After the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X, let’s take a look at how AMD’s next-tier Ryzen 9 7900X fares with the Zen 4 architecture this time around.
Testing environment
For the next test, let’s use the most powerful GPU NVIDIA just released:GeForce RTX 4090compared to the gaming performance of the Ryzen 9 7900X and 7950X of the same series, as well as the opponent’s current high-end Core i9-12900K.
| processor | AMD Ryzen 9 7900X AMD Ryzen 9 7950X |
Intel Core i9-12900K |
| motherboard | ASUS ROG Maximus X670E Hero | ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Hero |
| Memory | Kingston FURY Beast DDR5-6000 16GBx2 | |
| radiator | ASUS ROG Strix LC II 360 ARGB White Edition | |
| heat exchange medium | Thermalright TF8 | |
| Graphic card | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition | |
| shop | Kingston FURY Renegade SSD 2TB Seagate FireCuda 530 NVMe 2TB SSD |
|
| Power supply | FSP Hydro PTM PRO ATX 3.0 (PCIe 5.0) 1200W | |
| working system | Windows 11 professional | |
rendering operations
Since the maximum boost clock of the Ryzen 9 7900X is slightly lower than that of the Ryzen 9 7950X, the single-core performance is around 2% ~ 3% lower, which is comparable to the Core i9-12900K.
With only 3/4 the number of cores of the Ryzen 9 7950X, the low multi-core performance is understandable, but it’s about 10% more than the previous flagship Ryzen 9 5950X and even beats the Core i9-12900K.
Comprehensive application performance
With the advancement of the Zen 4 architecture, the performance of the Ryzen 9 7900X’s CrossMark commercial applications is only 4% lower than the Ryzen 9 7950X and significantly higher than the Ryzen 9 5950X by nearly 30%. Geekbench 5’s single-core / multi-core applications even drive the Ryzen 9 5950X by 30% / 20% respectively.
3DMark
In the Time Spy test that simulates DirectX 12 games, it can be seen that the CPU score gap between Ryzen 9 7900X and Ryzen 9 7950X is not large, but Graphic has a slight advantage. The CPU profile test passed both the Ryzen 9 5950X and the Core i9-12900K.
Game performance
Indeed, the gaming performance values of the Ryzen 9 7900X and Ryzen 9 7950X are quite close, but below the overall average of the 22 games we tested, the Ryzen 9 7900X is slightly better than the Ryzen 9 7950X by 0.5% and l Full HD CS: GO is even ahead of 4%.
Energy consumption and temperature
If you use the more extreme Prime95 for burn-in, the difference in power consumption between Ryzen 9 7900X and Ryzen 9 7950X is not great, only within 5 W. However, if the AIDA 64 FPU is used to burn the machine, the Ryzen 9 7900X’s power consumption will be significantly reduced, which is over 30W worse and slightly lower than the Core i9-12900K.
The temperature characteristics are inherited from the Ryzen 9 7950X The Ryzen 9 7900X can reach 96.1 ° C in Prime95 and the AIDA 64 FPU drops slightly to 93 ° C.
Recap
Although the grade is slightly lower, the Ryzen 9 7900X still leverages TSMC’s Zen 4 architecture and the benefits of TSMC’s 5nm process to achieve a high clock, as well as lower core-to-core latency due to fewer cores. . Average game performance is slightly higher. Ryzen 9 7950X a little.
While the overall game performance still falls short of the Core i9-12900K, it has reached quite close and the Ryzen 9 7900X is still dominant in multi-core applications and overall power consumption is slightly lower.
To sum up, the advantage of the AM5 platform this time around is that it has abundant and sufficient PCIe 5.0 bandwidth, and it is more convenient to configure a SSD with a PCIe 5.0 interface.Unfortunately, the price of the motherboard is high. If you don’t care about PCIe 5.0 applications, a motherboard with a more affordable B650 chipset will also be a less stressful choice.
