AMD Ryzen 7 9700X CPU Review

Starting things off with 3DMark Timespy and there really isn’t much in it when looking at the uplift from the 7700X to the newer 9700X at just over 1% in the overall score so could be argued identical due to margin of error. We do however see a larger gain of 4% in the CPU score moving up from the previous generation, but for the extra cost involved in buying the 9700X at $359, it’s not exactly off to a great start in our first synthetic benchmark test though it does put it not too far behind the Ryzen 9 7900X.

As we move onto Blender, again, the most stark comparison I can make is comparing the 9700X to its predecessor, the 7700X and again, it’s here where we do see an uplift, but nothing of significance at under 3% which again, would still be argued as margin of error, and we’d chalk that up as practically identical, as it’s nothing that you’d notice in real world tasks.

Moving onto Corona and we see a pretty measly 2 seconds shaved off the render time, with the 9700X now matching the time of the 7800X3D which before we’ve even got to gaming performance, you know should be the stronger contender, so I’m struggling to find a reason to recommend the 9700X at this stage, though it is early in our benchmarks.

In V-Ray, we start to see a slightly healthier improvement over the 7700X, with 7% more Vsamples, though how this relates to real world ray tracing we’ll show in our gaming tests, but if modelling using V-Ray, it could save you a bit of time in your final render, but again, not anything of huge difference, especially when factoring in the extra cost involved.

As we move onto Cinebench R23, again we see a small uplift, but you’re probably starting to see a bit of a trend that while the performance does increase, it’s by very negligible amounts seeing a multi-core score increase again by just under 3%. In terms of the single core score, it sounds a lot more impressive with a 12% uplift, but as we’re dealing with a lower score in general, a percentage increase can sound larger than what it actually is.

In our last synthetic benchmark, we have Geekbench and if you hadn’t guessed it, in terms of multi-core performance, we’re again at just under 3% going from the 7700X to the 9700X while single core again seems much better, with a score of 2536, which is a pretty hefty 19% above the 7700X, so who knows, but maybe we could see some stronger uplifts in gaming performance given how many games are geared more for strong single threaded performance opposed to being able to utilise mass amounts of cores and threads.