AMD 7900X Retested – PBO, SMT & Overclocked

Final Thoughts

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m more than aware that the 7800X3D is a CPU aimed at gaming, and the 9700X isn’t. It’s more of an all-rounder, but it’s not my fault that the 9700X and 7800X3D are so similar in price, so if you were eyeing it up, of course I’m going to be honest and tell you to pay $16 more and to grab it because on average, it is 14% faster and comes in cheaper in terms of the cost per frame. If you don’t want to spend that much, then just get the 7700X which with PBO, even at default levels isn’t too far away from the 9700X, and will save you $70.

I set out to test this because I honestly thought, mainly based on comments from our viewers that I must have missed something with the 9700X. That’s why we did a re-review and tested with PBO, but then took it one step further with disabling SMT and then because I didn’t want to have to go through the pain of talking about PBO again, we combined them, and even that wasn’t enough to do things justice.

At this point, my original verdict still stands and even though we don’t have any other Zen 5 parts right now at the time of filming, I’m pretty sure that they will follow the same trend and be lacklustre in the same fashion, at least in terms of performance. Sure, we can expect, much like with the 9700X that efficiency is better, but putting my mind into that of the consumer, I don’t think consumers, and mainly gamers care about efficiency as much as what AMD think they do. They want raw performance, and a generational uplift and while AMD promised an IPC improvement, that doesn’t translate natively to games, and that’s where AMD’s biggest consumer marketbase is.

Going into this, and the reason we have made quite a bit of content on the 9700X is that I do feel for gamers who were looking at buying Zen 5, and mainly the 9700X. It’s not the best move AMD has done, and in a time where Intel are having their own fair share of bad press, this could have been a pivotal time for the red team, and sadly, that’s just not happened and I can’t see a way that AMD can redeem Zen 5, short of severely dropping the price, or somehow unlocking more performance. Luckily, we’re going to also put that to the test soon as we’ve overclocked the 9700X to 5.3GHz on all cores, so make sure you stick around for that one coming up soon.