The Impact of AMD's Launch Strategy on Reviewers and Consumers

AMD's decision to distribute pre-reviewed firmware for their upcoming Ryzen 7000 series processors has caused some controversy among reviewers and consumers. The company is creating folders for commonly used review boards, distributing them to reviewers in advance of launch, and validating the performance of the CPUs on these boards. This means that AMD is essentially controlling the environment in which reviews are conducted, and any issues with the CPUs can be attributed to the specific board vendor rather than the processor itself.

As Patrick notes, he recently tested the Ryzen 7000 X CPU on an Azrock board and encountered memory issues. This suggests that there may be some compatibility problems with certain boards or memory configurations, which could affect real-world performance. The fact that AMD is taking steps to validate their products in advance of launch is a positive development, but it also raises questions about the company's overall strategy and commitment to ensuring the quality of their products.

One area where AMD has done well is in terms of efficiency improvements. The Ryzen 7000 X CPU's improved power management features mean that it will be more efficient than its predecessor, even if it doesn't offer significant performance gains. This is particularly important for those building new systems or upgrading existing ones, as it means they can get the benefits of a newer generation without necessarily replacing their entire system.

In contrast, Intel's 11th Gen Core processors are still struggling to gain traction in the market, and AMD has missed an opportunity to capitalize on this. The Ryzen 7000 X CPU is essentially just an incremental update over its predecessor, with no significant performance improvements or features that would justify upgrading from a previous generation. This is not necessarily true for the Ryzen 5000 series, which offers some notable efficiency gains and upgrades.

The pricing of AMD's processors has also become a major issue. The Ryzen 7000 X CPU is $60 cheaper than its Intel counterpart, but still commands a premium price due to its reputation and brand recognition. This makes it difficult for consumers to justify upgrading to an AMD processor when the difference in performance may not be significant enough to warrant the added cost.

In the case of gaming scenarios, the Ryzen 7800 X3D is actually more efficient than the 9700X, despite being released later. This is likely due to its improved architecture and power management features, which allow it to deliver better performance while consuming less power.

Overall, AMD's launch strategy has been marred by controversy and inconsistencies. While they have made some significant efficiency gains in their processors, these are not enough to justify the high prices and limited upgrades over previous generations. Consumers who are already happy with their current setup may not need to upgrade, and those who do will likely want to consider alternatives such as Intel's 11th Gen Core processors or AMD's own Ryzen 5000 series.

The Launch of Ryzen 7000 X3D: A New Generation of Gaming Processors?

AMD has finally released their latest generation of gaming processors, the Ryzen 7000 X3D. This new architecture promises to deliver improved performance and efficiency over its predecessor, with some notable upgrades in terms of power management and thermal design.

The Ryzen 7800 X3D is built on a new manufacturing process that allows for more transistors to be packed into a given area, resulting in increased processing power without a corresponding increase in heat or power consumption. This means that the processor can deliver better performance while consuming less power, making it an attractive option for gamers who want to upgrade their system.

In terms of actual performance, the Ryzen 7800 X3D has shown some impressive results in our tests. It delivers better gaming performance than its predecessor, with some notable upgrades in terms of frame rates and resolution. However, these gains are not entirely due to the processor itself, but also depend on other factors such as memory configuration and cooling.

One area where the Ryzen 7800 X3D excels is in terms of efficiency. The processor's improved power management features mean that it consumes less power than its predecessor, even at higher loads. This makes it an attractive option for gamers who want to upgrade their system without breaking the bank.

The Ryzen 7000 series has been a mixed bag for AMD. While they have made some significant upgrades in terms of efficiency and performance, these are not enough to justify the high prices and limited upgrades over previous generations. However, with the release of the Ryzen 7800 X3D, AMD is finally starting to offer a compelling alternative to Intel's 11th Gen Core processors.

Intel: A Company in Crisis

Intel is facing significant challenges in the current market. Their 11th Gen Core processors have not been able to gain traction, and the company is struggling to find its footing. The Ryzen 7000 series has shown some impressive performance gains over previous generations, but these are largely due to AMD's improved power management features rather than any significant upgrades in terms of processing power.

The Ryzen 7700X has proven to be a more attractive option for gamers than the 9700X, despite being released later. This is likely due to its improved architecture and power management features, which allow it to deliver better performance while consuming less power.

In contrast, Intel's 11th Gen Core processors are still struggling to compete with AMD's offerings. The company has made some significant upgrades in terms of processing power, but these have not been enough to justify the high prices and limited efficiency gains.

The Launch of Ryzen 5000 Series: A New Generation of Processors

AMD has finally released their latest generation of desktop processors, the Ryzen 5000 series. This new architecture promises to deliver improved performance and efficiency over previous generations, with some notable upgrades in terms of power management and thermal design.

The Ryzen 5000 series is built on a new manufacturing process that allows for more transistors to be packed into a given area, resulting in increased processing power without a corresponding increase in heat or power consumption. This means that the processor can deliver better performance while consuming less power, making it an attractive option for gamers who want to upgrade their system.

In terms of actual performance, the Ryzen 5000 series has shown some impressive results in our tests. It delivers better gaming performance than its predecessor, with some notable upgrades in terms of frame rates and resolution. The processor also consumes less power than its predecessor, making it an attractive option for gamers who want to upgrade their system without breaking the bank.

The Ryzen 5000 series is a significant step forward for AMD, marking a new era of gaming processors that offer improved performance and efficiency over previous generations. However, the company still has some work to do to justify the high prices and limited upgrades over previous generations.

Conclusion

AMD's launch strategy has been marred by controversy and inconsistencies, with issues arising from their distribution of pre-reviewed firmware for review boards. However, this is not a reflection on the quality of AMD's products or their commitment to ensuring the performance and efficiency of their processors.

The Ryzen 7000 X3D promises to deliver improved performance and efficiency over previous generations, with some notable upgrades in terms of power management and thermal design. The processor delivers better gaming performance than its predecessor, while also consuming less power.

In contrast, Intel's 11th Gen Core processors are still struggling to compete with AMD's offerings. The company has made some significant upgrades in terms of processing power, but these have not been enough to justify the high prices and limited efficiency gains.

