AMD's Ryzen 9000 is a true generational step forward.
I'm talking bigger level one cache, TSMC's new and improved 4nm FinFET process,
and a double digit IPC uplift thanks to its Zen 5 architecture.
And the best part? They're claiming they finally got a non-X3D chip
that can, on average, beat their giga-chad 5800X3D
all while using less power. As for Intel, well, they're in the middle
of an absolute dumpster fire to the point where I actually think
the more interesting question is whether Team Red can slay themselves.
Or whether you should just skip this launch until they inevitably come out with an X3D variant
of these chips that is so strong it makes me forget to segue to our sponsor.
Because of AMD's staggered launch, we're only looking at the Ryzen 5 9600X
and Ryzen 7 9700X today. Compared to last-gen, they boost slightly higher
and level one cache has increased, but the other caches are otherwise untouched
as our core counts compared to last-generation. However, thanks to TSMC's manufacturing process
improvements, AMD has managed to pack an extra nearly two billion transistors into these little guys,
about 26.5%. Too bad that wasn't enough transistors.
Starting with F123, we see our previous-generation
X3D chips leading the pack. Now, AMD never claimed that the 9700X
would be the new gaming champ, but what they did say is that it's supposed to beat
5,000 series 3DV cache chips in gaming on average.
We found that the story was a bit more complicated than that, but we'll get to that later.
For now, I'm happy to tell you that our new 9,000 series chips beat everything else
on the field except for Intel's 14900KS, and let's be real.
I can't personally tell the difference between 381 frames per second and 378,
and I certainly wouldn't wanna deal with the extra heat, power consumption, or cost.
Moving to a very CPU-bound eSports title in Rocket League,
wow, did these things ever rip. Do I need over 800 frames per second?
No, but is it cool that our 9700X
is heads and tails above everything else? Absolutely, and the 9600X isn't very far behind.
Now, it's clear that any of the CPUs we tested will do this job just fine,
even our inexpensive 14100F, but if you were looking for a generational gain,
it's clear that they can be found. Like in Returnal, where our 9700X wins again.
Not by much over AMD's go-to-X3D chips, but if we narrow in on the apples-to-apples comparisons
against the non-X3D predecessors, we're looking at gains of over 20%.
Now, considering these processors are barely different when we compare the spec tables,
and that they're using way less power, that is pretty dang impressive
and makes me very excited for the inevitable X3D refresh.
Of course, those aren't here yet, and we haven't finished painting a full picture of these.
You might have noticed that most of what we've tested so far has been at low settings instead of ultra,
so let's change it up a bit and look at maxed out Total War Warhammer 3.
This is still a fairly CPU-dependent game, which is why we chose it,
because we're testing CPUs, but you can see that once you start to turn the details up,
things get pretty close at the top of the charts. To show you why this matters,
we also ran this title at low, where you can see that the AMD CPUs do pull farther ahead,
but realistically, if you're spending this kind of money on your CPU, you're probably not
gonna be running everything at low. So it's worth taking all of these results as what they are,
an illustration of how much faster these CPUs are
in a completely non-GPU bottleneck scenario.
Probably the most interesting thing here, though, is our little 1400F that could just chugging along down there,
but we'll come back to that later. First, I wanna talk about our results from our X3D chips.
The 7800X3D does typically be the prior generation 5800X3D,
but not by as much as you might think, both in averages and in all important 1% lows.
So if you're a gamer, realistically, our recommendation from two and a half years ago
hasn't really changed other than that, you might be able to save yourself a buck
with the newer, cheaper 5700X3D.
We didn't actually run the numbers on this chip, but it's only marginally slower than its big brother,
and when paired with a budget board and some DDR4 memory,
it is an outstanding value. X3D's weakness, however, is in productivity,
and this is where the fun begins. Intel was already behind in PugetBent Photoshop,
but now AMD has increased their lead with a 10 plus percent gain
over their last-gen 7000 series. In handbrake, our H.264 results were disappointing
with the last-generation Ryzen 7 beating the new hotness,
but AV1 encoding is a whole other story
thanks to AM5's switch to a true 512-bit data path
instead of double-pumping 256. We see a similar improvement on the 9600X in Blender,
but curiously, the 9700X isn't gonna give you a reason
to upgrade over last-gen. Perhaps it's not as powerful as we thought it would be?
More on that later. And unfortunately, that trend of barely changing
continues with Godot Compile, where we have some marginal-generational uplift
on the Ryzen 7 and then slightly better results on the Ryzen 5.
7-Zip is a tad better for both in compression, but then worse in decompression,
and while Cinebench does see an improvement, it's minimal.
So what's going on here? As it turns out, a lot of it has to do
with the lower power consumption that we mentioned earlier.
In Cinebench, our 7700X consumes an average of 144 watts,
while the 9700X is steady at 88 watts.
That is almost a 40% decrease in power consumption
while netting slightly more performance. And here in this part of Canada, where power is cheap,
it's hard to get too excited about this kind of efficiency,
but for other parts of the world, you could save so much on power,
you could treat yourself to a PTM7950 thermal pad
from LTTstore.com. And check this out. Sure, our 14700K is streets ahead in terms of raw numbers,
but it's using almost 250 watts out of the box to get there.
