AMD’s flagship 16-core $699 Ryzen 9 7950X and entry-level six-core $299 Ryzen 5 7600X are the bookend models in the new Ryzen 7000 “Raphel” lineup, and they take leading spots on our list of Best CPUs and our CPU Benchmark hierarchy with Intel-beating performance in nearly every category, including gaming and applications. 

Intel’s hybrid Alder Lake processors caught AMD flatfooted, taking the lead in both performance and value at every price point. The Ryzen 7000 processors fire back with the new Zen 4 architecture, which AMD claims increases IPC by 13%, etched on the TSMC 5nm process. That combo delivers incredible peak clocks of 5.7 GHz — an increase of 800 MHz that marks a record for AMD’s Ryzen family. It’s also surprisingly a higher clock speed than we see with even Intel’s fastest chips, at least until the company’s 6 GHz Raptor Lake chips come to market.

Paired with vastly improved power delivery, which comes courtesy of a new platform, AMD’s process and architecture advances deliver truly explosive performance gains. AMD’s new chips drop into the new AM5 socket, which the company has committed to supporting until 2025, on 600-series motherboards. In addition, the new platform comes replete with support for the latest interfaces, like DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, largely matching Intel’s connectivity options. AMD has even developed its own EXPO DDR5 memory profiles for overclocking, rivaling Intel’s XMP standard. The Ryzen 7000 chips also come loaded with other new tech, like a new Radeon RDNA 2 iGPU for basic display output and support for AVX-512 and AI instructions.


As a quick preview of our extensive tests below, the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X makes incredible gains — it’s up to 15% faster at gaming, 21% faster in single-threaded work, and 45% faster in threaded work than its predecessor, setting a new bar for the highest-end mainstream chips. In fact, the $3,299 Threadripper Pro 5975WX is only 17% faster than the 7950X in threaded work, but it costs almost six times more. That’s not to mention that the 7950X beats the Core i9-12900K across the board.   

The Ryzen 5 7600X is equally impressive, delivering up to 18% faster gaming performance than its predecessor in tandem with 25% and 34% gains in single- and multi-threaded work, respectively, ushering in a new unmatched level of performance at the $300 price point.

Both chips beat Intel’s flagship in gaming. However, as impressive as they are, they aren’t perfect: The Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 series has a high $300 entry-level price point and only supports pricey DDR5 memory instead of including less-expensive DDR4 options like Intel. That muddies the value proposition due to the expensive overall platform costs. AMD also dialed up power consumption drastically to boost performance, inevitably resulting in more heat and a more power-hungry system. You do end up with more performance-per-watt, though.

Ryzen 7000 takes the lead in convincing fashion, but its real competitor, Raptor Lake, doesn’t come until next month. Nevertheless, Intel claims its own impressive performance gains of 15% faster single-threaded, 41% faster threaded, and a 40% ‘overall’ performance gain, meaning we’ll see a close battle for desktop PC leadership. In the meantime, here’s how the current chips stack up.

Check out our full article on Tom's Hardware