[…] Late last year, we were ready for some meaningful gaming performance gains. But when Zen 5 arrived, we were left stumped. The 9700X was only about 1 – 2% faster than the 7700X, while the 9600X was just a few percent faster than the 7600X. Although performance margins varied between review outlets due to different testing methods, the recurring theme was clear: for gaming and most general productivity applications, Zen 5 offered little to nothing over Zen 4.
So, has anything changed? We continue to see comments suggesting that Zen 5 has received further optimizations and is now comfortably ahead of Zen 4 for gaming.
Today, we are putting that claim to the test by comparing the 7600X and 9600X across a dozen games. For additional context, we’re including the 9800X3D to help determine whether we are CPU or GPU limited in our testing. We’re using the latest version of Windows 11, along with the most up-to-date BIOS for our AM5 motherboard.
Video version: YouTube
I came by these processors while fleeing intel earlier this year. Maybe my use cases are different than other gamers. Based on where I wanted to deploy the computer, trying to pull 800+W (including the GPU) was going to not work with my wiring. I also like to air cool if I can since I don’t want to have to maintain a cooling solution if it works.
So when I looked at these processors earlier this year, the 9600x (which was also on crazy sale) was a huge coup, because it runs 40W cooler than the 7600x, while slightly beating it in performance and offering access to Zen5 architecture and faster RAM. I didnt get the hate.
I’m sort of understanding that the mainline hate people have for these processors is that the 9600x isn’t a big improvement over the 7600x, but if you were coming over from outside the architecture, the 9600x seems like a no brainer if you’re buying into zen 5
The initial pricing was bad:
And prior to launch, expectations were set wrong:
If expectations were managed better and launch pricing made sense, reviews would probably have been mildly positive, highlighting the power consumption difference that you’ve noted instead of focusing on those two problems (lower-than-expected performance and nonsensical pricing).
Perceptions are heavily colored by how things are at launch, even though today the situation is modestly improved due to the pricing changes.
Makes sense. You quoted earlier:
And this advice makes sense in its context but also is very much like “An iphone 17 isn’t a meaningful enough upgrade over an iphone 16” and not really like “an iphone 16 probably isn’t worth buying anymore if you want something with long term support, but if you have a 16, the 17 isn’t really worth it for you; if you are upgrading from a 12, you might as well go 17 for <benefits>.”
Well, yeah I guess. But let’s say you were on AM4 with Ryzen 3000/5000 and were looking forward to jumping up to Ryzen 9000 at release specifically because the jump to 7000 wasn’t “big enough” to justify doing it. Suddenly with Ryzen 9000 it ended up being barely more of an upgrade for you than Ryzen 7000, which would make it still not really worthwhile. Upgrade perspectives don’t have to be just a single gen!