AMD announced their new affordable Zen 4 65 W processors at CES last week, today we have the reviews for you. In this review we're covering the Ryzen 5 7600, today's second review is for the Ryzen 7 7700, the 7900 is coming in a few days.

AMD's Zen 4, while very impressive processors technically, have been having a hard time winning over the hearts of buyers, because people are trying to save money where they can in these challenging times, and the high motherboard cost, plus DDR5 exclusivity, make the Zen 4 platform quite expensive overall. Also, Intel's newfound success with the Alder Lake and Raptor Lake architectures means that AMD is no longer the only CPU-choice worth considering. In order to strengthen their position, AMD's new Zen 4 processors come at lower prices, with lower power consumption, and include a cooler in the box, which further helps improve the value of the CPU.

The Ryzen 5 7600 is virtually identical to the Ryzen 5 7600X, it's based on the exact same Raphael silicon, which uses a multi-chip module that combines a 6 nm IO die, with a CCD compute die that's fabricated in 5 nanometers, containing the CPU's number crunching logic. Besides the change in TDP from 105 W to 65 W, the clock speeds have been reduced, too. The base frequency is now 3.8 GHz, down from 4.7 GHz, and maximum Boost has been lowered by 200 MHz, to 5.1 GHz. Cache sizes are identical, too, the new processor is drop-in compatible and will "just work," although a BIOS update is recommended.

Averaged over our 45 application tests we find that the Ryzen 5 7600 is only 5% slower than the 7600X—pretty impressive for a 30% price difference. At this performance level it matches the Intel Core i5-12600K and is 8% faster than the Zen 3 Ryzen 5800X 8-core, and 10% faster than 5800X3D. The gen-over-gen uplift, compared to the Ryzen 5 5600, is 32%. The Zen 3 flagships 5900X and 5950X are only 6% and 15% faster, respectively. Ryzen 7 7700X offers 20% performance uplift for $115 more. Intel's Core i5-13600K is 23% ahead, thanks to the mix of P- and E-cores, but also more expensive. Overall, Ryzen 5 7600 will give you virtually the same productivity experience as the 7600X, as long as you don't time it with a stopwatch. Performance is very respectable and can handle all day-to-day tasks with ease. The Zen 4 architecture is also great at computationally intensive tasks like rendering and encoding. If time is money for you, i.e. you're using the processor professionally and less time waiting on such tasks means more money in the bank for you, then you might want to consider a model with more cores, but for the vast majority of the market a Ryzen 5 7600 will have plenty of muscle for all workloads.

While AMD Zen 3 lacked integrated graphics, Zen 4 now comes with an iGPU. This is a huge deal for businesses, because they just want a box that can run Office, a browser and their own software—no need for an expensive GPU, one more thing that could break and needs maintenance. All Zen 4 Ryzens come with the same integrated GPU, the new 65 W models, too. These "just work"—if no discrete graphics card is installed, plug the monitor cable in the motherboard, boom, everything works. Windows Update will install the right driver, or you can grab the official AMD Radeon drivers. Overall IGP performance is outstanding, and plenty for everything except serious gaming. Some lighter 3D apps work perfectly fine, too, and get hardware-acceleration, just like all video decode and encode workloads, for video conferencing as an example. While AMD is very clear that the integrated graphics are not for gaming, performance is still impressive (for an IGP). AMD is able to match the IGP of the Core i9-13900K, which uses Intel's latest Xe architecture, that they've spent a ton of die area on. A real, discrete graphics card is still much faster, even the most entry-level Radeon RX 6400 offers four times (!) the FPS. For all other typical consumer activities, these integrated graphics are awesome and they'll be a huge selling factor for cost-optimized or compact office systems, a market where Intel has traditionally dominated, because discrete graphics cards weren't required.

Serious gaming with a discrete graphics card works very well on the Ryzen 5 7600, too—of course. Our testing reveals that the 7600X is only a tiny bit faster than the 7600, by a negligible margin. What's also important is that Ryzen 5 7600 is able to match the performance of Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which is the best Zen 3 CPU available for gaming. Intel's Raptor Lake 13th Gen processors do offer a noticeable gaming performance improvement, but Intel has only released 13600K, 13700K and 13900K so far, which are much more expensive. At CES, they announced more affordable models, some of which are Alder Lake rebrands, which won't offer the best gaming performance. It seems that the most affordable Raptor Lake processor will be the 13400F, which will probably end up a few points faster than the 7600. I bought a 13400F in retail, it's shipping today, so more info soon.

Probably the biggest highlight of the Ryzen 5 7600 is its lowered TDP of 65 W. Due to the way AMD reports TDP, the actual peak power consumption is a little bit higher with 80 W, but it's still a solid improvement over the 100 W that we saw on the 7600X. Compared to Intel's offerings there's a huge difference: the 13600K uses more than twice the power—190 W! As expected energy-efficiency for multi-threaded workloads is improved. A somewhat surprising result is that for lower-threaded workloads the Ryzen 7 7600 is actually a little bit less energy-efficient than the 7600X. Changing the TDP limit only affects the maximum power consumption, not the whole efficiency curve. It seems that at lighter loads, the Ryzen 7600 runs slightly higher voltage than the 7600X, which costs a little bit in efficiency, but could be just my sample. It's nothing serious, more like a curiosity in the test results that I wanted to explain.

