Today the day! AMD allowed reviewers to start publishing their Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 Series processor reviews. The four new CPUs were detailed just a few weeks ago, now we can share everything with you. With Zen 4, AMD has made significant improvements to nearly all parts of their platform. It starts with the new Zen 4 architecture, which improves instruction-per-clock by well over 13% and adds support for AVX-512 and acceleration for AI workloads. Also new is that compatible motherboards use the swanky "Socket AM5," which does away with the pins on the processor and uses an LGA package, similar to what Intel has been using for nearly two decades now. The new socket has support for all the latest technologies: PCI-Express 5.0 for graphics and NVMe storage; DDR5 memory, and also higher power delivery capability. Last but not least, AMD is finally including integrated graphics across the board, even with their non-APU processors, which will be extremely useful when building a rig that will only see light activity, such as office productivity, light browsing, or a media PC.

In this review we're examining the Ryzen 7 7700X, which is the company's 8-core/16-thread offering for Zen 4. The chip runs at a base clock of 4.5 GHz and boosts up to 5.4 GHz—an 800 MHz increase over the 5700X. AMD has also increased the TDP from 65 W to 105 W, which brings with it more headroom for boosting to higher clocks, but also increases cooling requirements, but more on that later.

We've spent months working on a new and improved CPU benchmarking suite, with tons of new apps and games, and every processor was retested with the latest Windows 11 updates, game patches and drivers. Averaged over our 45 application tests, we find the Ryzen 7 7700X a highly impressive 30% faster than its Ryzen 7 5700X predecessor, and 20% faster than the 5800X. That 30% is a huge increase in performance, gen-over-gen, and AMD achieved it without increasing the core count—7700X is still an 8-core processor. This makes performance slightly faster than the outgoing Intel Core i7-12700K, which needs eight P-Cores, plus four E-Cores (8P+4E) to keep up. Another impressive achievement is that the Ryzen 7700X beats AMD's last generation flagship, the Ryzen 9 5950X, by a small margin in application performance. Intel's i9-12900K is only 7% faster in applications, the Ryzen 9 7900X, also released today, is 15% faster, and the 7950X impresses with a 26% lead.

In gaming, Zen 4 can also deliver. At 1080p, the 7700X is the fastest Zen 4 processor for gaming—yes, even faster than the 7950X. The underlying reason is that the 7900X and 7950X use a dual-CCD design, where the processor's computation ability is spread across two silicon dies, while the 7600X and 7700X use only a single CCD. This single CCD configuration helps make a difference in gaming, because things are better localized and there's no inter-CCD latency penalties. The differences are small though, the other Ryzens are still formidable CPUs for gaming, but if gaming is your primary focus, then the 7700X is your best choice. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is a fantastic gaming processor, but on average, for our 12-game mix, the 7700X can pull ahead. Where the 5800X3D will still have an edge is in specific highly-CPU bound games that can benefit from its huge cache (such as Borderlands 3). Gaming performance on Intel is still a tiny bit better than Zen 4, at least with our selection of games, as long as you have an Intel CPU with P-Cores and E-Cores—the P-Core-only Intel 12600 and 12400F in our test group do lose to Zen 4 in gaming. In early summer, way before we had any Zen 4 samples, I picked titles based on their relevance and popularity; and it seems the games list tends to run a bit better on Intel than what a general average over many more titles would end up at. I have plans to test Zen 4 on a wider range of games, 50 is the target, to get a better statistical feel for this. Both AMD Zen 4 and Intel Alder Lake are fantastic processor series for gaming, and in a subjective test without an FPS counter you wouldn't be able to tell their performance apart. For gaming targeting the highest FPS, the processor is secondary, you should rather spend as much money as possible on the graphics card and pair it with a more affordable processor, instead of focusing on brute CPU performance at the cost of GPU budget.