Overall, AMD is finally starting to offer a compelling alternative to Intel's 11th Gen Core processors. With the release of the Ryzen 5000 series, AMD has marked a new era of gaming processors that offer improved performance and efficiency over previous generations.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe most positive thing about this CPU is power efficiency and the second most positive thing about it is even though I've looked everywhere I can't find the word Intel anywhere on the box today we're reviewing the AMD ryzen 7 9700x it's an 8 core 16th thread part this is on the zen5 architecture and we would also be posting an R5 9600 X review except our 9600 X has lots of problems which I I actually can't remember a single CPU review that we've ever done where we had enough problems where it prevented a review entirely so we'll talk about that briefly but that's more of a 9600 X review thing anyway we actually had some memory challenges with the 9700x as well but we were able to work around them considering that AMD recalled these CPUs prior to even launching them it's not a surprise that this launch has been a complete mess in some ways although there are stories about the recall being due to a typo on the IHS AMD definitely had some problems with hitting the clocks on at least its 16 core Parts if not some of the other ones so we know that that was a problem at least to the best of our ability to know it would be kind of crazy to recall all of them otherwise uh the type of thing I don't know if that's real or not I haven't looked into it but uh it just kind of adds to the general Ambiance of being a mess next week AMD will be launching the 950x 16 core CPU 9900x 12 core CPU today it's launching the 97 9600 X's the 9700x will be 3 $60 and then the 9600 x uh is going to be $280 which is actually a relatively large jump over where the 7600 X is today these socket into the M5 platform and they use existing chipsets but they will be followed shortly by new chipsets in the 800 series like X 870e we covered that and the architectural differences in a previous video that will link below if you want to learn more about the basics but today's focus is going to be on the performance before that this video is brought to you by height and the y70 case the height y70 case has a lot of Polish and heavy mention a detail on the finer points the case can fit radiators that are massive in depth to the side mount has Cooling in the floor of the case for direct intake to the GPU and tries to find a balance between structural support of dust filters without obstructing too much intake the y70 is a follow-up to the popular y60 which got height to where it is today with its cut Corner tempered glass cases the y70 also comes in unique new color combinations in addition to the existing white and black learn more at the link in the description below let's start with quick mark prices just so everyone's up to speed on what's available right now so quickly check in Amazon and newag in the US and keep in mind the 9700x is 360 bucks the relevant ones we think are for am4 users the 5700 x2d is a good upgrade at $29 sometimes on sale for 180 7800 x2d is going to be better for gaming in many of the cases than the current Zen 5 CPUs and cost $375 the 7700x cost $294 meaning the 9700x is about 22% more expensive right now the 7600 X is 200 bucks again against the $280 to 9600 X the 14900 K is $581 and might even include blue screens the 14700 K is $398 and Intel's most reliable current processor the 12900 K is $326 now as a quick reminder we published a big video about why we are not currently comfortable recommending any of Intel's 13th or 14th gen CPUs until we can evaluate their new micro code coming out later in August and until the company begins acting in good faith to help its customers at least by our definition of it you can watch our previous video for more about that so we had some trouble working with these CPS relaunch it's kind of abnormal am these has been generally stable for the last several years now zen1 had a lot of teething issues but they've gotten a into a pretty stable spot but we saw some regression with the general ease of working with the platform for these Zen 5 CPS which is odd because xx70 already exists it's pretty vetted uh it's relatively stable the bioses are pretty built up and it just didn't work the way we would have expected it so very disappointing uh we did get it all functioning it is function all a a total disaster but it's a bit pickier with some things than really the Zen 5 Parts Plus existing motherboards should be and we think it boils down to most likely a bios issue but possibly aista or the CPUs in some interaction with all of those things first we noticed that F clock was defaulting to 21100 MHz which is an error it's supposed to default to 2,000 still we confirm this with AMD fortunately we control our F clock manually for test so this didn't affect us but anyone not paying attention may have potentially some stability challenges or you might have artificially high performance in some tests versus a prior generation as a result of the not like for like f- clock Behavior we typically use a two- stick kit of course here DDR 56000 memory for am5 this has been used on all am5 CPUs we've tested to date including on this exact board without any issues at all however we can't get the 9600 X or the 9700 X to stay stable with the same board we've been using although there was a bios update so that is a PO possible and maybe likely candidate for why we manually control most relevant timings in the voltage we also control F clock U clock to M clock ratio and it still just wasn't stable we eventually got the 9700x working for Expo with our laxar gdr 56000 kit which is the same kit that we use for our CPU Cooler reviews uh it works pretty well and the timings are mostly the same we manually configured all of it to our normal Corsair kit there a few differences in there so like trfi for example is much looser on the Lexar kit so that'll minimally affect some of the performance and the short version is that if you're looking at a 1 to 2% difference whether uh a regression or an increase in performance it is more possible than typically that that falls within our run to- run uh or margin of error because of the slight memory kit change because of amd's uh compatibility issues that we were running into but you know we're talking 1 to 2% so the conclusion is really going to be the same here just want you all to be aware of it and speaking of that for the 9600 X we tried a whole lot of things to get it stable and uh we're going to go over that the 9600 X review separately it's not going to be here okay for methodology so we recently debuted our new suite of testing in the 3700x and the 3600 revisit that we published you can check that out if you want to see those older CPUs and here's a list of the games we're currently testing so not every one of these will appear in every review we sometimes rotate them out temporarily if the game updates uh and renders the existing data incomparable like what happened with Rainbow 6 recently all the games here are from 2024 to 2023 with the exception of Total War Warhammer 3 which is 2022 Stellaris which is 2016 Rainbow 6 from 2015 and these have continued to receive updates Stellaris actually remains really important for evaluate Sim time rather than just frame rate here's a list of our current production of workstation tests the main addition here is spec workstation otherwise everything's mostly the same as it has been it's just we've updated all to newer versions uh the newest versions of the software spec workstation has become a standardized test for us and as part of our CPU reviews now however it is still in experimental phases meaning we're still determining how exactly we want to use it test it and it follows it use in our thread Ripper reviews previously and here's our list of miscellaneous tests we do such as thermal power and frequency logging and then finally we removed this list of CBS from our data for this review today we have these tested but we removed them because the charts are too crowded and difficult to read and we had to make some choices on what to cut also we're still validating some of the results but these will go live in a separate Mega charts piece soon so if you want to see any of these we've got them done we'll be publishing it hopefully within the next couple weeks and all this information is available on the website free of thirdparty ads on gamers access.net in in the living documents page for our general test benches and methodologies it doesn't contain the full paragraph format written details we're still building it all out but it has most the basics for you you can check that page for updates on what we're using lab wide and that'll give some component information like memory kits motherboards and so on and then we'll run some methodology videos as soon as we can find the time to put them together and you can support our efforts on that page and keeping the website without any thirdparty ads by going to store. Gamers access.net and using Code this is fine to get 10% off to get 10% off of any orders right now on things like our brand new solder mats in uh different colors like red green and yellow in addition to Blue all right let's get into the data we'll start with power consumption and efficiency seen as that's the most promising aspect of Zen 5 this is tested in an all core blender workload that's intended to max out the power measured after 5 minutes at least which ensures that any to based boosting behavior on the older Intel CPUs is in effect the 9700x pulled 88 Watts at the EPS 12 volt cables which has it equal to the non-x 7600 and 7900 CPUs and similar to the older 30 700x the 7700x pulls significantly more power at about 150 watts this will be important throughout the review because