That is almost triple the power for just under twice the score.
And if you toss out those e-cores, we can see that in single core testing
on both the 97 and 9600X, Intel is losing by a wide margin.
Now part of this could be because AMD seems to be leaving
some performance on the table. Check this out. In Cinebench, our Ryzen 7 refuses to reach
the advertised 5.5 gigahertz boost clock, capping out instead at around 5.2.
And I know what you're thinking. Well, that 5.5 is just a single core boost.
It's just for gaming, except that on our Ryzen 5,
it does manage to hit its maximum advertised boost
across all cores in multi-threaded workloads. Not all the time, mind you, but sometimes,
our Ryzen 7 doesn't seem to be defective. It hits 5.5 in games and even in other stress tests,
like OCCT-Linpack and outside of games,
it's using the same or a similar power envelope to do so.
So what gives here? And I know what you're thinking. It's gotta be cooling, right?
Well, here's the thing. This might be clear to some of you already,
but less watts means less heat. So where AMD was already crushing Intel,
now we're seeing even better performance. These chips run so cool.
I'm talking a 22 degree drop on average on the Ryzen 7
and 16 degrees on the Ryzen 5.
So for anyone who hates seeing high CPU temps,
AMD just dummied Intel and did it efficiently.
So it's not thermals. What is it? We'll get to it.
First, I wanna talk about where this efficiency uplift comes from.
It's partially thanks to AMD's new two-ahead branch prediction.
This is gonna be really simplified down, but here we go.
Let's say you're running a program and that program is trying to get from point A to point B.
Without branch prediction, at every fork in the road, it has to stop and figure out which way to go,
then go down the right path. With branch prediction,
your CPU can predict the path ahead of time, removing the need to stop and think at each fork.
With two-ahead prediction, the CPU is guessing the next two steps.
And by dual porting the instruction fetching, AMD is able to basically check the guesswork
about twice as quickly, which speeds up the entire process.
Now there is still a penalty if they get a prediction wrong,
but it's not any worse than how they were doing things before. So it's all gains, baby.
So what's not to love here? Well, there are a few things.
We are not getting the XDNA2 AI component
that is present in the StrixPoint mobile counterpart to these chips.
Instead, AMD is claiming that the CPU can act as an AI accelerator,
which is a pretty honest takedown of the whole AI frenzy
that AMD themselves is participating in, but it could make a slight difference down the line,
especially for power consumption. A bigger issue for me though,
is that more Ryzen 9000 chips are coming,
but everything AMD has announced is going to be more expensive than what we're looking at today,
which continues AMD's troubling trend of ignoring their Ryzen 3 customers.
We also think that while efficiency is exciting to the data center folks
who are eagerly awaiting Epic Turin with its unthinkable 192 core counts,
most desktop users might have preferred to see AMD
give these chips a little more juice by default.
And it's finally time to talk about the weirdness that we observed.
We tested the 9700X with PBO enabled
and with its power set to unlimited. And what we found was that it easily drew over 140 watts,
putting it in the same neighborhood as its predecessor in terms of power consumption
and resulting in some measurable performance gains.
Of course though, this is technically overclocking and with the recent reliability issues
that have plagued Intel users, I can understand why some of you might shy away from this.
So I guess what I'm saying is, I wish AMD had just officially under warranty
given these things more juice so that we could reach those advertised boost clocks
across all cores like we did once we enabled PBO.
Also, last thing, the lowest tier AM5 B840 motherboards
that are supposedly supposed to help make this platform more affordable
don't officially support PCIe Gen 4.
So if you do try to save a buck on your motherboard, you could end up seriously limiting your graphics
and your storage bandwidth, which is just, it's one more knife in the side
of AMD's budget conscious customers. With that in mind, we thought it would be interesting
to see how AMD's new offerings stack up against what you can't buy from AMD right now.
A CPU that costs less than half as much money, fits in a cheaper board that does support PCIe Gen 4
and comes with a stock cooler. The results aren't amazing,
but when you don't even have a competitor in the weight class, you kind of forfeit the fight
and Intel's 14100F puts up pretty respectable results
at less than half the price. Now it struggles in productivity
and struggles even more in CPU-bound games, but if you're on a budget, it's a pretty compelling value.
Of course though, it's based on a platform that has no future upgrade path
and you aren't saving that much compared to AM4,
which by the way, AMD just released another refresh for
with the XT lineup. And they also confirmed that AM5
is gonna be supported until at least 2027. In conclusion then, solid chips,
even better if you're adventurous and turn on PBO, but not really for gamers.
So I'm kind of more excited to see the matchup that's coming then between the 9800X3D
and Intel's Aero Lake, which supposedly is dropping hyperthreading altogether.
Huge move and I don't think anybody knows what that's gonna mean for gaming performance
as they go to a purely big little architecture.
Just like nobody knows what on earth would happen if I didn't segue to today's sponsor.
If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go check out our review of the 7800X3D.
Somehow that chip and even its predecessor are just killing it.
Years later, outstanding gaming CPUs.