Following on from our Ryzen 9 7900X and Ryzen 5 7600X review, it’s finally time to look at the two remaining CPUs in AMD’s Ryzen 7000 family: the $449/£439 Ryzen 7 7700X, a potential gaming value champ, and the $799/£769 Ryzen 9 7950X, a sixteen-core titan expected to outperform almost every consumer CPU in content creation workloads. We’ve seen significant price cuts on Ryzen 7000 processors since launch – so are these CPUs worth buying in 2023?
As a quick recap, these Zen 4 processors are profoundly different from AMD’s last-gen Ryzen 5000 parts. There’s been a shift to a new socket, AM5, with an LGA design that can provide up to 230W of power, as well as a new 6nm I/O die, integrated graphics on all models and support for two key technologies: DDR5 and PCIe 5.0.
These upgrades unlocked some impressive gen-on-gen gains in the case of the 7600X and 7900X, and there’s the potential for even greater improvements with the 7700X and 7950X. As AMD uses a chiplet-based design with up to eight cores per CCD, the eight-core 7700X and sixteen-core 7950X ought to represent the maximum performance possible from single-CCD and double-CCD designs respectively – and reports suggest that in some titles, the performance penalty of splitting a gaming workload across multiple CCDs could counteract the gains from having access to a higher number of threads, leaving the 7700X as a CPU of particular interest.
You can see how each of the designs stack up in the table below. With a quoted 13 percent uptick to instructions-per-clock (IPC) and more internal improvements, like an improved execution engine and a better branch predictor, we’d expect the significant boosts to frequency and higher power allowances to translate into some serious performance gains in all manner of workloads, from gaming to content creation. That was certainly the case for the 7600X and 7900X – so how do the 7700X and 7950X fare?
To find out, we’ll be using the same test system that featured in our previous Ryzen 7000 tests – an ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard, G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo DDR5-6000 CL30 RAM (with Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR5-5200 for supplementary testing) and Asus’ RTX 3090 Strix OC for the GPU side of things. Cooling was provided with a 240mm Alphacool Eisbaer Aurora AiO, which is happily compatible with the new AM5 socket.