Processors

AMD Ryzen 9 7900X Review

So, today is the day. We can finally lift the lid on the new AMD Ryzen 7000 series of processors, starting with our coverage and mass amounts of benchmarks for the Ryzen 9 7900X. The shiny new 12 core, 24 thread beast that is the direct replacement for the 5900X.

Now before we get started, we will have content on all of the other processors launching today, but for now, I want to focus on the Ryzen 9 7900X. While the 7950X is the flagship, if the 7900X is anything like its predecessor, it should offer very similar performance, especially in gaming and for a more reasonable price point.

Now I don’t want to stomp too much over the specs and what not, because Lisa Su already told us everything we needed to know, and the full product pages over on AMD.com have been live for quite some time now, but we’ll gloss over some of the key points of the 7900X and the 7000 series in general on AM5. So the big one I guess, comes down to this being a completely new platform. While we have a new range of processors, we also have a new range of motherboards, a new socket, chipset, and support for the fastest technologies on the market, like DDR5, and support for the fastest technologies not on the market, like PCI-Express 5.0 of which the likes of NVME based storage will be available in the future and GPUs maybe, at some point, but for now, who knows?

In terms of the CPUs, what I guess you need to know is that the whole lineup is now based on the TSMC 5nm process node and due to that we see some pretty hefty gains to go with it. Firstly, the base frequency has been increased from 3.7GHz on the 5900X to a whopping 4.7GHz on the 7900X along with a boost frequency increase from 4.8GHz to 5.6GHz. Not being content there, AMD have also managed to increase the IPC or instructions per clock by 13% and have also seen the L2 cache on all processors doubled.

So it all sounds pretty impressive and the fact that the 7900X has kept the same $549 launch price that we saw on the 5900X, it’s going to be an interesting one to see how it performs.

Another interesting subject to talk about is the design that the processor now has which has finally changed after many many years. In fact, if I remember rightly, the IHS design was first implemented on the Athlon 64 ClawHammer range of processors back in 2003 and has been the same ever since. Now I’m not sure if it’s just me, but though it looks a bit odd on the Zen 4 range, and now gives you the fear of getting thermal paste everywhere, it also has a more extreme look to it. Hopefully the performance does too.

Also, as you’re probably aware, the new range of Ryzen 7000 series processors now sport an LGA pin design, opposed to the PGA design that we’ve been used to for so many years.