there are times that the 9700x slightly regresses or equals the 7700x and that'll be from the company's choices on power limiting and boosting in the very least it's a significantly lower power part whether that's an improvement depends entirely on performance for reference the 1400k was pulling about 287 Watts with our original review micro code ranked right alongside the 14700 K the thread rer 7980x was at about 352 Watts for significantly more all core performance now for efficiency this informs us how much work is completed per unit of power we're looking at total energy consumed as a formula of power and time for this ultimately it results in Watt hours this test is interesting because the part that completes the work the fastest isn't necessarily the most efficient and actually often it isn't in this test the 9700x is now our new chart leader for all core efficiency it gets the work done using the least amount of energy making it the most efficient on this chart where effectively normalizing for one unit of work and it's the same unit for all these CPUs allowing us to mostly isolate for the efficiency the previous leader isn't present that was the 7 950x in eco mode in terms of things running out of box though the 9700x leads the 7800 x2d is next for its low power consumption the older 5950 X remains impressive as well Intel remains one of the least efficient in General on this chart when you look at something like the 14900 K the 14700 K which are down towards the bottom for the outof boox settings and Intel's quote unquote recommended defaults whatever that means all core frequency testing is next these tests are important for understanding the application performance later and prepare to be disappointed testing with all threads engaged the 9700x ran at an average all core frequency of about 4440 to 4480 MHz with frequent spikes above that in a deviation from typical rise and boost in Behavior this is a remarkably low all core frequency and is a result of the default power limits imposed on the CPU by AMD plotting the 7700x we see the predecessor at 5200 MHz initially with a slow Decay to around 5190 MHz there are no spikes that appear so that's a huge gap between these two CPUs one of which is supposed to be a predecessor frequency alone really doesn't mean much for performance but it can be an indicator of it architectural differences mean that the frequency between the two is not purely like for like comparable but having this information will help us explains some of the performance specifically in all core workloads later this is why manufacturers have up two numbers for boosting it's typical that the Boost listed on the box is higher than the all core boost as the listed spec normally refers to a low thread count load and we can look at that next single core frequency has the 9700 a at 55 25 MHz flat and C bench single threaded the advertised spec is up to 5.5 GHz so they hit the advertisement our 7700x ran the same test at 5550 MHz slightly higher but 25 MZ isn't a big enough advantage to counterbalance the architectural improvements found in the new 9700x so we should see improvements and applications especially where they run a low thread count the next big one is thermals this is an important section so AMD has moved the sensor and changed a little bit how it behaves for thermals so you can't just look at T die on a 7700x and put it on a line graph uh or a bar chart against T die on the 9700x and have them be directly comparable it is not uh it would be similar to comparing Intel to AMD or something for thermals just doesn't make a lot of sense cuz they measure it slightly differently now so uh what we can do is try and compare the sensor Behavior as best we can there are some limitations so this is not a perfect science but we can get it pretty good because the chiplet layout is the same the iust is the same we can mostly isolate for the architecture and the sensor Behavior changes for this test we're going to limit the 7700x down to the exact same power consumption as the 9700x in blender so we'll run both at 86 to 87 watt EPs 12vt and blender and that's about 90 wat PBT on the 7700x so it's similar to the Eco Mode levels here's the results the 9700x plotted at about 50 to 52° C in a 21c ambient under a 360 mil liquid feuser 2 at 100% fan speeds this was in an allcore workload the original 7700x result at 150 watts ran at 92 Dees celsi but remember these aren't directly comparable and also this was by Design where the 7,000 series uh was boosting until they hit a thermal limit and we keep boosting until hitting other limits like power so the limits 95c there uh we have two things going on it's higher cuz it's boosting until that point but also cuz AMD changed the sensor Behavior unveiling the 7700x at the same power so we've now artificially restricted it by using bios we can see it's actually at 59° C as compared to the 9700x this helps us understand two things one is whatever the actual improvements there may be and the other is the change to the sensor Behavior itself this is much more directly comparable to 9700x it is as close as we can get without external sensors and the end result is closer to a 8 to maybe 9° change depending where you look on the chart so this makes sense and these previous claims were approximately 7° Celsius at the same TDP that is directly from them we're actually remarkably close for this approach so this would be the closest we can get to a real comparison and although it'd be one hell of a story to say that they reduced it by 40° it's really just not that simple Starfield is absolutely embarrassing for AMD kind of like how it was for Bethesda which makes sense because AMD and Bethesda partnered on Starfield to make sure was equally disappointing in reality the 9700x is about equal to the 7700x here technically it's a little bit below this may explain why AMD stalled this CPU launch though just like Starfield stalled its launch and should have stalled it by about six more years we've seen this with AMD in the past notably the 595x and 3950x some production tests were equal but this is just sad for the 9700x it would have to be a good deal cheaper to really matter the higher spec memory help it here but remember that applying the same memory to the 7700x would likely yield another result nearing equivalent still this is one of the few games where we saw uplift on the 9700x with the faster memory spec just not against the 77 either way the 7800x 3D didn't seem to benefit much from it but this is consistent with less Reliance on memory in general due to the larger cache as for Intel there's a large block that leads the 9700x including the 14600 K 13700 K 14700 K and 14900 K and the benefit is in this game you wouldn't be able to tell if the blue screen is from the game or from Intel stability problems and as for the 7800 XD it's above all of these Final Fantasy 14 Dawn Trail is up now this is a brand new 2024 update to Final Fantasy 14 and it includes a complete overhaul of graphics and other systems it also totally changes how AMD and Intel behave on these charts in relation to each other the prior versions of this Benchmark uh often had Intel in a different positioning the 9700x landed at 330 FPS average at 1080p Max which has it 6% ahead of the 5700 x3d 311 FPS average result the lows are proportional to the average and otherwise uninteresting this makes the 9700x as worse than the 5600 x3d as a reminder the 5600 x3d has a higher boost clock than the 5700 x3d by 300 MHz so in games where the clock helps more than the extra cores would it'll outperform the 5700 x3d this is normal behavior even though the naming looks weird but that's what we're seeing here in either case the 9700 X ends up in a boring position it's below the two generation old 5800 x2d which leads by 4% and it's behind the 7800 x2d which leads by 10% Intel runs worse than cheaper AMD CPUs here even ignoring the uncertainty of the inbound micro code update it just really isn't competitive so we'll move on at 1440p we're bringing in a GPU bind to the top of the chart that limits performance scaling of the CPUs this also makes the data less useful at the top because it'll clip the upper bound of the frame frame rate and bring down the average the 9700x ran at 273 FPS average which had it about tied with the 7800x 3D and the 14900 K and the 5600 x3d and the 5800 x3d and the 14700 K and the 5700 x3d and so on the lead over the 7700x is real but it's not meaningful it's 3.9% balers Gate 3 is up now the 2023 launch saw worldwide success and we fully incorporated into our CPU testing the 1080p medium result is tested in a carefully selected of the city that creates a heavy CPU bind the 9700x landed at 107 to 108 FPS average with both kits of memory the 5700 x3d has a technical but indistinguishable lead and the Intel lineup mostly clusters around 114 FPS average which makes sense because the entire Intel lineup right now is a giant cluster the 7800x 3D with our default memory leads the 9700x by 23% here with the 5800 X 3D ahead by 10% as for things the 9700 a is better than it leads the 7700 a by 8% older CPUs like the R56 and r7700 ran poorly in this game and so we removed them from the data set you can see the 2700 and the 2600 for prior generation comparisons though they were just above our cut off for performance generationally the 9700x leads the 2700 non X by 101% the 3700x by 58% the 5700x hasn't been retested but it would be similar enough to the 5800 X to use as a proxy and that one allows the 9700x a lead of 30% dragon Dogma 2 is up next this one is from 2024 and it's a remarkable CPU Benchmark for its NPC load not necessarily because the game is built well but it does load the CPUs our testing includes the game's recent patches that claims to improve performance the 5700 x2d is back Del leading the 9700x in this one and actually so is half of the rest of the