Am I crazy? Ryzen 9600X and 9700X

Summary

Highlights

• The 'X' in AMD's 9600X and 9700X can mislead performance comparisons! 🔍
• Real efficiency gains are less than what's suggested by involves misleading comparisons. 📉
• You won't find huge gaming performance improvements with the new CPUs. ⚔️
• Emphasis on needing prices to drop substantially for good value. 💵
• Precision Boost Overdrive doesn't significantly boost gaming performance. 🚫
• Gaming-wise, these new Ryzen models are more 'meh' than 'wow'. 🤷‍♂️

Key Takeaways

• Don't be fooled by the 'X' in 9600X and 9700X! Names can be deceiving. 🎭
• Comparing power efficiency? Ensure you're using the right predecessor for accuracy! ⚖️
• Prices should come down significantly before these models become a good gaming deal. 🎮💸
• Precision Boost Overdrive doesn’t always mean big gaming wins! 🚀
• AMD's pricing strategy and loss of cooler make these CPUs less appealing. 📉
• For gamers, these new AMD models aren't mind-blowing just yet! 😒

Overview

Am I crazy? Ryzen 9600X and 9700X Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 one little letter is throwing off people's interpretations of the 9700x and 9600 X CPUs quite a bit because I'm going to come back to why they're being compared to the wrong predecessor processor which is making a a big difference in things like how we interpret power efficiency because for example if you look at the gamers Nexus review where they were overall uh you know calling it a wasted opportunity and when you look at the gaming performance showing not much of an improvement over the previous generation they at least came back back with but there was a
• 00:30 - 01:00 massive generational power efficiency Improvement when compared against the 7700x and that's true if you compare it against the 7700x uh the problem is that nowhere on this chart is the 7700 and I'm not saying that Gamers Nexus did anything wrong they included a ton of CPUs here they I think tested even more that just didn't fit onto these charts and we'll probably see even more on their uh you know website that they that that they put up there and not everybody can test every single CPU but the problem is that I think we should be
• 01:00 - 01:30 comparing against the 7700 non-x also um I've seen people talking about uh Precision boost overdrive and whether that should be being used when looking at performance because I've been seeing a lot of people saying well okay the the the 5% performance gains uh uh look a lot better if you allow PBO to go up to maximum settings and then you can see these like 20% performance gains and that can be true in tests like cinebench R23 however however in this very same
• 01:30 - 02:00 derau review which a lot of people are citing as this product's way more way more exciting when you look at PBO well if you're focused on gaming performance though uh most of his game testing here is actually showing you know a couple perc difference at most when enabling PBO meaning PBO did not give those massive performance gains in gaming workloads so uh I think that's one issue here is the focus on whether we're focus on gaming performance or productivity
• 02:00 - 02:30 performance and if we're looking at uh efficiency which processor are we actually comparing against so I want you guys to bear with me as I make some sense out of these charts I pulled from Wikipedia where we look at the 7,000 Series against what we have so far of the 9000 Series and why I think one little X is making these CPUs actually look better than they should um which uh is saying something considering they already don't look all that great but okay here's what a lot of people are
• 02:30 - 03:00 doing and what I think AMD wanted people to look at which is compare these 7700x up against the uh the 9700x and this makes sense they're eight core 16 parts and they both have the X on them and there's a bit of a problem with this though the problem is that the 7700x is a 105 watt part and the 9700x is a uh is a 65 watt part so there's a pretty big difference on that
• 03:00 - 03:30 power consumption and this is what's looking uh what's happening when people are pointing out these huge efficiency gains generationally is they're comparing a 105 watt part up against a 65 watt part now uh this also is leading people to a more positive conclusion about pricing because that 7700x 105 watt part came in at $399 MSRP and the9 700x 65 watt part is
• 03:30 - 04:00 coming in at a $359 MSRP so what AMD is wanting people to notice here is that that is taking a $40 cut to the MSRP and so a lot of people are discussing this as a good thing although correctly bringing up that if you look at the 7700x in the current market you can get it as low as $274 and suddenly it this looks a lot less impressive if you're actually trying to buy a CPU in the current
• 04:00 - 04:30 market but my argument is that this is actually worse when we look at msrps as well because let me switch to maybe a different color here let's switch to Green here's what I think we should actually be comparing for both efficiency and value is the ryzen 7700 non-x because names can literally be anything names are almost meaningless um you can slap whatever name you want onto something but if we're comparing uh products that were already available from the previous generation
• 04:30 - 05:00 of Zen processors the 7700 is also an 8 core 16 thread part and it's coming in at 65 Watts just like the ryzen 9700x is an 8 core 16 thread part coming in at 65 watts and uh again this is coming in at an MSRP of $359 but wait a minute the 7765 watt part came in at $329 so if we look at that comparison
• 05:00 - 05:30 we're now not taking $40 off the MSRP we're actually adding $30 to the MSRP and it actually gets even worse than that because notice that what this line also Drew through the ryzen 7700 NX came with a boxed cooler which adds value to a value oriented build because this being only a 65 watt part means that a wraith prism boxed cooler that