I've been complaining about extremely long boot times in my original Zen 4 reviews, and AMD assured us that these are fixed. To my surprise nothing was fixed and the new 65 W CPU models took just as long to boot—30 seconds or more—every single time. Turns out that on ASUS motherboards you need to enable the "Memory Context Restore" BIOS option, which saves some memory training info after the first attempt and reuses that on subsequent reboots. Kinda dumb that the option is turned off by default, even on the latest 0805 BIOS from last month. With "Memory Context Restore" enabled, boot times are still longer than on other platforms, but only by a few seconds and are now in a range that I would call "acceptable."

While AMD rates their Ryzen 5 7600 for 3.8 GHz base, we measured the actual clocks the processor runs at, and I'm happy to report that the CPU ticks at 5.15 GHz with one thread active, many threads active, or all cores fully loaded, no matter what you do—fantastic. I suspect this could change when you fully light up the integrated graphics, populate all memory channels and keep the I/O busy, which drives up the power consumption of the processor, so that it will have to take away some energy from the CPU cores, to stay within its power budget. This is a somewhat unlikely scenario though, and you can always use the BIOS settings to bump the power limits a bit.

Overclocking the new Ryzens works just like the -X models—there's no artificial segmentation or limitations (unlike what Intel keeps doing). You may either adjust the multiplier manually, or use Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) to overclock more intelligently. I tried both, the manual OC route gave me 5.3 GHz, which is a very decent result, considering that the CPU is limited to 5.15 GHz at out-of-the-box configuration. Using PBO (Scalar x10, Boost +200, CO -10) I got very similar results, both in terms of performance and heat output. Neither of those configs is the maxed out hand-tuned config that you can achieve if you spend days or weeks with tweaking, but rather a common ground that's easy to reach for a vast majority of people, even with a limited skillset. The good news is that overclocking definitely yields performance improvements, in the 3-5% range, which is not huge, but not nothing either. Just like on other recent CPUs, vendors have become really good at eking the last bits of performance out of their product at stock.

The lower TDP helps with cooling of course. While Ryzen 7600X was "not easy" to cool, the 7600 runs much cooler and is no problem to handle for any decent heatsink. AMD is including their Wraith Stealth in the box, which is a welcome addition as it lets people get going immediately, without having to shop around for a cooler—it also saves some money. Unfortunately the Wraith Stealth is somewhat on the weak side, even for the Ryzen 7600's heat output. This won't damage the processor at all, and everything will work great, but the CPU will go into thermal throttling at 95°C after a while, even when loaded with lighter tasks like gaming. Performance won't fall off a cliff though. As we uncovered in this article, the throttling will be very well-behaved and rather a small, reasonable reduction in performance that's just enough to keep the CPU from overheating. Still, I don't understand why AMD didn't include a Wraith Spire in the box.

Priced at $230, the Ryzen 5 7600 is a huge improvement to the value proposition of the Zen 4 platform. It's considerably cheaper than the 7600X ($300), yet runs virtually as fast. As mentioned before, a heatsink is included, too, so that's at least another $20 saved, unless you're reusing your existing cooler, when upgrading from Socket AM4, for example. AMD motherboards are still crazy expensive. Even the cheapest B650 boards are around $200! Intel clearly has the better offerings here, with plenty of boards in the $150 to $200 range and below. While Intel lets you use DDR4 memory, AMD is betting on DDR5 exclusively with AM5, which guarantees best performance, but increases overall cost. Spending $320 on an Intel Core i5-13600K just to gain a few percent in additional gaming performance doesn't seem to be worth it, even if you can make back some of it through lower motherboard prices. As mentioned before, Intel just released new affordable models, too, and it will be interesting to see how they compete with the 7600.

Last but not least, and probably the biggest obstacle for AM5 adoption, is the fact that A LOT of people are currently on AMD's AM4 platform, using older Zen 2 Ryzens or even first-gen. For this crowd, the best upgrade path is to buy a cost-effective Zen 3 CPU, Ryzen 5600, 5600X or even 5800X3D and they've got a huge upgrade at minimal cost. My neighbor just upgraded his Ryzen 5 1600X to a Ryzen 5 5600X, not even 200 bucks, plop in new CPU, done, a whole new gaming experience.

AMD at CES announced its Ryzen 7000X3D processors that integrate 3D Vertical Cache technology. For those in the market for the $230-ish 7600, this isn't too relevant, as the lineup only begins with the 8-core 7800X3D, and if its gaming performance claims versus the Core i9-13900K hold up, AMD will price these at quite a premium, to try and recover from the slow start it had with the Ryzen 7000 series.