chart the 9700x is only ahead of the 7700x by 1.8% here the 5800 X 3D leads the 9700x by 9% or so with the 7800x 3D leading it by 21% at 9 fps to the 990 FPS of the newer CPU compared to older CPUs the 9700x leads the 1700x by 86% the 2700 on X is led by 72% the 3700x by 47% and the 5800 X by 21% Intel's 14700 K is ahead of the 9700x by 14% here though we don't know what Intel's micro code will do just as a reminder the 6400 kit had no meaningful change from the 6000 kit for the 9700x in this particular game but that's not always the case f124 is up next the 24 stands for 2024 we're not sure what that stands for though at 1080p High the 9700x ended up at 380 FPS average with lows mostly proportional as far as amd's devices go int's 14900 K has a slight advantage in 1% and. 1% lows here but not in a way observable to a human the 9700x with DDR 56400 improves to 400 FPS average which is a jump of 5% the 78 00x 3D didn't benefit from the same memory bump but it still leads the 9700x by 20.5% compared against the 7700x the 9700x was 4% ahead it's not very exciting the 14700 K Trails the 9700x and it leads the 7700x landing right in the middle at the time of testing as for the 5700x 3D that one Falls below the 9700x and 7700x in this game the 5800 X 3D is however still better than the 9700x with equivalent memory and it ties the DDR 56400 result at 1440p the GPU restriction limits frame rate to 370 FPS average on the fastest device here which ends up being the 9700x by a technicality its rank is shared by the 7800x 3D both are bottlenecked by other components so these could be thought of as the same here otherwise the chart mostly scales as before except with the top performing devices having the max frame rate trimmed thus reducing the average Stellaris at least shows uplift although extra cash via x2d helps in some situations like the large 58 x3d improvement over the 5800 X which is a reduction in time of 11% it has never helped as much at the very top of the performance range in this test we become bound Elsewhere for this reason the 7800x 3D isn't as impressive a jump leaving the 9700x the leader with a Sim time reduction of 3.9% over it against the 7700x it's a reduction of almost 3 seconds the 97 or a somewhat large 9% drop and that's reduction from the longest to the shortest of these two SIM times this game seems to benefit from the IPC uplift and because it's based on time and not frame rate it is immediately and clearly observable to most users games like Stellaris Galactic Civilizations which is awesome if you haven't played it or other simulation titles have clear time reductions from uplift like this this is one of the 9700 X's stronger titles Intel's first showing is at 30 seconds with fast memory or 30.5 with the same memory that almost everything else here uses but we already knew Intel simulation time is slow because it wasn't able to run PR simulations fast enough to bury the recent controversy this allows AMD a lead overall on this chart but also just right now generally for now we'll see we have to skip Rainbow 6 this time because they just updated the game and we measured a performance impact from the patch so we only have 9700x tests for the new version we'll move on to production our production and workstation tests coming up start with blender these are heavily multi-threaded generally and generally more reliant on core count though not all of them are so Photoshop for example behaves a little differently we'll go through all of those in this testing our blender render is the first one it's a real world test and it performs a tile-based render on the CPU of our intro animation to this video the render requires 13.2 minutes on the 9700x for one frame which roughly ties it with the 7700x that's unfortunate Stellaris already showed us the opposite of this where the performance of fewer threads matters more for the 9700x here however the impact is less because the workload distribution across all the CPU cores minimizes the difference x3d doesn't matter in this particular test so the non x3d Parts generally perform better since they tend to have higher clocks than the x3d counterparts sadly for the 9700x it's outperformed by the 5900 X of a few Generations ago which has benefited more by the core count than the 9700x can make up for with frequency and Architectural improvements the same is true for the 3950x 16 core part and and actually Intel's 14700 K also outperforms the 9700x here the 5000 series x3d Parts at least don't lead this time but the result is complete and total stagnation for the 9700x versus the 7700x it's just not good at most you could call it acceptable but now we'll move on to file compression with szip the 7700x is technically 1.7% ahead functionally they're tied and we're looking at stagnation here remember that the 9700 X was run technically on different memory despite us matching the timing as much as we could stabilize this could account for some small differences very small ones but not much ultimately at best the parts are the same and at worst the 9700 a is slightly worse the 5900 a 3950x and even 14600 K all run ahead of the 9700x here and these performance is embarrassing and fails to move the needle there's absolutely no reason to buy this CPU for workloads like this unless you were already going to buy a 7700x anyway and if this is cheaper both of those conditions have to be true in decompression testing the 9700x completed 136,000 mips which roughly tied it with the 14600 K performance is below the 7700x for the reasons we've discussed already at best you could maybe call them equal but overall this is pretty disappointing the 9700x leads in Photoshop so for AMD that's a relief this is less thread bound and more individually intensive on fewer cores as a result amd's IPC improvements show through the 9700x ends up leading the 750x and 7700x alike with the lead over the 7700x at 10% that's one of the largest gaps we've seen in our testing so far and is similar to Stellaris the closest Intel CPU is the 14900 k at 10,049 points giving the 9700x a lead of 19% against the original 1700x the 9700x leads by 130% and that was an ERA when AMD was disadvantaged on clocks manifesting in disproportionately bad Photoshop results Adobe premier is up now the Puget aggregate score is a combination of editing tasks such as filters Time Warp scales raw performance intraframe performance and more this one favors the 14900 K which has an overall score of 10,715 points in aggregate or 14% higher than the 9700x the 9700x is at least ahead of the 7700x in this one boasting an unbelievable breathtaking 3.2% lead it's truly mind-blowing what AMD is able to achieve in just two short years it's almost as much as what Intel achieved with each year of its 14 nmet era maybe we could start adding pluses to these CPS for the next round code compile testing is up next compiling chromium for a heavy and extended workload the longer runtime of this test allows us to better see the impact of things like boosting Behavior the 9700x ends up slightly ahead of the 7700x again this time with a 3.3% compile time reduction that's exciting the 13600 K is faster here but what's even faster than that is if it blue screens while compiling Intel's 14900 K and 14700 K also do well in this test with the 7950 X and x3d leading rodinia cfd is next our observation of this one is that it likes core count and frequency with less emphasis on cache and reduced on Purely cores a balance the 9700x has one of its larger leads over the 7700x in this one at 10.7% Intel is relatively speaking dominating here next up are the spec life sciences and biomedical the spec life sciences and biomed lamps test is described by spc.org as quote molecular Dynamic simulator that consists of five test simulating a variety of molecular properties in lamps we're seeing regressive performance again it doesn't happen often but the 7700x as results here at 4.45 leads the 9700x by 2.5% some of this may be due to the slightly different memory timings that we've already talked about as a result of the memory compatibility troubles but that shouldn't account for the whole difference the 97 00x is just disappointing compared to the 7700x in this one all right so wrapping this up this is a pretty big review we could break down really simply though Intel has been working really hard this past year they have been putting in concerted effort to make sure that nobody has any confidence in them whatsoever and they've succeeded they've done exceptionally well at really killing the confidence in Intel as a brand destroying its brand credibility uh making us question whether or not it'll actually support its products making us question whether it'll tell people about the faults of its products and try to make good on it so because of that AMD has that going for it unfortunately though this is not a good marketing tactic uh the other one being worse generally speaking is not a good sell because what happens is stagnation people look at it they go ah I'll just sit on what I am using now or whatever and it's it's just not as exciting so uh this leads to potential boredom slow down in the market station AMD has efficiency going for it though so that is the biggest thing AMD has has with the 9700x we'll see if that continues with the other N5 CPUs they are doing well there uh and that is the singular pillar preventing this review from going the direction of us saying this is amd's 14 nmet plus plus plus plus plus moment they are halfway there they're at like a a 14 nmet and a half of a Plus without the efficiency pillar H they're there it's the skyling stagnation boredom but uh that change in power means that it's not quite so simple so at least there's that going for it uh we'd like to see the efficiency improvement with more of a performance uplift we have been uh maybe spoiled by that over the past Generations overall the