• 05:30 - 06:00 comes with the product can actually get you pretty much the advertised performance maybe the uh you know uh sound level on the fans wouldn't be ideal and a lot of people would end up upgrading the the um the cooler on it but if you were throwing together a value oriented build you could include that box uh um that that that boxed processor so not only are we gaining $30 to the MSRP we're also losing a stock cooler now
• 06:00 - 06:30 but uh you might be like well okay but the 7700x and 7700 don't perform the same well the the thing is they actually perform extremely similarly and also uh that's because a lot of people accuse the 7700x and just generally the X products in the previous generation when they launched of being driven way too hard out of the box which was leading them to run a lot hotter and a lot less efficiently than they needed to and so if you did then compare it to the 65 watt part and you didn't actually lose that much performance despite losing a
• 06:30 - 07:00 lot of wattage now it's a lot harder to find reviewers who are actually including these 7700 in their test results uh in Hardware unbox original review of the 9700x uh they didn't include the 7700 non-x as a comparison point but in their 9600 X review uh they actually followed up on this very idea showing the cinebench results of the 7700 against the 9700x showing that overall their
• 07:00 - 07:30 they measure total system power rather than just the CPU but the total system power was within one watt of each other and um getting 7% better performance in cinebench 2024 so we're seeing about a 7% efficiency increase as opposed to the you know 40 something per efficiency increases that a lot of people were seeing uh when comparing it against the X version of the uh of the previous generation part so that suddenly takes away a lot of that efficiency argument
• 07:30 - 08:00 and we can make a lot of these same uh arguments about the six core part as well where again if I switch back to uh what I think AMD wants you to think about in red uh AMD wants you to look at the 7600 X and compare it to the 9600 X because they're named similarly and they're both six core 12 thread Parts however uh if we take a look at the 7600 X the 7600 X was a 5 watt part it came
• 08:00 - 08:30 in at $299 so AMD wants you to uh compare that to our 9600 x uh which is coming in at $279 and so they want you to see this as $20 off the MSRP however again if I switch into green let's look at the other way you could look at this we've had a ryzen 7600 nonex available for a long time that comes with a wraith stealth cooler uh that's a 65 watt part and came in at 2
• 08:30 - 09:00 $29 and wait a minute we're getting a six core 12 thread part here uh that comes in at 65 Watts doesn't include the stealth cooler and comes in at uh $279 so rather than being a um a $20 decrease if you compare it to the previous gen 65 watt part this is actually even worse value this is a $50 increase over the previous generation generation 65 watt part so and you're
• 09:00 - 09:30 losing that boxed cooler which again for the most value oriented builds actually does save you 20 or $30 on a CPU Cooler so it looks even worse than that so and and then again you can get to looking at the actual Market uh where the uh 7600 has actually been available as low as $182 if I wanted to buy it today and again that comes with a boxed cooler so
• 09:30 - 10:00 um that that suddenly makes this look really bad uh and so AMD at least wanted to show lower msrps but again I think if you look at these just against a different part that was available I think is a better match these are actually worse msrps and you lose the boxed cooler and again the efficiency proposition kind of flies out the window as well so if we uh start to look at the overall performance here you can see that the uh you know what actually let's pop over to tech power up let's look at
• 10:00 - 10:30 Tech powerups results but again if if I flip the reviews here you're going to see that that there there's not massive differences depending on which Outlet you look at uh certain games did see bigger performance games but on any outlet that reviewed a large number of games uh you're seeing that the performance generationally is maybe a 5% gaming jump and a lot of testing is actually showing even lower than that and in certain games there's actually performance regression so let's look at the 90 600x review from Tech PowerUp and
• 10:30 - 11:00 focus on their 720p data and they included PBO and they included an overclock and they included stock NOW notice that PBO uh whereas maybe in your um you know cinebench results can get a massive performance jump when we're looking at gaming results we are just not seeing the same thing so here we are seeing uh less than 2% Improvement to gaming performance when allowed PBO to go to maximum even less than that when just overclocking and when compared
• 11:00 - 11:30 against the previous generation if we kind of scroll down here uh the 7600 X was reaching 94.8% of the performance we were already uh within about 5% of gaming performance of the previous generation if you compare it to what AMD kind of wants you to and if you look at the at the 7600 that doesn't have that x on it notice we only lose 2% more performance relatively meaning that we're now with in about 7 or 8% of the
• 11:30 - 12:00 performance of the newer generation when we're comparing 65 watt parts so maybe generationally that makes your performance uplift look a little better it's more like 7% but that also means your efficiency gains while gaming is only about 7% because we're now comparing 65 watt parts to 65 watt Parts uh rather than comparing up against the much uh less efficient X versions of the CPUs from the previous generation so uh