AMD is fabricating the Zen 4 compute dies on TSMC's 5 nanometer production process, and the I/O die is made on TSMC 6 nanometer. Just these numbers alone would suggest that Zen 4 is extremely energy efficient, but it seems clocking Ryzen 7000 at these high frequencies and TDPs has cost AMD quite some efficiency. We've upgraded our power measurement pipeline, and can now measure "chip-only" power consumption (as opposed to "whole system" before), and we record samples much faster, with full integration of the results. This lets us pair up power measurements with individual benchmark runs and perform more complex analyses, check out page 23. Compared to the Ryzen 7 5700X, the 7700X has lost around 15% in energy efficiency, but does offer much better performance overall, a reasonable tradeoff in my opinion. You can always dial down the clocks and voltages a bit, and greatly improve efficiency with minimal impact on performance. Compared to Intel's offerings, the Zen 4 architecture is miles ahead in power-draw. Especially when comparing against the i9-12900K, it's difficult to justify the additional power draw on Intel. The Intel i7-12700K comes with more sane power limits and is roughly in the same ballpark as the 7700X when it comes to power and efficiency.

What will be a big source of discussion for Zen 4 is the extremely high temperatures. Using our high-end Noctua air cooler, there was a constant struggle trying to keep the CPU from its 95°C thermal limit - at which point it will start lowering boost clocks. Even adding all-in-one watercooling wasn't able to make a significant difference. The only AIO that showed meaningful gains over air was the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 240, which offers an "offset mounting" configuration that moves the center of the cold plate away from the center of the CPU to sit right on top of the compute dies on Zen 4. This gained us a couple of degrees improvement, so we could test the performance impact of hitting the 95°C temperature limit. I'm happy to report that there is only minimal loss in performance, maybe a few percent, as long as you have a good air cooler. AMD is very clear in their cooler guidance for 7950X and 7900X, mentioning "240-280 mm liquid," but the 7700X and 7600X are supposed to be paired with "mid-frame tower coolers," which I feel is a bit less than what I would recommend. AMD was also clear that 95°C is the new 65°C: "TJMax is the max safe operating temperature—not the absolute max temperature. In the Ryzen 7000 Series, the processor is designed to run at TJMax 24/7 without risk of damage or deterioration. At 95 degrees it is not running hot, rather it will intentionally go to this temperature as much as possible under load because the power management system knows that this is the ideal way to squeeze the most performance out of the chip without damaging it."

I'm just surprised that temperatures are so high. Maybe it's the smaller die size of the compute dies, paired with high clocks and voltage that leads to these temperatures, or some compromises were made to achieve compatibility with AM4 coolers, or maybe both. I'm sure in the coming months we'll learn more about the cooling challenges, how to overcome them, and cooler vendors will probably release solutions optimized for Socket AM5. Right now you need to be aware that cooling Zen 4 is much more difficult than Zen 3, and that you should really stop worrying about 95°C temperatures. AMD is very clear in their messaging that these temps are normal and expected.

During testing I didn't encounter any major bugs or issues; the whole AM5 / X670 platform works very well, considering how many new features it brings; there's one big gotcha though, and that's startup time duration. When powering on for the first time after a processor install, your system will spend at least a minute with memory training at POST code 15 before the BIOS screen appears. When I first booted up my Zen 4 sample I assumed it was hung and kept resetting/clearing CMOS. After first boot, the super long startup times improve, but even with everything set up and installed, you'll stare at a blank screen for 30 seconds. To clarify: after a clean system shutdown, without loss of power, when you press the power button you're still looking at a black screen for 30 seconds, before the BIOS logo finally appears. I find that an incredibly long amount of time, especially when you're not watching the POST code display that tells you something is happening. Most motherboards don't even have a POST code readout, and rely on LEDs to tell you which stage of the POST the machine is running at. The LED will seem "stuck" at memory or CPU. For cheaper boards that lack even this, there will be an unnerving wait. AMD and the motherboard manufacturers say they are working on improving this—they must. I'm having doubts that your parents would accept such an experience as an "upgrade", considering their previous computer showed something on-screen within seconds after pressing the power button.
Update Sep 29: I just tested boot times using the newest ASUS 0703 Beta BIOS, which comes with AGESA ComboAM5PI 1.0.0.3 Patch A. No noticeable improvement in memory training times. It takes 38 seconds from pressing the power button (after a clean Windows shutdown), until there ASUS BIOS POST screen shots. After that, the usual BIOS POST stuff happens and Windows still start, which takes another 20 seconds or so.