CPU is relatively boring it is slightly better than a 7700x sometimes it is slightly worse other times relatively rare but does happen and uh the biggest changes we're seeing in meaningful applications are like 10% uh and that is not the norm so you the efficiency is exciting in a way we just think AMD probably should have found a better balance between efficiency and performance to try and get a little bit of both uh without just sort of uh mid maxing on the efficiency side the memory compatibility has been rough for our testing it's odd considering the stability of the motherboard and the platform overall for the same memory sticks on 7,000 series it could be bios or it could be the CPU or it could be aesa ultimately Tam's fault and here's why uh AMD knows whose boards are being used by reviewers they know to the extent that when they're packaging the BIOS and the drivers and whatever for reviews in advance of launch before it's publicly available uh they will create folders for a set of boards that are commonly used by reviewers and distribute it that means AMD is Distributing the stuff for the reviews AMD is validating in its labs in theory that stuff works on those boards for the reviews uh and so we'd view it as it's ultimately under amd's control to make sure this stuff kind of works as it's supposed to we're not going to let them just blame it on a board vendor so and also Patrick did just while I was filming this go and quickly validate and we had some of the same memory issues with our 9600 X on an azrock board so it does seem like that CPU is just screwed as for the 9700x the CPU is fine if it didn't have the efficiency improvements it'd be getting the Intel 11th gen treatment of being a dead generation that we call a waste of sand instead because it has efficiency it just gets me which is at least a little bit better I guess if you're on am4 you should consider the 5700 x3d uh if you're not happy with your performance if you're happy with your performance just keep the CPU I mean you don't have to upgrade every generation it's normally not productive anyway and skipping a couple is just fine uh if you want an upgrade though and you're on A4 there's a lot of good x3d options assuming you're not trying to do a total new system and then if you want a total new system the 7800 x3d is still looking really good and probably for a lot of gaming scenarios does still make more sense as for Intel we'll re-evaluate the company's processors when the micro code ships and when they get their together and just really thinking aloud here you know the 9700x it's okay but the reason this is disappointing is just because of how much AMD has totally flubbed and squandered the opportunity here Intel is down and it it's really screwing up it's good that AMD delayed their launch if they had problems but they still have problems so it wasn't enough there's clear compatibility issues uh with some of the memory configurations that worked just fine on the 7000 series we were able to confirm now after filming the whole review and editing it the 9600 X that we got originally it actually is just as functional and this is the first CPU I think I've ever received that is that broke and where we can't review it we got a new one in it works totally fine as expected uh in the same test conditions so there's something wrong with the first one and then you look at the pricing and if a 7700x is 60 bucks cheaper than a 9700x that makes way more sense uh the value is not there for the 9700x versus amd's own existing inventory the 7800x 3D at a similar price to the 9700x makes way more sense for gaming scenarios uh and so the the 9700x there's really just no reason to buy it right now we think compared to amd's own Alternatives so they've kind of squandered this launch and flubbed the opportunity to really try and impress everyone when Intel is down with the exception of efficiency in the 9700x versus the 7700x but the 7800 X 3D is basically just as technically actually more efficient in its intended use case gaming STS than the 9700x that's it for this one the 9700x like I said whatever it's it's boring but uh it's not a total disaster and it's got good efficiency so it's a little bit cooler as well so uh that's it thanks for watching subscribe for more go to store. Gamers access.net to help us out directly you can grab one of the these shirt which are actually going to be shipping pretty soon and then we also have the red green and yellow soldering mats along side are blue it's been really interesting to see the popularity of them uh I actually thought red was going to be the most popular just because such a a bright vibrant pop that we got on it so far though most of you are buying Green in fact green is moving uh I think it's pretty close to 2x red and yellow so what I can say is all of you and our audience must be inid shills that's what it means because Green's the most popular solder mat color Behind Blue which I guess makes you Intel shills as well that's just you know we got to do something about that thanks for watching subscribe for more we'll see you all next timethe most positive thing about this CPU is power efficiency and the second most positive thing about it is even though I've looked everywhere I can't find the word Intel anywhere on the box today we're reviewing the AMD ryzen 7 9700x it's an 8 core 16th thread part this is on the zen5 architecture and we would also be posting an R5 9600 X review except our 9600 X has lots of problems which I I actually can't remember a single CPU review that we've ever done where we had enough problems where it prevented a review entirely so we'll talk about that briefly but that's more of a 9600 X review thing anyway we actually had some memory challenges with the 9700x as well but we were able to work around them considering that AMD recalled these CPUs prior to even launching them it's not a surprise that this launch has been a complete mess in some ways although there are stories about the recall being due to a typo on the IHS AMD definitely had some problems with hitting the clocks on at least its 16 core Parts if not some of the other ones so we know that that was a problem at least to the best of our ability to know it would be kind of crazy to recall all of them otherwise uh the type of thing I don't know if that's real or not I haven't looked into it but uh it just kind of adds to the general Ambiance of being a mess next week AMD will be launching the 950x 16 core CPU 9900x 12 core CPU today it's launching the 97 9600 X's the 9700x will be 3 $60 and then the 9600 x uh is going to be $280 which is actually a relatively large jump over where the 7600 X is today these socket into the M5 platform and they use existing chipsets but they will be followed shortly by new chipsets in the 800 series like X 870e we covered that and the architectural differences in a previous video that will link below if you want to learn more about the basics but today's focus is going to be on the performance before that this video is brought to you by height and the y70 case the height y70 case has a lot of Polish and heavy mention a detail on the finer points the case can fit radiators that are massive in depth to the side mount has Cooling in the floor of the case for direct intake to the GPU and tries to find a balance between structural support of dust filters without obstructing too much intake the y70 is a follow-up to the popular y60 which got height to where it is today with its cut Corner tempered glass cases the y70 also comes in unique new color combinations in addition to the existing white and black learn more at the link in the description below let's start with quick mark prices just so everyone's up to speed on what's available right now so quickly check in Amazon and newag in the US and keep in mind the 9700x is 360 bucks the relevant ones we think are for am4 users the 5700 x2d is a good upgrade at $29 sometimes on sale for 180 7800 x2d is going to be better for gaming in many of the cases than the current Zen 5 CPUs and cost $375 the 7700x cost $294 meaning the 9700x is about 22% more expensive right now the 7600 X is 200 bucks again against the $280 to 9600 X the 14900 K is $581 and might even include blue screens the 14700 K is $398 and Intel's most reliable current processor the 12900 K is $326 now as a quick reminder we published a big video about why we are not currently comfortable recommending any of Intel's 13th or 14th gen CPUs until we can evaluate their new micro code coming out later in August and until the company begins acting in good faith to help its customers at least by our definition of it you can watch our previous video for more about that so we had some trouble working with these CPS relaunch it's kind of abnormal am these has been generally stable for the last several years now zen1 had a lot of teething issues but they've gotten a into a pretty stable spot but we saw some regression with the general ease of working with the platform for these Zen 5 CPS which is odd because xx70 already exists it's pretty vetted uh it's relatively stable the bioses are pretty built up and it just didn't work the way we would have expected it so very disappointing uh we did get it all functioning it is function all a a total disaster but it's a bit pickier with some things than really the Zen 5 Parts Plus existing motherboards should be and we think it boils down to most likely a bios issue but possibly aista or the CPUs in some interaction with all of those things first we noticed that F clock was defaulting to 21100 MHz which is an error it's supposed to default to 2,000 still we confirm this with AMD fortunately we control our F clock manually for test so this didn't affect us but anyone not paying attention may have potentially some stability challenges or you might have artificially high performance in some tests versus a prior generation as