Review Ryzen 7 9700X Reviews

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blckgrffn

Diamond Member
May 1, 2003
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www.teamjuchems.com
I'd take the 7950X3D over the 7800X3D since it has a better binned vcache CCD. +200MHz. Only a small increase over the 7800X3D, but an increase none the less. It's a small amount of money over the 7800X3D. I keep the HF CCD disabled on mine which allows me to not have to install the 3D vcache optimization driver or deal with the XBox overlay. If ever the need arises, I can also go into the BIOS and enable the HF CCD (which has been never thus far).

I see your point, but I don't know if that difference is even reliably benched. You could get a golden or bit of a dud of either CPU and that would probably matter about the same. So I get why you would do so, but I didn't think that made sense in this case.

Down the road, perhaps the resale value on the 7950X would be better too, but this particular client tends to keep PCs quite a while and doesn't typically buy these tiers of parts. This the 3 generations of builds I've done for this family since about 2007. I am confident this is a huge uplift over their Zen 2600's and a slight improvement wouldn't move their needles at all - and despite their spend on this set of computers they are value sensitive/budget constrained.

Even on the GPU front, we had a $600 7900XT chosen and shifting that $120 to the GPU budget didn't move the needle either, so we kept that as well.
 

Golgatha

Lifer
Jul 18, 2003
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With the new Windows patch there's about a 10% across the board average uplift for both Zen 4 and Zen 5. 30%+ at the extremes. No performance degradation found across 45 games tested. Wow! I do wonder how Windows 10 compares now too? I personally just updated to Win11 about a month ago, so good timing for me. :)

 

Golgatha

Lifer
Jul 18, 2003
12,230
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So the more power it uses, the slower (ever so slightly) it gets? Clown show benchmarks. And one at that.

View attachment 106732
Yeah, there's a point of diminishing returns when cranking up the wattage, because that extra wattage causes more heat. Once the heat gets higher, the boost clocks suffer and FPS go down to keep the heat in control. I've found manually setting my 7700X to the equivalent of ECO@80w is the sweet spot for no loss of performance. Not surprisingly, the thermals at my ECO@80w settings never cross over the max thermal setting of 90°C. Basically there's enough wattage to run the CPU at it's full potential and the thermals will never throttle it. I also use a curve offset of -12 on all cores and I've yet to come across an AM4 or AM5 chip that won't run at this setting.

My personal experience with the 7700X and 7800X3D is there's only about 2-3% to be gained performance wise by optimizing the wattage applied to the CPU under an all-core load. For gaming, you wouldn't notice a difference because the thermals are never an issue and the boost clocks are at their highest always. I tweak my CPUs to have better thermals overall, with the primary goal of maximum performance for the least amount of electricity possible.

Edit: From the article, it looks like my experience matches what they found. Basically all-core situations saw improvement, and gaming (a non-all-core situation) saw no improvements.


"In Cinebench 2024, the Ryzen 9700X improved by 10% and the 9600X saw a smaller 3% uplift which is in line with the PBO results AMD had officially shared.

In Handbrake: Encoding, the Ryzen 9700X was able to execute the process 15% faster and the Ryzen 9600X was just 5% faster. In UL Procyon, the difference was rather negligible since the program requires stronger single-core performance. The single-core performance seems not affected by the 105W mode for both CPUs in almost all the tests conducted."
 
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