everyone including us has recommended the AMD ryzen 5700 x3d for gaming on a
budget at some point or another but like
who wants to pay for a gaming PC that is out of date before you even click add to
cart not you but fortunately there's a
secret gaming CPU one that goes blow for blow with the 5700 x3d and sits on a
future ready platform and most importantly is cheaper meet the AMD
ryzen 5 7500f we ran it through the Labs
Gauntlet to find out if this off menu CPU is the one budget-minded Gamers
should be targeting just like we're targeting you yes you Howard with this
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the 7500f isn't exactly new so why are
we covering it now well the main reason is that unlike CPUs that come in retail
boxes this one is targeted at system Builders and bulk buyers and therefore
has mostly flown under our radar now you
can find them on sites like New Egg but at the time of writing the most reliable
place to get one for a good price seems to be AliExpress not exactly a
mainstream us retailer but what is it
well on paper it is strikingly similar to a ryzen 5 7600 non-x except that it
lacks onboard Graphics hence the- F suffix and hence the lower price there
are some compromises here compared to the 5700 X 3D it's got only about
onethird of the cash none of AMD's
amazing 3dv cach here and being OEM chip
it comes with no AMD direct warranty or box cooler but if you're willing to live
on the edge it boosts nearly 1 GHz higher uses newer Zen 4 cores supports
faster ddr5 memory and sits in a more modern am5 socket giving us room to
upgrade it in the future let's see how these differences manifest in gaming
starting with our test that best isolate CPU performance the 7500f does pretty
darn well it Trails the 600x and 5700 X
CD in games like cyber Punk and Shadow the Tomb Raider but on average it
remains within Striking Distance falling short by a smaller Gap than the price
difference between those chips and that's kind of the worst case scenario
in games where clock speed is King like rocket League the 7500 FC's a big lead
of over 24% over its primary competitor
and I say primary competitor cuz Intel still exists for now but it's hard to
call them competition when we throw in some similarly priced chips from Team
blue on the chart they do not put up a
fight not a single one beats our
7500f even once even worse our other
secret value gaming monster the ryzen 8400f gets in on the Beatdown too often
available for just over $90 sometimes cheaper this almost an
8600 G but without the igpu beats the
more expensive 13400 F in all but one of
our tests even then it was a draw for 1%
lows which I still considered to be a win even considering that the 8,400 f is
on average about 20% slower than the
7500f and even occasionally falls behind the older 5600x in games like F1 the
price to Performance of this little fella is kind of outstanding and that
positive look continues when we match our CPUs with gpus that might be a
little more price appropriate price appropriate like this quality stretchy
wicking button-up sport shirt from LTT Store.com fre as soon as we switch to a
more reasonable 4060 class GPU both the
8400f and 7500f make us question why gamers are even bothering with gaming
CPUs at all the 8400 does show its limitations more often but the 7500f
stays remarkably close to the old budget gaming King even pulling slightly ahead
over overall at 1440p and matching the gold standard for
PC gaming the 9800 x3d in cyberpunk and
f124 of course a lot of this changes once we swap out our GPU which we know
from a lot of audience surveys is the most likely upgrade to an existing
system paired with a 470 super the 8400
starts to fall behind especially at 1080p where on average the 9800 x3d
beats its 1% lows by 41% which is a lot
even considering that it costs five times as much and remember it's more
fair to compare the total system price versus the price of individual
components when evaluating bang for the buck of a new pc purchase focusing back
in on our head-to-head showdown between the 7500 F and the 5700 x3d they trade
blows with each other performing about 15% better than the 8400f with the 7500f
taking F1 in rocket league and the 5700 x3d holding strong and Punk and Shadow
the Tomb Raider as we jump to 1440p the results are same same but with smaller
gaps and by the time we make it all the way to 4K we're so GPU bound that even
the 8400f is back within a margin of error of the gold standard now this is
where we had planned to end our testing but then we thought okay but what if we
switch over to an RTX 4090 for some legitimate 4K gaming that would
obviously be a pretty imbalanced Choice given that the MSRP of that g GPU is
more than 10 times the cost of our 7500f but wouldn't you know it the
little F gin that could is breathing down the neck of the
9800 x3d in most games with the 1% lows
of City skylines 2 being the only really
meaningful performance difference across our UHD gaming testing but what is all
that mean well first of all while this isn't really news it means hot damn
Intel y'all need to get it together while AMD has dominated the CPU gaming
performance charts at both the mid-end and high-end for a while their budget
lineup has withered to almost nothing
leaving an opportunity for Intel an opportunity they should have taken while
they had it because now with these two stealthy budget ryons it's hard to see a
single bright spot for team blue I mean we didn't even include the latest
generation of core Ultra chips in our testing because there aren't any core
Ultra CPUs and compatible motherboards that are in a comparable price bracket
that means that any Intel budget purchase is going to be on a dead
platform Yonkers but what about compared to AMD's
own products should you be considering these effing cool
chips well yeah both offer strong real
world performance as long as you can find one for the right price and while I
lean more towards recommending the 7500f as a long-term proposition for
gamers the 8400f is one of very few
quality sub $100 processors these days and could be a great way to game today
if you're on a strict budget just be aware that someday and that day may
never come being limited to eight PCIe Gen 4 lanes for your GPU may make you
feel the pinch making this one the less future proof of our options though of
course that won't matter if the only future proofing you care about is
putting something you in your am5 socket sometime between now and 2027 when AMD
says that this platform will be abandoned oh and there is one more thing
while AliExpress is pretty reliable these days we actually ordered a second
chip off of New Egg just to make sure and we found that both were equally
genuine import tariffs could impact the viability of these CPUs for our American
neighbors wait sorry did I say one more thing I meant two more things and the
second is this segue to our sponsor seic
you know what kind of cars I like the kind with unreliable gutless engines
just kidding of course nobody likes that and in the same way nobody likes a PC
that has a gutless unreliable engine and that's where cic's Focus GX line of
power supplies comes in they'll keep your rig running smoothly and
efficiently no matter what kind of workload you're putting it through they
use a thermal solution called optis sync which enhances cooling efficiency while
minim iing space requirements meaning you can stick a cic power supply in
almost any size of case and still have enough power to support nextg gpus it
even comes in white or black to match your build and the best part it comes
with a 10-year transferable warranty so don't wait pick up a cic focus GX today
using our Link in the video description if you're looking for a GPU to pair with
your new CPU we have reviewed a ton of gpus recently with the AMD RX 970 and
970 XT looking like a pretty solid match
for the 7500f as long as you can get it at a fair price or actually maybe the
Intel b580 wow what a hell froze over
system that would be AMD CPU Intel GPU