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 7 7700, today's second review is for the Ryzen 5 7600, 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 keep their money together in these challenging time, and the high motherboard cost, plus DDR5, makes 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 7 7700 is virtually identical to the Ryzen 7 7700X, 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 4.5 GHz, and maximum Boost has been lowered by only 100 MHz, to 5.3 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 7 7700 is only 3% slower than its bigger 7700X sibling—this is nothing you'd ever notice in real-life. At this performance level, the Ryzen 7 7700 is able to match the similar-priced Intel Core i7-12700K, and the 12900K is only 11% ahead. With 13th Gen Raptor Lake, Intel has been betting big on their E-Cores and it paid off, the 13700K is a pretty serious 21% ahead of the Ryzen 7700, but Intel is charging almost $100 extra for it. Cost-wise, the 13600K is comparable to the Ryzen 7700, despite the "7" vs "6" branding, and here the difference is only 6% in favor of Intel.

For productivity the Ryzen 7 7700 is a fantastic workhorse that has plenty of processing power even for demanding activities like rendering or encoding. The eight Zen 4 cores crunch through data much faster than eight cores from older CPU architectures—not only core count matters, but also how modern the tech inside is. If you absolutely must have the fastest processing times, then you could certainly opt for the Ryzen 9 7900X or 7950X, but these are so much more expensive, it won't be easy to justify the cost difference. While these two faster processors use a second chiplet that contains the extra cores, the Ryzen 7 7700 works with a single-CCD design, which helps ensure optimum performance in all cases, especially for lower threaded workloads.

Gaming is such a scenario. Here the communication between the two CCDs often comes with performance penalties that push the 7900X and 7950X below the single-CCD processors in game tests. That's why the Ryzen 7700X is so popular with gamers—because it offers the best Zen 4 gaming performance, with "just enough" cores. The Ryzen 7 7700 non-X continues that philosophy, at 1080p, it's only 0.9% slower than the 7700X. All Zen 4 Ryzen are very close in terms of gaming performance, slightly behind the Intel Raptor Lake CPUs. For gaming the Ryzen 7 7700 is a fantastic choice, especially if you feel that future games will be more CPU-intensive, which could lead to 6-core designs (like the Ryzen 7600) getting overwhelmed. Personally I think we're far from that, especially when you have a modern 6-core CPU, but you never know.

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 that's one more thing that could break and needs to be maintained. 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.

Probably the biggest highlight of the Ryzen 7 7700 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 83 W, but it's still a solid improvement over the 135 W that we saw on the 7700X. Compared to Intel's offerings there's a huge difference: the 13700K uses almost three times the power—252 W! Even the 13600K is very power hungry (187 W). The lower TDP helps quite a bit with energy-efficiency. In our multi-threaded testing, the Ryzen 7 7700 is the most energy-efficient processor we've ever tested. In single-threaded it's in second place. Good job AMD!

With that efficiency I guess you can already imagine that temperatures are very easy to manage. While we were always fighting thermal throttling on the Ryzen 7 7700X, even with a Noctua cooler, we had no issues keeping the Ryzen 7 7700 cool. Even when fully loaded it ran at only 71°C, a 23°C improvement over the 7700X! AMD is including the Wraith Prism in the box, which is a very decent cooling solution. While it's not as powerful as the Noctua, it's a perfect match for the Ryzen 7 7700X, especially at the price of "free." We've got 86°C, which is still far away from the 95°C temperature that Zen 4 always wants to run at. This gives you plenty of headroom for bad case ventilation, or hot summer weather.

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."

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 quite decent result. Using PBO (Scalar x10, Boost +200, CO -10) I got very similar performance numbers, 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. While overclocking definitely yields performance improvements, in the 3-5% range for applications, the gains for games are quite meager and only in the 1% range. Just like on other recent CPUs, vendors have become really good at eking the last bits of performance out of their product at stock.

AMD wants $330 for the Ryzen 7 7700, which is quite a nice improvement over the $400 launch MSRP of the Ryzen 7 7700X, but 7700X is available for $345 nowadays. The $15 difference gives you only a small performance gain, but the resale value should be better. On the other hand, the non-X includes a solid cooler, which will easily save you 30-50 bucks. 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. Strong competition comes from Intel models like the Core i5-13600K ($320) or the Core i5-12700K ($325). I can also image that a lot of gamers will happily pay more for the 13700K ($430), because of the higher gaming performance, and the lower motherboard cost on Intel will let them offset that cost. At CES, Intel announced various non-K models at multiple price points that look quite interesting compared to the 7700 at $330: Core i7-13700 @ $384, i5-13600 @ $255, i5-13500 @ $232 and i5-13400F @ $196. We'll see how these turn out, but I feel that AMD's $330 price point for the Ryzen 7700 is a little bit ambitious and that the company will have to go for sub-$300 to conclusively put the Ryzen 7 7700 on people's purchase list.

AMD at CES announced its Ryzen 7000X3D processors that integrate 3D Vertical Cache technology. While these new models don't threaten the 7700/7700X directly, because the lineup only begins with the 8-core 7800X3D, it'll still be a tempting offer for many gamers. If AMD's gaming performance claims versus the Core i9-13900K hold up, then these will be some impressive processors, but that also means that AMD will price them at quite a premium, to try and recover from the slow start it had with the Ryzen 7000 series.