With the Ryzen 9 7900 and their other non-X processors, AMD is offering more affordable versions of their Zen 4 lineup, with lower power targets, which ensures they are easier to cool. With this move, AMD is now also able to include a boxed cooler in the package, which helps offset the purchase cost and makes things simpler for building office-type computers. Under the hood, physically, the Ryzen 9 7900 is identical to the Ryzen 9 7900X. It comes with the same 6+6 core CCD configuration, meaning the processor's compute capability is built from two separate silicon dies, which each have six cores inside them. These are all "P-Cores" in Intel speak, AMD Zen 4 does not feature heterogenous cores like Intel introduced a while ago. Cache sizes are unchanged, too. What is different is the power limits, as expected. Ryzen 9 7900 is rated for 65 W TDP, which is a huge difference to the 170 W TDP of Ryzen 9 7900X—less than half of it. AMD has also lowered the rated clocks, because less power headroom is available. Maximum boost is down to 5.4 GHz from 5.6 GHz, and base clock is now at 3.7 GHz, one full GHz lower than the 4.7 GHz base clock of the 7900X, probably to account for scenarios where the IGP is fully lit up, leaving not a lot of power for the CPU cores.

For productivity, the Ryzen 9 7900 is a fantastic workhorse that has plenty of processing power even for demanding activities like rendering or encoding. Averaged over our extensive application test suite, we find the Ryzen 9 7900 fairly close to the 7900X. The averaged performance difference is only 8.5%, but it also depends a lot on the actual application. Basically, the differences will be small as long as a given workload will fit within the 65 W TDP limit. Once that is crossed, you'll be seeing much bigger gaps, of around 20%, but that's expected to achieve the processor's low heat output. Considering its price point, the Ryzen 7900 non-X goes up against the Intel 13700K and 12900K. While AMD's new offering can outperform the 12900K by a small margin, the 13700K is faster by around 9% on average, ending up much closer to the 7900X. The performance uplifts compared to last generation's Zen 3 are pretty impressive: 22% faster than the 5900X, 12% faster than even the 5950X, despite a 4-core deficit.

Things are different in gaming. Here the high core count doesn't matter much and single-threaded and memory performance take over. The Ryzen 9 7900 actually ends up as one of the slowest options from the AMD Zen 4 family for gaming. The underlying reason is that the dual CCD design results in higher inter-core latencies, which drag down gaming performance. Another factor is that the 7900 runs relatively low clock speeds overall, which affect gaming performance quite a bit, too. At 1080p, on average, the 7900 gets sandwiched between the Ryzen 5 7600 and 7600X. The performance differences vs other Zen 4 are relatively small though, they all sit in a narrow band that spans a few percentage points relative to the other comparison processors in this review. As resolution increases, the gaps become even smaller, and the 7900 keeps its relative positioning. What's important here to clarify is that Ryzen 9 7900 is not a bad gaming processor, quite the opposite. It's a fantastic gaming machine that's faster than all Zen 3 processors, including Ryzen 7 5800X3D. It's also faster than most Intel 12th and 13th Gen CPUs. On the other hand, there's CPU choices that are cheaper and faster, like other Zen 4 models, the Intel 13600K, 13700K, and of course the new Zen 4 X3D processors (7800X3D seems promising).

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 RDNA 2 based Radeon 610. 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 9 7900 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 75 W, but it's still a huge difference to the 200 W that we saw on the 7900X. Normally you'd expect such a big power limitation to affect performance a lot, but as our results show, performance is quite close. Magic? Binning? No, what AMD is doing is running the processor at lower voltage and clocks, which make it run much more efficiently. In our multi-threaded power efficiency test the 7900X gains 152 points for every watt consumed, whereas the 7900 non-X gains 332 points per watt—more than double that of its bigger brother—very impressive! This makes the Ryzen 9 7900 the most energy efficient CPU we've ever benched in that test. Single-threaded efficiency is not nearly as spectacular. It's "good," no doubt, but due to the dual-CCD design, the power usage is higher here, because even though all but one core are idle in that test, they (and their surrounding parts), still consume a little bit of power. Gaming efficiency is very good, not as stellar as 7950X3D or 13900K, but definitely near the top of our charts, which is important, especially if you want to reduce the heat dumped into your room during longer gaming sessions.

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 9 7900X, even with a Noctua cooler, we had no issues keeping the Ryzen 9 7900 cool. Even when fully loaded it ran at only 54°C, almost half of what the 7900X measures. Here the dual CCD design helps a lot, because it spreads the heat out over a larger area, so it's easier for the heatsink base to "pick up" the heat. AMD is including the Wraith Prism RGB top-flow cooler 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 9 7900X, especially at the price of "free."

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. 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." Unfortunately that option is disabled by default, and the reason seems to be that it's not always stable. With the newest BIOS versions, enabling Memory Context Restore will result in random blue screens in Windows, especially when the machine is idle.

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, but 100 MHz lower than the highest boost as stock. This manual all-core overclock will yield around 7% in applications, which nearly matches the 7900X. Using PBO (Scalar x10, Boost +200, CO -15), I got slightly better performance numbers at low thread counts, because here the CPU can boost higher than the 5.3 GHz all-core OC, but when fully loaded, this PBO setting will run at less than 5.3 GHz. 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 gaming performance gains from overclocking are fairly small though, in the range of 1-2%, depending on the resolution. I did a little bit of digging and it looks like the limiting factor here is that AMD capped the maximum clocks on the 7900 non-X. While the 7900X and 7950X will happily boost to 5.5 GHz and above with low thread counts, even at stock; the 7900 is artificially limited to much lower clocks, around 5.3 GHz. Just like on other recent CPUs, vendors have become really good at eking the last bits of performance out of their product at stock, so the gains from overclocking are not nearly as high as what we used to see in the past.

AMD's Ryzen 9 7900 is currently listed online for $430, which is simply too much, given what the product offers. You can buy a 7900X for $425 (yup, $5 cheaper), and it offers better performance across the board and a higher resale value. On the other hand there is no cooler included in the box and you better buy a powerful thermal solution to keep it cool. What you could do though is to buy a cheap cooler and run the 7900X with a lower power limit setting, which will greatly reduce its heat output and improve efficiency. Probably the strongest competitor for Ryzen 7900 is the Intel Core i7-13700K, which costs $425, too, but achieves better performance in both applications and gaming. If gaming is your main focus, you might as well go for a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which lets you build the rig with much lower platform cost, because it uses DDR4 and motherboards for AMD Socket AM5 are much more expensive. Last but not least, we have the 7800X3D, which will be out soon, at a price of $450. This CPU will give much better gaming performance than the 7900 non-X, probably rivaling 13700K and 13900K, but we'll have to wait for the reviews, soon. If AMD could bring the price of 7900 non-X down to $399 or below, then it could become an interesting choice for people who are eyeing the 7700X ($325). Such an upsell would be tempting, because it offers considerably better application performance at a price increase that's "close enough" to consider. It would also help offset the higher platform cost against Intel's offerings and sufficiently separate the 7900 from the 7900X.