Both AMD Ryzen 9700X and Ryzen 9600X CPUs offer just minor improvements in gaming performance. But they perform well in applications and their power efficiency.
AMD had announced Zen 5 Ryzen 9000 series of CPUs in June this year. While originally expected to release on 31st July, AMD delayed its release to August. Just a day before release, AMD officially announced their prices.
AMD Ryzen 7 9700X & Ryzen 5 9600X Reviews
Meanwhile, AMD Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X reviews are officially out. Let’s check some of them.
Tom’s Hardware
Tom’s Hardware reviewed both AMD Ryzen 7 9700X & Ryzen 5 9600X.
They found the Ryzen 9700X to be 12% faster than previous-gen Ryzen 7700X. It was also 9% faster than Intel Core i7-14700K.
Even with Ryzen 9600X, they found it to be 12% faster than previous-gen Ryzen 7600X and Intel Core i5-14600K.
Even the power efficiency is great. Take Blender Classroom benchmark for example. While Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X both consumed 80W and 82W respectively. The previous-gen Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 7 7700X both consumed way more, at 102W and 129W respectively.
Even the thermals are great. The temps of Ryzen 9600X never went above 69C in multithreaded tests. Which is excellent, as the previous-gen Ryzen 7000 was known to reach 95C.
We must mention, Tom’s Hardware is an outlier in performance. Other reviewers aren’t so impressed.
TechSpot
TechSpot tested just AMD Ryzen 7 9700X. It’s from the famous YouTuber Steve Walton from Hardware Unboxed, who have posted the video review for the same.
In above a dozen of games they tested, they found Ryzen 7 9700X to be just 3%, yes, just 3% faster than the previous-gen Ryzen 7 7700X CPUs. While having almost no difference in minimum FPS.
The Ryzen 9700X was in fact slower than Ryzen 7700X in some games.
In overall PC power usage in gaming, they found it to using be 3% less power. Which is good, but this shows that major power usage improvements have happened in applications, not games.
In simple words, Steve Walton calls the Ryzen 9700X a flop.
TechPowerUP
TechPowerUp too tested AMD Ryzen 7 9700X and AMD Ryzen 5 9600X respectively.
In gaming benchmarks (page 18) at 1080p, they found the Ryzen 9700X to be just 2% faster than the previous-gen Ryzen 7700X. However, it was faster than all the previous-gen Ryzen 7000 CPUs except Ryzen 7800X3D. In applications, the Ryzen 9700X was just 3% faster than the Ryzen 7700X.
Even Ryzen 9600X was just 3% faster than the previous-gen Ryzen 7600X CPU in gaming. It changed a bit in applications, where it was about 7% faster than Ryzen 7600X.
In power consumption (page 23), the numbers were interesting. Both Ryzen 9700X and Ryzen 9600X used way lesser power in applications than their previous-gen counter-parts when running at stock settings.
However, there was hardly any difference in power usage while gaming, both Ryzen 9700X and Ryzen 9600X used almost the same amount of power respectively than their previous-gen versions when running at stock settings.
Due to the above reasons, there were little noticeable difference in temperatures too while gaming. But when testing in Blender, the improvement in temperature was massive.
Why so bad performance numbers though. TechPowerUp says that it’s because of hard power limits that AMD has set. When all the power limits are removed, AMD CPUs seem to perform better.
Conclusion
Gamer Nexus too reviewed Ryzen 9700X (YouTube) and called it a wasted opportunity and we completely agree with them.
Both AMD Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X are uninspiring. They don’t offer much performance uplift, they cost a lot more currently and don’t offer that big an improvement in power efficiency in gaming. This is seen in almost all reviewers.
Only Tom’s Hardware got good performance out of them. Even there that could be an exception depending on games tested and binned CPU they got.
Except performance improvements in single thread, applications and power usage decrease in application, these two new CPUs offer no benefit whatsoever for the gamers.
All the big claims by AMD have turned out to be incorrect. If at all, these CPUs are made for datacenter workloads and not gamers.
Some are claiming that this is the worst CPU series by AMD in years. We wonder if they are purposely underpowering their CPUs to sell more X3D CPUs for gamers.
These AMD Ryzen 9000X3D CPUs are likely coming this September. AMD should try to release them as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, reviews for both AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X are expected in a few days. It’s to be seen whether they perform similarly to AMD Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X or they perform better than those CPUs.