• 12:00 - 12:30 again that's my take on the 9600 X is compared to the 7600 you're getting less than 10% performance increase uh maybe we could call it 7% at the same power levels it costs a lot more and you're losing the Box cooler and my take on the 9700x is very similar if we look at the 9700x again using Tech powerups data again lots of other review Outlets I I watched Pretty and read pretty much all the reviews uh I could find out there on
• 12:30 - 13:00 these uh you get the these type of results the 9700x at stock compared to the PBO at maximum is less than 1% performance gain using PBO when we're actually looking at gaming performance their OC results actually saw a slight performance reduction although all of these are so close uh you could call it just margin of error it it's not a huge difference if you compare it against the 7700x we're within 4% of the performance so you're seeing uh you know 4%
• 13:00 - 13:30 difference generationally here when compared against the X product and when compared against the nonex product were uh reaching 94.9% performance of the 9700x were within about 5% of the gaming performance when we're comparing the Matched uh wattage parts so when we're comparing 65 watt Parts we're now gaining about 5% performance at about the same power power level so uh yeah
• 13:30 - 14:00 the the jokes about this being Zen 5% seem pretty dang accurate to me this is about a 5% increase in performance at when when when looking at the same wattages and when allowing the the wattages to go you know a lot higher we're not seeing much gaming performance improvements now again we're also losing the boxed cooler when compared against the non-x parts and um that's kind of rough again I've been seeing this D our results showing the massive increase
• 14:00 - 14:30 with PBO enabled uh thrown around out there as people just not setting these up properly or not looking at what potential is available and I think that is only going to be true in certain workloads but again even within that same review the gaming tests did not show that same result and we're seeing tech power up also showing that gaming performance not massively in improved with PBO and again we're also seeing Hardware unboxed confirming again that even in cinebench when you're not using
• 14:30 - 15:00 PBO the power efficiency of the 9700x compared against the other 65 watt part is only about a 7% power efficiency gain so again uh My overall take on all of this is that the reviews got massively confused by that X in the naming scheme that's going to make this look like a much bigger uh efficiency gain than it actually is especially when you're looking at gaming where I think we're getting singled digigit efficiency improvements for gaming and we're getting singled digigit performance
• 15:00 - 15:30 improvements for gaming uh we're doing all of that at an actually an increase to the MSRP when compared against the previous uh 65 watt part and the loss of a box cooler and compared to the prices you can actually buy the previous generation which again gets you basically tied performance uh we're get seeing it as extremely bad value so these uh 9600 X and 97 X Parts don't
• 15:30 - 16:00 make sense for a gaming build until their prices come down massively or I guess the 7,000 series dries up in availability and um unfortunately that's my take on all of this and so I yeah I think really when you compare it against the parts that make the most sense to compare it against um you kind of lose even that that e efficiency Improvement now where it can I think make the most sense as as a positive review is in uh reviewers who are less focused on the gaming side of things so AMD did make a
• 16:00 - 16:30 lot of revisions um to the overall architecture which benefits certain workloads you can hear my kids running around upstairs we didn't lose that at the new house so anyway um so for Old Time sake there you go anyway um in certain workloads especially things with like AVX 512 and and certain forward-looking changes I think this is kind of nice I also don't hate moving to 65 Watts as our Baseline cuz I think that made a lot more sense with the previous generation as well and
• 16:30 - 17:00 I think trying to get these these CPUs uh down to to to the peak of their efficiency curve makes a lot of sense so so I don't hate that I and I and I really don't think these are terrible processors at all if the price is right but what we need to do is we need to see the 9600 X down here around $180 and then still it's not all that exciting because the 7600 was already basically doing that for a while now now within you know single digigit
• 17:00 - 17:30 performance differences with the boxed cooler so uh still not all that exciting and then if we look at the 7700 again down here around $280 okay if we start seeing the 9700x available around this price point then it starts to at least be okay but again you still lose the boxed cooler and you're still only gaining about 5% performance at that wattage so uh again when we're talking about gaming so sure there are certain workloads where these are a much more exciting product but my channel focuses
• 17:30 - 18:00 on gaming and so if you're interested in gaming yeah I've got to give a pretty negative um reaction to overall where we're at with these things let me know what you guys think in the comments section and also expect a video coming out for me very soon talking about the updates to Intel because Intel notice hasn't really featured anything I'm discussing here because of all their stability issues but their new micro code has launched today at least for some motherboards so expected an upcoming video to talk a lot more about
• 18:00 - 18:30 that and I hope you guys found this video useful and or interesting uh huge thank you to viewers uh subscribers and especially channel members we've clicked the join button down below to directly support the channel financially if you find what I do here uh useful and or interesting would like to support it uh feel free to click that join button get uh membership badges on your comments Early Access to some videos all of that uh and I hope all of you have an excellent day