Was I Wrong? – AMD Ryzen 9700X Re-Review!

On Wednesday, the Ryzen 7 9700X reviews dropped, and for the most part, it wasn’t great news for AMD. The 9700X launched with a $360 price tag, which put it 24% more expensive than the current pricing of the Ryzen 7 7700X, the CPU that it was set to replace, and while pricing is a futile thing if the performance matches up, sadly that wasn’t the case, and typically, ourselves and other media outlets saw less than a 4.5% uplift in performance making the whole thing a bit of a nothingburger.

So armed with some comments about how we didn’t test using PBO or Precision Boost Overdrive, we went to testing to see if the 9700X could be redeemed with a simple flick of an option in the BIOS.

Now whenever anything launches, we’re always keen to get community feedback, not just on our content, but on what the general consumer space is feeling in regards to a new product launch. We went through comments, not only on our own content, but other websites and YouTube videos to see how potential and existing AMD customers were feeling and the main thing that kept cropping up came down to power efficiency and Precision Boost Overdrive.

Now while the points are valid, some were clearly made by disgruntled AMD users who maybe were just expecting more, and I won’t be as bold to call those out as AMD fanboys, but I can see why you’d be frustrated, because as far as generational uplifts go, well, it wasn’t great.

Couple that in with the fact that AMD denoted the chip as an X CPU, and I think it’s maybe just led to some confusion. If this was the 9700 non-X, then I think the reception would have been a lot better, because even from our own tests, at least at optimised defaults, it matches within a small percentage to the 7700X but uses less power.

So that leads us to today and why we’ve set out to retest all of our day 1 launch tests with PBO enabled on the 9700X, but just simply enabling that wouldn’t show us much, other than that in applications that can harness the extra potential through the use of Precision Boost Overdrive, that things would be improved or faster than stock, out of the box results, which is how we’ve always tested traditionally in the past as it’s the fairest way. If AMD or even Intel have features that need “turning on”, then they should be on by default if that’s what they want reviewers to show, and consumers to see in the first place.

Now to make it fair, and considering that the 9700X is the evolutionary step forward from the 7700X, we also enabled PBO on the Zen 4 based CPU because I think it may be pretty clear that while PBO will improve the performance on the 9700X by a certain percentage, the same will be done on the 7700X, and we’ll be in exactly the same situation with higher numbers, but a similar percentage uplift, but hey, I’m humble enough to eat my own words if that really is the case, so let’s jump into it and see what the numbers now look like.

To test, we used our existing AM5 test system with an MSI X670E ACE motherboard with the latest BIOS. We also used 32GB of G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo 6000MHz CL30 memory and for all of our testing, we used an INNO3D RTX 4090 iChill X3 OC to alleviate any potential bottlenecks. We also used the latest version of Windows 11 and with the latest drivers and as we’re looking at CPU performance, all of our gaming tests were performed at 1080p where CPU utilisation is at its highest. We’ve kept other processors on their default out of the box results in our charts to show how things compare against the 7700X and 9700X on both optimised defaults and with PBO enabled to get a clearer picture as to how things look. Again, we tested the processors in a selection of synthetic tests as well as 13 games to show how things look.

So with that out of the way, let’s get into those glorious benchmarks.