Power Efficiency Is So Zen! The AMD Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X

One Thread Good, Two Thread Bad … Well, Not As Good

It’s actually fairly easy to sum up the two Zen 5 chips which were reviewed today with two data points, though Josh will certainly expound in far more detail on the podcast.  The Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X are far more power efficient than Zen 4 and amazingly more efficient than Intel’s current chips.   They also show significant improvements in single threaded performance; we are seeing double digit percentage increases, while multi-threaded performance only slightly improves.  That pretty much describes what you will see in general performance and if you are solely interested in gaming performance then the Ryzen 7 7800X3D remains your best friend until we see a Zen 5 equivalent.

The power efficiency is worth mentioning again.  In their tests The FPS Review saw the power draw of both chips top out at 88W, though it is interesting that the Ryzen 5 9600X got significantly more toasty during their testing, hitting 65.8C compared to the Ryzen 7 9700X at 57.2C.  In contrast the Intel i7-14700K devoured 253.3W and settled in at 90C.  The two AMD processors are able to outperform that Intel chip in single thread apps and while closer in performance during multi-threaded apps they are still not equal, but they use just over 1/3 the power to accomplish that!

Gaming performance isn’t significantly improved, though tasks like encryption and PCMark 10 benchmarks see monstrous improvements.  Over all, it’s hard to recommend the new chips as an upgrade to a Zen 4 system however as the older inventory dries up these two chips are a solid choice as they are indeed better than Zen 4 chips.

As usual there were some challenges but our reviews will be up soon and, as is tradition, will feature monitor resolutions you barely remember ever existed.