting Ryzen to a Better Power-Consumption Place
Overall, you can see clear signs that AMD's Ryzen 7 9700X is better than its predecessor, the Ryzen 7 7700X. It’s slightly faster in many tests, even if only just so. Its best feature is that it draws less power and runs considerably cooler, but those aren’t usually key selling points for desktop processors. It makes the Ryzen 7 9700X more attractive for compact PCs than the Ryzen 7 7700X, but that’s about it.
It's exciting that we've seen some improvement, but we need to look at the Ryzen 7 9700X in terms of real-world pricing and performance. For starters, the Ryzen 7 7700X is almost as fast and costs much less now. Don’t have a Micro Center nearby? Amazon or Newegg will be more than happy to sell you one for $300 or less. We just don't see enough performance gain to make the $359 Ryzen 7 9700X a must-buy unless you are excited about the reduced power consumption and heat numbers, or you want to air-cool and avoid buying an AIO liquid cooler for an Intel Core i7 or better chip.
What’s more concerning is that Intel’s 14th Gen Raptor Lake refresh processors drive much more performance. To be sure: We are fully aware some of these chips have, for all intents and purposes, blown up at current settings. But we're also keeping in mind how this problem could be resolved on newly purchased chips this very month, and are mindful of Intel’s now-extended five-year warranty on those same processors. Even if you have to slow down or undervolt the processor to avoid damage, the performance differences between this new Ryzen, and Intel's Core i5-14600K and Core i7-14700K, are so large that you’d still have a faster PC by going with Intel.
That’s not even to mention that the Core i5-14600K costs around $299 from multiple online retailers, which makes it less expensive, or that the Core i7-14700K is available for around $397 from Amazon—not much more than AMD's chip.
We cannot say that the Ryzen 7 9700X is a disappointing CPU, as it truly is not. It performs well, and it delivers excellent power-draw and heat-generation numbers that AMD should rightly be proud of. The problem: It simply doesn’t outperform its predecessor by much, and it’s slower overall than the Intel competition. In truth, its reduced TDP is likely a major factor holding it back, as we noted in the Cinebench R23 results. That's why we see larger performance gains on single-threaded tests but not much on multi-threaded tests, as the processor holds its power and temps down more to avoid going past its TDP limit.
As noted, a silver lining to that lower TDP is that it can help these processors work well in compact PCs, and it may enable you to buy a cheaper cooler. Liquid coolers tend to cost multiple times more than air coolers, and being able to get by with an air cooler on 65-watt TDP processors like the Ryzen 7 9700X goes a long way toward helping it compete on pricing with Intel's more power-hungry Core i7 and i9 processors, which levy a $50-to-$100 minimum "tax" for a 240mm or larger liquid cooler if you don't own one already. If Intel’s current issues make you nervous, then this might be the right option to consider. But you’d likely do well to wait at least a few weeks to see how Intel’s patch for its 13th and 14th Gen Core problem works out, or for what Intel releases next, in its "Arrow Lake" 15th Gen desktop-CPU replacements, reportedly coming later this year.
AMD's Ryzen 7 9700X desktop CPU is better than its 7000-series predecessor, mostly on power consumption and heat generation—it's only slightly faster. A lower list price gives it added AM5 appeal.
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