The AMD Ryzen 9 7900, Ryzen 7 7700, and Ryzen 5 7600 Review: Zen 4 Efficiency at 65 Watts
by Gavin Bonshor on January 9, 2023 9:00 AM ESTGaming Performance: 720p And Lower
The reason we test games in CPU reviews at lower resolutions such as 720p and below is simple; titles are more likely to be CPU bound than they are GPU bound at lower resolutions. This means there are more frames for the processor to process as opposed to the graphics card doing the majority of the heavy lifting.
There are some variances where some games will still use graphical power, but not as much CPU grunt at these smaller resolutions, and this is where we can show where CPU limitations lie in terms of gaming.
We are using DDR5 memory on the Ryzen 7000 series 65 W SKUs, as well as the other Ryzen 7000 processors tested, at the following settings:
- DDR5-5600B CL46 - Intel 13th Gen
- DDR5-5200 CL44 - Ryzen 7000
- DDR5-4800 (B) CL40 - Intel 12th Gen
All other CPUs such as Ryzen 5000 and 3000 were tested at the relevant JEDEC settings as per the processor's individual memory support with DDR4.
Civilization VI
World of Tanks
Borderlands 3
Grand Theft Auto V
Red Dead Redemption 2
F1 2022
Hitman 3
Total War: Warhammer 3
Cyberpunk 2077
We saw relatively decent performance across the board at very low resolutions of 720p and below, with low to minimal settings selected to bring raw CPU performance into play as opposed to discrete graphics. In most titles, the 65 W Ryzen 7000 CPUs trade blows well compared to other SKUs from both AMD and Intel, despite their power limitations.
The biggest limitation of power came in our Total War Warhammer 3 benchmark, where limited power did seem to handicap performance at 720p more than we've seen in other games so far.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
55 Comments
View All Comments
The Von Matrices - Monday, January 9, 2023 - link
The multiple tests where the 7900 is beating the 7950X by large (>5%) differences in game tests makes no sense and makes me concerned for the repeatability of the test suite. There is nothing (cache, clock speed, architecture, TDP, NUMA) that is inferior on the 7950X compared to the 7900 but somehow it loses by a large margin in many game tests.ag10n - Monday, January 9, 2023 - link
in your conclusion "Of course, users on a budget may want to pair up a Ryzen 5 7600 with a card such as an AMD Radeon RTX 6600"no RTX on the 6600 afaik ;)
boozed - Monday, January 9, 2023 - link
Those power consumption numbers are amazing.While you can make the argument that a "65W" AMD CPU consuming 90W is misleading, at least it's going to be consistently 90W regardless of which model you choose...
thulle - Monday, January 9, 2023 - link
Doesn't it become really weird to talk about efficiency while only comparing to TDP and not actual power consumption for the load? Not everything hits TTP as yCruncher does either.Preferrably the score in each result should be normalized to actual power consumption, or something similar. Even that has its issues though, since the balance between performance and efficiency is somewhat tuneable.
t.s - Monday, January 16, 2023 - link
Seconded! Or write the AVG power for the task. Ex: Cinebench: 7950X (214W) xxx.xxx pointHarry_Wild - Monday, January 9, 2023 - link
Performance difference is not that much! I going with the 7600 for internet surfing, watching streaming videos and email!😁👍LuxZg - Tuesday, January 10, 2023 - link
I was expecting that all along, so I'm glad it's confirmed. Now just to find sensible AM5 MBO at the right price :-/James5mith - Tuesday, January 10, 2023 - link
Real question: Why do CPUs no longer idle in the 800MHz-1600MHz range? Is there too great a change in the multiplier to hit max turbo at this point? Otherwise, what's the point at idling around 3.6GHz?It seems like a waste of power.
qwertymac93 - Tuesday, January 10, 2023 - link
The cores are gated such that they are at 0hz when idle. The clock shown in Windows is just the speed the core ran at when it last reported.fallaha56 - Tuesday, January 10, 2023 - link
Goodness Anandtech do better, ditch the bizarre memory policy and do some PBO testing…