AMD's new Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" family of CPUs are now official, led by the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X with 16 cores and 32 threads, but there's also the mid-range Zen 4 chip: the new Ryzen 5 7600X.
The new AMD Ryzen 5 7600X is a mid-range Zen 4-powered CPU that packs 6 cores and 12 threads that have a base clock of 4.5GHz and boost up to 5.3GHz, with a 105W TDP and price of $299. That pricing is competitive AF, given that the mid-range Ryzen 5 7600X chip keeps up with and trades blows with Intel's very best Core i9-12900K processor that costs almost twice as much.
AMD's new Ryzen 5 7600X is made on the same 5nm process node at TSMC, with it keeping up with the Core i9-12900K in 1080p gaming with titles like Middle-earth: Shadow of War, F1 2022, GTA V, Cyberpunk 2077, and Rainbox Six: Siege. In AMD's own internal benchmarks, we see the Ryzen 5 7600X ties with the Core i9-12900K in Cyberpunk 2077, is 3% slower (you wouldn't notice that) in GTA V, and beats the 12900K in everything else.
This means that AMD's new Ryzen 5 7600X should easily beat Intel's next-gen mid-range Core i5-13600K "Raptor Lake" CPU, given that the Ryzen 5 7600X beats Intel's best Alder Lake CPU. In previous leaks, we heard about the Intel Core i5-13600K "ES3" engineering sample CPU, which is a 14-core, 20-thread CPU with up to 5.1GHz clocks and power consumption of around 173W (105W on the Ryzen 5 7600X).
- Read more: AMD's new Ryzen 9 7950X 'Zen 4' CPU: 16C/32T at up to 5.7GHz for $699
- Read more: AMD Ryzen 7000 series 'Zen 4' CPUs are official: September 27 launch
Intel's new mid-range Core i5-13600K is rumored to have an official 160W TDP, while leaks at the time said there was still a lot of room for improvement. But if AMD is able to provide a 6-core, 12-thread CPU at up to 5.3GHz for 105W... that's all you'll need for some truly awesome bang-for-buck when it comes to next-gen PC hardware.
There aren't many games out there pushing past 12-16 threads of CPU performance, and if they are... you'll know about them and adjust your PC specs -- like buying the higher-end Ryzen 9 7950X -- for those games. For 90%+ of gamers, a 12-thread Zen 4-powered CPU at 5.3GHz for sub $300 (and cheaper once AMD really needs to push these CPUs out there, and once Intel launches its new Raptor Lake CPUs) is fantastic.
Given that you get DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 technologies as well, you can have a sub $300 CPU with a sub $300 motherboard, choosing to go for some DDR5 memory and a new PCIe 5.0 SSD and PCIe 5.0 graphics card? Quite the potent PC there, now we need to see how the RDNA 3-powered Navi 3X-based Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs go.