a result of the not like for like f- clock Behavior we typically use a two- stick kit of course here DDR 56000 memory for am5 this has been used on all am5 CPUs we've tested to date including on this exact board without any issues at all however we can't get the 9600 X or the 9700 X to stay stable with the same board we've been using although there was a bios update so that is a PO possible and maybe likely candidate for why we manually control most relevant timings in the voltage we also control F clock U clock to M clock ratio and it still just wasn't stable we eventually got the 9700x working for Expo with our laxar gdr 56000 kit which is the same kit that we use for our CPU Cooler reviews uh it works pretty well and the timings are mostly the same we manually configured all of it to our normal Corsair kit there a few differences in there so like trfi for example is much looser on the Lexar kit so that'll minimally affect some of the performance and the short version is that if you're looking at a 1 to 2% difference whether uh a regression or an increase in performance it is more possible than typically that that falls within our run to- run uh or margin of error because of the slight memory kit change because of amd's uh compatibility issues that we were running into but you know we're talking 1 to 2% so the conclusion is really going to be the same here just want you all to be aware of it and speaking of that for the 9600 X we tried a whole lot of things to get it stable and uh we're going to go over that the 9600 X review separately it's not going to be here okay for methodology so we recently debuted our new suite of testing in the 3700x and the 3600 revisit that we published you can check that out if you want to see those older CPUs and here's a list of the games we're currently testing so not every one of these will appear in every review we sometimes rotate them out temporarily if the game updates uh and renders the existing data incomparable like what happened with Rainbow 6 recently all the games here are from 2024 to 2023 with the exception of Total War Warhammer 3 which is 2022 Stellaris which is 2016 Rainbow 6 from 2015 and these have continued to receive updates Stellaris actually remains really important for evaluate Sim time rather than just frame rate here's a list of our current production of workstation tests the main addition here is spec workstation otherwise everything's mostly the same as it has been it's just we've updated all to newer versions uh the newest versions of the software spec workstation has become a standardized test for us and as part of our CPU reviews now however it is still in experimental phases meaning we're still determining how exactly we want to use it test it and it follows it use in our thread Ripper reviews previously and here's our list of miscellaneous tests we do such as thermal power and frequency logging and then finally we removed this list of CBS from our data for this review today we have these tested but we removed them because the charts are too crowded and difficult to read and we had to make some choices on what to cut also we're still validating some of the results but these will go live in a separate Mega charts piece soon so if you want to see any of these we've got them done we'll be publishing it hopefully within the next couple weeks and all this information is available on the website free of thirdparty ads on gamers access.net in in the living documents page for our general test benches and methodologies it doesn't contain the full paragraph format written details we're still building it all out but it has most the basics for you you can check that page for updates on what we're using lab wide and that'll give some component information like memory kits motherboards and so on and then we'll run some methodology videos as soon as we can find the time to put them together and you can support our efforts on that page and keeping the website without any thirdparty ads by going to store. Gamers access.net and using Code this is fine to get 10% off to get 10% off of any orders right now on things like our brand new solder mats in uh different colors like red green and yellow in addition to Blue all right let's get into the data we'll start with power consumption and efficiency seen as that's the most promising aspect of Zen 5 this is tested in an all core blender workload that's intended to max out the power measured after 5 minutes at least which ensures that any to based boosting behavior on the older Intel CPUs is in effect the 9700x pulled 88 Watts at the EPS 12 volt cables which has it equal to the non-x 7600 and 7900 CPUs and similar to the older 30 700x the 7700x pulls significantly more power at about 150 watts this will be important throughout the review because there are times that the 9700x slightly regresses or equals the 7700x and that'll be from the company's choices on power limiting and boosting in the very least it's a significantly lower power part whether that's an improvement depends entirely on performance for reference the 1400k was pulling about 287 Watts with our original review micro code ranked right alongside the 14700 K the thread rer 7980x was at about 352 Watts for significantly more all core performance now for efficiency this informs us how much work is completed per unit of power we're looking at total energy consumed as a formula of power and time for this ultimately it results in Watt hours this test is interesting because the part that completes the work the fastest isn't necessarily the most efficient and actually often it isn't in this test the 9700x is now our new chart leader for all core efficiency it gets the work done using the least amount of energy making it the most efficient on this chart where effectively normalizing for one unit of work and it's the same unit for all these CPUs allowing us to mostly isolate for the efficiency the previous leader isn't present that was the 7 950x in eco mode in terms of things running out of box though the 9700x leads the 7800 x2d is next for its low power consumption the older 5950 X remains impressive as well Intel remains one of the least efficient in General on this chart when you look at something like the 14900 K the 14700 K which are down towards the bottom for the outof boox settings and Intel's quote unquote recommended defaults whatever that means all core frequency testing is next these tests are important for understanding the application performance later and prepare to be disappointed testing with all threads engaged the 9700x ran at an average all core frequency of about 4440 to 4480 MHz with frequent spikes above that in a deviation from typical rise and boost in Behavior this is a remarkably low all core frequency and is a result of the default power limits imposed on the CPU by AMD plotting the 7700x we see the predecessor at 5200 MHz initially with a slow Decay to around 5190 MHz there are no spikes that appear so that's a huge gap between these two CPUs one of which is supposed to be a predecessor frequency alone really doesn't mean much for performance but it can be an indicator of it architectural differences mean that the frequency between the two is not purely like for like comparable but having this information will help us explains some of the performance specifically in all core workloads later this is why manufacturers have up two numbers for boosting it's typical that the Boost listed on the box is higher than the all core boost as the listed spec normally refers to a low thread count load and we can look at that next single core frequency has the 9700 a at 55 25 MHz flat and C bench single threaded the advertised spec is up to 5.5 GHz so they hit the advertisement our 7700x ran the same test at 5550 MHz slightly higher but 25 MZ isn't a big enough advantage to counterbalance the architectural improvements found in the new 9700x so we should see improvements and applications especially where they run a low thread count the next big one is thermals this is an important section so AMD has moved the sensor and changed a little bit how it behaves for thermals so you can't just look at T die on a 7700x and put it on a line graph uh or a bar chart against T die on the 9700x and have them be directly comparable it is not uh it would be similar to comparing Intel to AMD or something for thermals just doesn't make a lot of sense cuz they measure it slightly differently now so uh what we can do is try and compare the sensor Behavior as best we can there are some limitations so this is not a perfect science but we can get it pretty good because the chiplet layout is the same the iust is the same we can mostly isolate for the architecture and the sensor Behavior changes for this test we're going to limit the 7700x down to the exact same power consumption as the 9700x in blender so we'll run both at 86 to 87 watt EPs 12vt and blender and that's about 90 wat PBT on the 7700x so it's similar to the Eco Mode levels here's the results the 9700x plotted at about 50 to 52° C in a 21c ambient under a 360 mil liquid feuser 2 at 100% fan speeds this was in an allcore workload the original 7700x result at 150 watts ran at 92 Dees celsi but remember these aren't directly comparable and also this was by Design where the 7,000 series uh was boosting until they hit a thermal limit and we keep boosting until hitting other limits like power so the limits 95c there uh we have two things going on it's higher cuz it's boosting until that point but also cuz AMD changed the sensor Behavior unveiling the 7700x at the same power so we've now artificially restricted it by using bios we can see it's actually at 59° C as compared to the 9700x this helps us understand two things one is whatever the actual improvements there may be and the other is the change to the sensor Behavior itself this is much more directly comparable to 9700x it is as