Just like previous AMD Ryzen processors, all AMD Zen 4 CPUs come with unlocked multipliers, which makes overclocking much easier. Our highest manual all-core OC turned out to be only 5.1 GHz, held back by the fact that it's impossible to keep the fully loaded CPU under 100°C, even with a large AIO. This means that you're limited in how much voltage you can feed the beast, and you thus end up with much lower manual clocks. You could decide to not run Prime95, and test stability with lighter loads only, but that's not what I consider a stable OC. I ran all our benchmarks at 5.1 GHz All-Core OC, and this config ends up slower than the 7700X at stock in all tests, so unless you have exceptional cooling or are super lucky with the silicon lottery, it makes no sense to go for an all-core OC, not even for rendering workloads. The better way to OC Ryzen is using PBO "Auto Overclocking," paired with Curve Optimizer, same as Zen 3. Spending just a few minutes on that will yield you a few percent in OC performance—not a lot, but the times of huge OC gains are firmly a thing of the past—CPU manufacturers are getting better and better at giving you the best performance out of the box.

As mentioned previously, Zen 4 now comes with integrated graphics. 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 like Google Earth work perfectly fine too, and are hardware-accelerated, just like all video decode and encode workloads for video conferencing, for example. While AMD is very clear that the integrated graphics are not for gaming, I still ran our IGP test suite and have to say I'm impressed—the Zen 4 IGP roughly matches the IGP of the Core i9-12900K, which uses Intel's latest Xe architecture and 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 compact, or cost-optimized office systems, a market where Intel has traditionally dominated, because discrete graphics cards weren't required.

AMD is pricing the Ryzen 7 7700X at $400, slightly below the $450 price point that the Ryzen 7 5800X launched at. Why am I comparing the 7700X with the 5800X? Because the 7700X is really the "7800X" of this generation, AMD just changed the naming, to make it easier to position an upcoming "Ryzen 7 7800X3D," and probably to align with Intel, who offer no x800 SKU either. On the 5800X3D, AMD had to lower the clock frequencies, so the 3DV Cache could be used, which led to a situation in which 5800X was faster in some workloads than 5800X3D—AMD want to avoid that naming mess this time. Right now the Ryzen 7 5800X costs only $295, the 5700X goes for $245, and the 5800X3D is $430. When comparing against these price points, the 7700X does feel expensive, but it offers much better performance too. Overall platform cost of Ryzen 7000 is however, very high. The new motherboards are extremely expensive, and there's only X670/X670E available for now, the more affordable B650 boards will be released in October. While Intel supports both DDR4 and DDR5, AMD is focusing exclusively on DDR5, saying that this will eventually help adoption rates of DDR5, which enables higher production volumes, which will bring memory pricing down. Nothing wrong there, and while the performance gains from DDR5 are substantial, it still drives up platform cost. Basically you're looking at $1000+ for Zen 4+board+memory whereas $500 will get you a solid Zen 3 setup that offers somewhat slower performance, but at half the price. For gamers, this means you could go one or two tiers higher in your graphics card choice, which would definitely result in an FPS increase. Intel's 12700K is $400 right now, with similar performance, and cheaper motherboards available, so that's strong competition too, and Intel's new 13th gen processors are getting announced this week. It seems like the CPU market will become even more interesting in the coming months, and I'd expect that AM5/DDR5 platform prices will go down in the closing months of 2022, and through 2023.