AMD 65W Zen 4 Review: Ryzen 7600, 7700, and 7900 CPUs Tested

TweakTown's Rating: 91%

The Bottom Line

Adding 65W Ryzen CPU SKUs, AMD has furthered the availability and reach of it new AM5 platform.

Pros

• + Gaming performance
• + AM5 support
• + Performance per watt
• + Power consumption

Cons

• - Launch pricing

Should you buy it?

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Introduction and Pricing

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AMD's 65-watt Zen 4 processors open the door to small form factor systems and DIY builders wanting better options that are easier to cool. On the other hand, it also ushers in a second processor stack to fill in pricing gaps in the initial Zen 4 landscape.

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Looking at today's launch models, AMD is starting with the Ryzen 9 7900, a twelve-core twenty-four-thread part. It enjoys a solid 5.4GHz boost and the same 76MB cache as the 7900X. Of course, TDP has been reeled into 65W, and pricing has been adjusted to $429 MSRP.

Second, we have the Ryzen 7 7700, an eight-core sixteen-thread part, with a healthy boost up to 5.3GHz and cache at 40MB. MSRP for this model sits at $329.

Last, we have the Ryzen 5 7600, a new entry model, a six-core twelve-thread part, 38MB cache, and $229 MSRP.

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Looking further into the new 65W models, we note each processor's bundled cooling solution in the slide above, followed by compatibility and supporting features. AMD also noted intended competition at the far right.

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Diving into a few comparison slides, AMD uses its own Zen 3 parts to show the performance of its Zen 4 65W parts. As you may have noted, the 7600, in this instance, outperforms the 5600X in every tested game.

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Moving on to the 7700, we note a 5800X comparison again, showing the huge performance gain to be had, even at 65W.

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The 7900 does just as good, too. The chart above shows solid boosts in performance gen over gen.

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The CPUs themselves follow the design changes we saw with the initial launch of Zen 4.

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The cooler above is the Wraith Stealth cooler included with the 7600.

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This much larger cooler is the Wraith Spire and is included with the 7700 and 7900.

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X 8-Core, 16-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor

	Today	Yesterday	7 days ago	30 days ago
	$301.51	$301.51	$301.51	$287.65	Buy
* Prices last scanned on 4/24/2024 at 4:07 pm CDT - prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission.

Test System

• Motherboard: X670E AORUS Master BIOS F5C
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090Ti
• RAM: Corsair Dominator RGB DDR5 6000 CL30
• Cooler: 3x140mm Custom Water
• OS Storage: Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB
• Power Supply: AORUS GP AP1200PM
• OS: Microsoft Windows 11

Cinebench, Crossmark and AIDA64

Cinebench R23

Cinebench is a long-standing render benchmark that has been heavily relied upon by both Intel and AMD to showcase their newest platforms during unveils. The benchmark has two tests, a single-core workload utilizing one thread or 1T and a multi-threaded test that uses all threads or nT of a tested CPU.

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Into testing, we found all three 65W models landing in the bottom half of our charts. The 7900 scored 1921 in single thread while the 7700 and 7600 come in at 1893 and 1772, respectively.

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Over to multi-thread, the 7900 offered 24918, a few thousand lower than its X counterpart. The same can be said for the 7700 scoring 18597 and 7600 scoring 14221.

Crossmark

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CrossMark lined all three CPUs up at the bottom of our charts.

AIDA64

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AES has been very strong for Zen 4, and even with the lower TDP, they still lead in our chart above. At the top is the 7900 at 265K, and the 7700 and 7600 just behind at 186K and 135K, respectively.

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SHA3 has the 7900 at 7522, 7700 at 5426, and 7600 reaching 4047, very close to their X counterparts.

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WebXPRT4 showed a small performance loss for the 65W model compared to their X series parts. At the top is the 7900 at 292.

UL Benchmarks

Procyon and 3DMark

UL Procyon Suite

The UL Procyon Office Productivity Benchmark uses Microsoft Office apps to measure PC performance for office productivity work.

The Photo Editing benchmark uses Adobe® Lightroom® to import, process, and modify a selection of images. In the second part of the test, multiple edits and layer effects are applied to a photograph in Adobe® Photoshop®.

The Video editing benchmark uses Adobe® Premiere® Pro to export video project files to common formats. Each video project includes various edits, adjustments, and effects. The benchmark score is based on the time taken to export the videos.

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Starting with our Office workload, the 65W models all landed at the bottom of the chart, with the 7900 first at 8302 but just a little behind the 7700 and 7600.

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Photo showed solid performance for the 7900 reaching 10863.

3DMark

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The first of our 3DMark workloads has us in CPU Profile. We noted how well the 65W CPUs did in these workloads against their X counterparts. For instance, the 7700 lands just 900 points behind the 7700X at sixteen threads, and the 7600 is even closer at 6619.

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Our first "gaming" scenario lands us a score of 20411 in Timespy with our 3090 Ti.

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Speed Way is an added benchmark, with the 7600 doing the best in this workload.

Gaming and Power Consumption

Gaming Performance

Diving into gaming, we use Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p, 1440p, and 2160p.

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Getting into gaming, the 7900 landed with 187 FPS at 1080p. At 1440p, this drops to 146FPS, and at 4K, 88.7 FPS. Compared to the 7900X, we lose no FPS at 1080p, while 4K loses about 10 FPS.

Power Efficiency

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Looking at our CPU power draw alone, the 7900, 7700, and 7600 all pull around 20 watts at idle. Under load, we picked up 106 watts from the 7900 and 95 watts from the 7700 and 7600.

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Adding our new 65W model to our performance per watt chart, the 7900 takes top honors at 100%, followed by the 7700 at 95% and 91% for the 7600.

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Adding in cost, the 7600 takes the top spot for Zen 4 65W, with the 7900 landing at 82% and 7700 at 80%.

Final Thoughts

I've been pleasantly surprised by the range of AMD 65W CPUs launched today. Looking at gaming first, we saw minimal performance loss at 1080p when comparing these new SKUs to the original launch stack and, in some cases, a small uptick in performance. At 1440p and 4K, performance was still quite good, though down a few FPS compared to higher TSP parts.

Sliding over to AIDA64, we noted fantastic AES and SHA3 performance, rivaling the X series parts once again. While benchmarking with CrossMark, we did note a score of 2289 for the 7900, while the 7700 and 7600 picked up 2191 and 2050, respectively.

Power numbers across the entire range were mind-blowing. 106 watts peak was measured from the 7900 during testing and, when crossed with the performance numbers from Procyon, landed it as the top CPU performance per watt. The same could be said for the 7700 and 7600, landing top three in our PPW chart above.

Onto pricing, where AMD may have gone wrong once again, we note the launch MSRPs from the beginning of our review, $429, $329, and $229 for the 7900,7700 and 7600, respectively, and a quick look at the current market will note many of the X series SKUs have already come down quite a bit since launch.

Many SKUs, like the 7900X, are just $10 more than the launch price of the 7900. The same is repeated across the lineup, making us believe there will be price cuts in the future for these newly launched SKUs. You may want to wait a bit.