close as we can get without external sensors and the end result is closer to a 8 to maybe 9° change depending where you look on the chart so this makes sense and these previous claims were approximately 7° Celsius at the same TDP that is directly from them we're actually remarkably close for this approach so this would be the closest we can get to a real comparison and although it'd be one hell of a story to say that they reduced it by 40° it's really just not that simple Starfield is absolutely embarrassing for AMD kind of like how it was for Bethesda which makes sense because AMD and Bethesda partnered on Starfield to make sure was equally disappointing in reality the 9700x is about equal to the 7700x here technically it's a little bit below this may explain why AMD stalled this CPU launch though just like Starfield stalled its launch and should have stalled it by about six more years we've seen this with AMD in the past notably the 595x and 3950x some production tests were equal but this is just sad for the 9700x it would have to be a good deal cheaper to really matter the higher spec memory help it here but remember that applying the same memory to the 7700x would likely yield another result nearing equivalent still this is one of the few games where we saw uplift on the 9700x with the faster memory spec just not against the 77 either way the 7800x 3D didn't seem to benefit much from it but this is consistent with less Reliance on memory in general due to the larger cache as for Intel there's a large block that leads the 9700x including the 14600 K 13700 K 14700 K and 14900 K and the benefit is in this game you wouldn't be able to tell if the blue screen is from the game or from Intel stability problems and as for the 7800 XD it's above all of these Final Fantasy 14 Dawn Trail is up now this is a brand new 2024 update to Final Fantasy 14 and it includes a complete overhaul of graphics and other systems it also totally changes how AMD and Intel behave on these charts in relation to each other the prior versions of this Benchmark uh often had Intel in a different positioning the 9700x landed at 330 FPS average at 1080p Max which has it 6% ahead of the 5700 x3d 311 FPS average result the lows are proportional to the average and otherwise uninteresting this makes the 9700x as worse than the 5600 x3d as a reminder the 5600 x3d has a higher boost clock than the 5700 x3d by 300 MHz so in games where the clock helps more than the extra cores would it'll outperform the 5700 x3d this is normal behavior even though the naming looks weird but that's what we're seeing here in either case the 9700 X ends up in a boring position it's below the two generation old 5800 x2d which leads by 4% and it's behind the 7800 x2d which leads by 10% Intel runs worse than cheaper AMD CPUs here even ignoring the uncertainty of the inbound micro code update it just really isn't competitive so we'll move on at 1440p we're bringing in a GPU bind to the top of the chart that limits performance scaling of the CPUs this also makes the data less useful at the top because it'll clip the upper bound of the frame frame rate and bring down the average the 9700x ran at 273 FPS average which had it about tied with the 7800x 3D and the 14900 K and the 5600 x3d and the 5800 x3d and the 14700 K and the 5700 x3d and so on the lead over the 7700x is real but it's not meaningful it's 3.9% balers Gate 3 is up now the 2023 launch saw worldwide success and we fully incorporated into our CPU testing the 1080p medium result is tested in a carefully selected of the city that creates a heavy CPU bind the 9700x landed at 107 to 108 FPS average with both kits of memory the 5700 x3d has a technical but indistinguishable lead and the Intel lineup mostly clusters around 114 FPS average which makes sense because the entire Intel lineup right now is a giant cluster the 7800x 3D with our default memory leads the 9700x by 23% here with the 5800 X 3D ahead by 10% as for things the 9700 a is better than it leads the 7700 a by 8% older CPUs like the R56 and r7700 ran poorly in this game and so we removed them from the data set you can see the 2700 and the 2600 for prior generation comparisons though they were just above our cut off for performance generationally the 9700x leads the 2700 non X by 101% the 3700x by 58% the 5700x hasn't been retested but it would be similar enough to the 5800 X to use as a proxy and that one allows the 9700x a lead of 30% dragon Dogma 2 is up next this one is from 2024 and it's a remarkable CPU Benchmark for its NPC load not necessarily because the game is built well but it does load the CPUs our testing includes the game's recent patches that claims to improve performance the 5700 x2d is back Del leading the 9700x in this one and actually so is half of the rest of the chart the 9700x is only ahead of the 7700x by 1.8% here the 5800 X 3D leads the 9700x by 9% or so with the 7800x 3D leading it by 21% at 9 fps to the 990 FPS of the newer CPU compared to older CPUs the 9700x leads the 1700x by 86% the 2700 on X is led by 72% the 3700x by 47% and the 5800 X by 21% Intel's 14700 K is ahead of the 9700x by 14% here though we don't know what Intel's micro code will do just as a reminder the 6400 kit had no meaningful change from the 6000 kit for the 9700x in this particular game but that's not always the case f124 is up next the 24 stands for 2024 we're not sure what that stands for though at 1080p High the 9700x ended up at 380 FPS average with lows mostly proportional as far as amd's devices go int's 14900 K has a slight advantage in 1% and. 1% lows here but not in a way observable to a human the 9700x with DDR 56400 improves to 400 FPS average which is a jump of 5% the 78 00x 3D didn't benefit from the same memory bump but it still leads the 9700x by 20.5% compared against the 7700x the 9700x was 4% ahead it's not very exciting the 14700 K Trails the 9700x and it leads the 7700x landing right in the middle at the time of testing as for the 5700x 3D that one Falls below the 9700x and 7700x in this game the 5800 X 3D is however still better than the 9700x with equivalent memory and it ties the DDR 56400 result at 1440p the GPU restriction limits frame rate to 370 FPS average on the fastest device here which ends up being the 9700x by a technicality its rank is shared by the 7800x 3D both are bottlenecked by other components so these could be thought of as the same here otherwise the chart mostly scales as before except with the top performing devices having the max frame rate trimmed thus reducing the average Stellaris at least shows uplift although extra cash via x2d helps in some situations like the large 58 x3d improvement over the 5800 X which is a reduction in time of 11% it has never helped as much at the very top of the performance range in this test we become bound Elsewhere for this reason the 7800x 3D isn't as impressive a jump leaving the 9700x the leader with a Sim time reduction of 3.9% over it against the 7700x it's a reduction of almost 3 seconds the 97 or a somewhat large 9% drop and that's reduction from the longest to the shortest of these two SIM times this game seems to benefit from the IPC uplift and because it's based on time and not frame rate it is immediately and clearly observable to most users games like Stellaris Galactic Civilizations which is awesome if you haven't played it or other simulation titles have clear time reductions from uplift like this this is one of the 9700 X's stronger titles Intel's first showing is at 30 seconds with fast memory or 30.5 with the same memory that almost everything else here uses but we already knew Intel simulation time is slow because it wasn't able to run PR simulations fast enough to bury the recent controversy this allows AMD a lead overall on this chart but also just right now generally for now we'll see we have to skip Rainbow 6 this time because they just updated the game and we measured a performance impact from the patch so we only have 9700x tests for the new version we'll move on to production our production and workstation tests coming up start with blender these are heavily multi-threaded generally and generally more reliant on core count though not all of them are so Photoshop for example behaves a little differently we'll go through all of those in this testing our blender render is the first one it's a real world test and it performs a tile-based render on the CPU of our intro animation to this video the render requires 13.2 minutes on the 9700x for one frame which roughly ties it with the 7700x that's unfortunate Stellaris already showed us the opposite of this where the performance of fewer threads matters more for the 9700x here however the impact is less because the workload distribution across all the CPU cores minimizes the difference x3d doesn't matter in this particular test so the non x3d Parts generally perform better since they tend to have higher clocks than the x3d counterparts sadly for the 9700x it's outperformed by the 5900 X of a few Generations ago which has benefited more by the core count than the 9700x can make up for with frequency and Architectural improvements the same is true for the 3950x 16 core part and and actually Intel's 14700 K also outperforms the 9700x here the 5000 series x3d Parts at least don't lead this time but the result is complete and total stagnation for the 9700x versus the 7700x it's just not good at most you could call it acceptable but now we'll move on to file compression with szip the 7700x is technically 1.7% ahead functionally they're tied and we're looking at stagnation here remember that the 9700 X was run technically on different memory despite us matching the timing as much as we could stabilize this could account for some small differences very small ones but not much ultimately at best the parts are the same and at worst the 9700 a is slightly worse the 5900 a 3950x and even 14600 