amd's ryzen 9000 is a true generational step forward. I'm talking bigger level one cache, tsmc's new and improved 49m 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 5800 x3d, all while using less power. As for Intel, well, they're in the middle of an absolute dump 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 MSI. Need a laptop? MSI's got you covered with their summer sale event. Check out their sweet deals on laptops like this cyborg 14 using the link in the video description. Because of amd's staggered launch, we're

only looking at the ryzen 5 9600 x and ryzen 79700 x today compared to last gen they boost slightly higher and level one caches 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 2 billion transistors into these little guys, about 26.2%. 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 9700 X would be the new gaming champ, but what they did say is that it's supposed to beat 5,000 series 3dv cash 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 9000 Series chips beat everything else on the field except for Intel's 14900 K. And let's be real, I can't.

personally, tell the difference between 381 frames per second and 378, and I certainly wouldn't want to deal with the extra heat, power consumption, or cost. Moving to a very CPU-bound Esports title in Rocket League, wow, do 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 GoedX3D 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 further ahead. But realistically, if you're spending this kind of money on your CPU, you're probably not going to 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 14100 F that could, just chugging along down there. But we'll come back to that later. First, I want to talk about our results from our x3d chips. The 7800 x3d does typically beat the prior generation 5800 x3d, 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 2 and 1/2 years ago hasn't really changed, other than that you might be able to save yourself a buck with the newer, cheaper 5700 x3d. 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 Huget bench Photoshop, but now

AMD has increased their lead with a 10 plus % gain over their last gen 7000 series in handbreak. Our h264 results were disappointing with the last Generation ryzen 7 beating the new hotness, but av1 encoding is a whole other story thanks to am5 switch to a true 512-bit data path instead of double pumping 256. We see a similar Improvement on the 9600 X in blender, but curiously the 97 100x isn't going to 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 go do compile where we have some marginal generational uplift on the ryzen 7, and then slightly better results on the ryzen 5. 7zip 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

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 PTM 7950 thermal pad from LTT store.com. And check this out: Sure, our 14700 K 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 ecor, we can see that in single-core testing on both the 97 and 9600 X, 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 GHz 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 got to 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° drop on average on the ryzen 7, and 16° 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 want to talk about where this efficiency uplift comes from. It's partially thanks to AMD's new two ahead branch prediction. This is going to 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 XDNA 2 AI component that is present in the Strix Point 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. 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 PCI.

E 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 just, 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 PCI 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 1400F 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 4 with the XT lineup, and they also confirmed that AM5 is going to 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 9800x 3D and Intel's AOL link, which supposed is dropping hyperthreading all together. Huge move, and I don't think anybody knows what that's going to 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 Squarespace. Tired of your online presence looking like a geoc city's nightmare? We feel you. Instead of dragging your feet on coding a site, you can literally just drag and drop designs with Squarespace blueprint. It's designed to give you great layout and styling options so your website is optimized.

for every device. They also have integrated, optimized SEO tools that help your site rank higher in search results, which means more people will find your site easily. Squarespace makes shopping easy too. They accept credit cards, PayPal, and even Apple pay to give your customers flexibility. If you want to give me money, you do it any way you want. And of course, we use Squarespace to build our website too. No more late nights spent Googling why my website broken. Squarespace has 24/7 support to help you build your dream website. Start building your website today and receive 10% off your first purchase by visiting squarespace.com/LTT. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go check out our review of the 7800 x3d. Somehow that chip and even its predecessor are just killing it, like years later. Outstanding gaming CPUs.

Stop, Intel’s Already Dead! - AMD Ryzen 9600X & 9700X Review

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.