K all run ahead of the 9700x here and these performance is embarrassing and fails to move the needle there's absolutely no reason to buy this CPU for workloads like this unless you were already going to buy a 7700x anyway and if this is cheaper both of those conditions have to be true in decompression testing the 9700x completed 136,000 mips which roughly tied it with the 14600 K performance is below the 7700x for the reasons we've discussed already at best you could maybe call them equal but overall this is pretty disappointing the 9700x leads in Photoshop so for AMD that's a relief this is less thread bound and more individually intensive on fewer cores as a result amd's IPC improvements show through the 9700x ends up leading the 750x and 7700x alike with the lead over the 7700x at 10% that's one of the largest gaps we've seen in our testing so far and is similar to Stellaris the closest Intel CPU is the 14900 k at 10,049 points giving the 9700x a lead of 19% against the original 1700x the 9700x leads by 130% and that was an ERA when AMD was disadvantaged on clocks manifesting in disproportionately bad Photoshop results Adobe premier is up now the Puget aggregate score is a combination of editing tasks such as filters Time Warp scales raw performance intraframe performance and more this one favors the 14900 K which has an overall score of 10,715 points in aggregate or 14% higher than the 9700x the 9700x is at least ahead of the 7700x in this one boasting an unbelievable breathtaking 3.2% lead it's truly mind-blowing what AMD is able to achieve in just two short years it's almost as much as what Intel achieved with each year of its 14 nmet era maybe we could start adding pluses to these CPS for the next round code compile testing is up next compiling chromium for a heavy and extended workload the longer runtime of this test allows us to better see the impact of things like boosting Behavior the 9700x ends up slightly ahead of the 7700x again this time with a 3.3% compile time reduction that's exciting the 13600 K is faster here but what's even faster than that is if it blue screens while compiling Intel's 14900 K and 14700 K also do well in this test with the 7950 X and x3d leading rodinia cfd is next our observation of this one is that it likes core count and frequency with less emphasis on cache and reduced on Purely cores a balance the 9700x has one of its larger leads over the 7700x in this one at 10.7% Intel is relatively speaking dominating here next up are the spec life sciences and biomedical the spec life sciences and biomed lamps test is described by spc.org as quote molecular Dynamic simulator that consists of five test simulating a variety of molecular properties in lamps we're seeing regressive performance again it doesn't happen often but the 7700x as results here at 4.45 leads the 9700x by 2.5% some of this may be due to the slightly different memory timings that we've already talked about as a result of the memory compatibility troubles but that shouldn't account for the whole difference the 97 00x is just disappointing compared to the 7700x in this one all right so wrapping this up this is a pretty big review we could break down really simply though Intel has been working really hard this past year they have been putting in concerted effort to make sure that nobody has any confidence in them whatsoever and they've succeeded they've done exceptionally well at really killing the confidence in Intel as a brand destroying its brand credibility uh making us question whether or not it'll actually support its products making us question whether it'll tell people about the faults of its products and try to make good on it so because of that AMD has that going for it unfortunately though this is not a good marketing tactic uh the other one being worse generally speaking is not a good sell because what happens is stagnation people look at it they go ah I'll just sit on what I am using now or whatever and it's it's just not as exciting so uh this leads to potential boredom slow down in the market station AMD has efficiency going for it though so that is the biggest thing AMD has has with the 9700x we'll see if that continues with the other N5 CPUs they are doing well there uh and that is the singular pillar preventing this review from going the direction of us saying this is amd's 14 nmet plus plus plus plus plus moment they are halfway there they're at like a a 14 nmet and a half of a Plus without the efficiency pillar H they're there it's the skyling stagnation boredom but uh that change in power means that it's not quite so simple so at least there's that going for it uh we'd like to see the efficiency improvement with more of a performance uplift we have been uh maybe spoiled by that over the past Generations overall the CPU is relatively boring it is slightly better than a 7700x sometimes it is slightly worse other times relatively rare but does happen and uh the biggest changes we're seeing in meaningful applications are like 10% uh and that is not the norm so you the efficiency is exciting in a way we just think AMD probably should have found a better balance between efficiency and performance to try and get a little bit of both uh without just sort of uh mid maxing on the efficiency side the memory compatibility has been rough for our testing it's odd considering the stability of the motherboard and the platform overall for the same memory sticks on 7,000 series it could be bios or it could be the CPU or it could be aesa ultimately Tam's fault and here's why uh AMD knows whose boards are being used by reviewers they know to the extent that when they're packaging the BIOS and the drivers and whatever for reviews in advance of launch before it's publicly available uh they will create folders for a set of boards that are commonly used by reviewers and distribute it that means AMD is Distributing the stuff for the reviews AMD is validating in its labs in theory that stuff works on those boards for the reviews uh and so we'd view it as it's ultimately under amd's control to make sure this stuff kind of works as it's supposed to we're not going to let them just blame it on a board vendor so and also Patrick did just while I was filming this go and quickly validate and we had some of the same memory issues with our 9600 X on an azrock board so it does seem like that CPU is just screwed as for the 9700x the CPU is fine if it didn't have the efficiency improvements it'd be getting the Intel 11th gen treatment of being a dead generation that we call a waste of sand instead because it has efficiency it just gets me which is at least a little bit better I guess if you're on am4 you should consider the 5700 x3d uh if you're not happy with your performance if you're happy with your performance just keep the CPU I mean you don't have to upgrade every generation it's normally not productive anyway and skipping a couple is just fine uh if you want an upgrade though and you're on A4 there's a lot of good x3d options assuming you're not trying to do a total new system and then if you want a total new system the 7800 x3d is still looking really good and probably for a lot of gaming scenarios does still make more sense as for Intel we'll re-evaluate the company's processors when the micro code ships and when they get their together and just really thinking aloud here you know the 9700x it's okay but the reason this is disappointing is just because of how much AMD has totally flubbed and squandered the opportunity here Intel is down and it it's really screwing up it's good that AMD delayed their launch if they had problems but they still have problems so it wasn't enough there's clear compatibility issues uh with some of the memory configurations that worked just fine on the 7000 series we were able to confirm now after filming the whole review and editing it the 9600 X that we got originally it actually is just as functional and this is the first CPU I think I've ever received that is that broke and where we can't review it we got a new one in it works totally fine as expected uh in the same test conditions so there's something wrong with the first one and then you look at the pricing and if a 7700x is 60 bucks cheaper than a 9700x that makes way more sense uh the value is not there for the 9700x versus amd's own existing inventory the 7800x 3D at a similar price to the 9700x makes way more sense for gaming scenarios uh and so the the 9700x there's really just no reason to buy it right now we think compared to amd's own Alternatives so they've kind of squandered this launch and flubbed the opportunity to really try and impress everyone when Intel is down with the exception of efficiency in the 9700x versus the 7700x but the 7800 X 3D is basically just as technically actually more efficient in its intended use case gaming STS than the 9700x that's it for this one the 9700x like I said whatever it's it's boring but uh it's not a total disaster and it's got good efficiency so it's a little bit cooler as well so uh that's it thanks for watching subscribe for more go to store. Gamers access.net to help us out directly you can grab one of the these shirt which are actually going to be shipping pretty soon and then we also have the red green and yellow soldering mats along side are blue it's been really interesting to see the popularity of them uh I actually thought red was going to be the most popular just because such a a bright vibrant pop that we got on it so far though most of you are buying Green in fact green is moving uh I think it's pretty close to 2x red and yellow so what I can say is all of you and our audience must be inid shills that's what it means because Green's the most popular solder mat color Behind Blue which I guess makes you Intel shills as well that's just you know we got to do something about that thanks for watching subscribe for more we'll see you all next time\n"