This year at Computex AMD announced the next generation of their Ryzen CPU lineup, the 9000 series which is built on the Zen 5 microarchitecture. They announced four different CPUs, The Ryzen 5 9600X with 6 cores, the Ryzen 7 9700X with 8 cores, and then two Ryzen 9 CPUs, the 9900X with 12 cores and the 9950X with 16 cores. AMD was originally launching these at the end of July but they did push things slightly with the 9600X and 9700X hitting stores on the 8^th and the 9900X and 9950X hitting stores on the 15^th. So today I will be checking out the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X to see what they are all about ahead of that store launch. Let’s dive in!

Product Names: AMD Ryzen 9600X and 9700X

Review Sample Provided by: AMD

Written by: Wes Compton

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AMD Ryzen 5 9600X

AMD Ryzen 7 9700X

Test Rig and Procedures

Test System

Motherboard: ASUS ROG Crosshair X670E Hero - Live Pricing

Cooling: Corsair iCUE H100i ELITE LCD Liquid CPU Cooler - Live Pricing

Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Paste - Live Pricing

Memory: G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo DDR5 16GBx2 6000MHz - Live Pricing

Storage: Kingston FURY Renegade 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD- Live Pricing

Video Card: Nvidia RTX 4090 FE - Live Pricing

Power Supply: Corsair AX1200 - Live Pricing

Case: Primochill Wetbench - Live Pricing

OS: Windows 11 Pro 64-bit - Live Pricing

CPU Performance

To start testing off I went with a rendering-focused benchmark with the always popular Blender. This software is always updating and with that the benchmark changes as well so I have run with a few versions here. I tested with the older Blender 3.6, 4.0, and the latest 4.2 as well. I have all of the results stacked together to get the overall picture and the Ryzen 7 9700X came in just below the 14600K here. AMD has a nice improvement over the 7700X as well showing the generation-to-generation jump. The same goes for the 9600X which has a nice gap between it and the 7600X, passing the 12600K in that process. The same can be seen in the 4.0 and 4.2 results in regards to the 9700X coming in just behind the 14600K on those tests as well.

Continuing with the video encoding theme I also have Handbrake which is an open-source transcoder. For this test I am taking a 4k video down to 1080p 30 FPS, the results are the average FPS of that task. The 9700X improved on the last generation 7700X by 9 FPS here which still leaves a big gap between it and the 7900 sitting above it. For the 9600X it is also sitting right above the last gen 7600X with an improvement of 6 FPS there as well.

For the always popular Cinebench, I am testing with the older Cinebench R20 and R23 as well as the new 2024 edition as well. I always like Cinebench because we have multi-core and single-core performance which gives us a good look at the performance of the whole CPU and IPC performance. In R20 on the multi-core test, the 8 core 9700X and 6 core 9600X show big improvements over their previous generation equivalents. It’s the single-core test though that really shows AMDs Zen 5 improvements, with both CPUs jumping way ahead of all of the last gen Ryzen CPUs and sitting right behind Intel’s 14900K which should really help with the other upcoming 9000 Series Ryzen CPUs that will target the higher end market. You can see with Cinebench R23 and 2024 that single-core performance is impressive and it helps put a big gap between the 9700X and the 7700X as well as the 9600X and the 7600X.

Next up we have ray tracing-focused rendering benchmarks. Here I tested the CPUs in POV-Ray and V-Ray including the newer V-Ray Benchmark 5. POV-Ray was also tested with a single core and across all of the cores. The 9700X didn’t have as big of a jump in POV-Ray, in fact when compared with the 7700X its single-core test went well but it is basically tied with the 7700X. The 9600X on the other hand did make its improvement, especially in the single-core test. In the older V-Ray, the 9700X did edge down to 39 seconds for the test and the 9600X was at 47 seconds. Then in the V-Ray Benchmark 5 test, the 9600X snuck past the 8700G with a big jump in performance over the 7600X. The 9700X came in sitting between the 13600 K and 14600K.

I also tested using the CPUz’s built-in benchmark which does run on a single thread and with all threads. In the multi-thread test, the 9700X improved on the 7700X by 300 points and the 9600X did similar. The real improvement was once again on the single thread chart where both CPUs are up near the top, but the last two generations of Intel CPUs are still a little ahead all the way at the top.

Next, we have wPrime which is a classic overclocking benchmark that calculates pi out to 1024 million digits and is timed. This is a multi-thread heavy test which has the older high-core count CPUs still all over the top of the charts and you can see that with the top CPUs sitting at 8 or more cores. The 9600X was out in front of the 14900K with its eco cores and even farther in front of the 7600X. The 9700X was up near the top of the chart as well with its two additional cores but the 7700X was still sitting in its shadow.

7 Zip is another open-source program, this time for compressing and decompressing all of your files. Here I have run the benchmark and we have three results. The combined MIPS is a combination of compressing and decompressing performance. Then I have it broken down between the two. The combined results have the Ryzen 7 9700X sitting behind the previous generation 7700X and even the 7700. The 9600X is similar, sitting behind the 7600. Both the compressing and decompressing numbers paint a similar picture as well.

Jetstream 2 is a compilation benchmark that takes a long list of HTML5 and Java in-browser tests and runs them all three times and puts together an overall score. I love this benchmark because let's be honest, most people are using their browser more than any other game or program. Jetstream gives some interesting results sometimes though but it tends to prefer high IPC or single-core performance and there are some situations where it prefers lower core-count CPUs. We saw earlier just how well the new CPUs did in any of the single-core or threaded tests and that shows here again with both sitting way out in front of everything else with just the 14900K competing.

For Passmark Performance Test I used the latest version, Performance Test 11 and also tested with the older Performance Test 10 as well. I only look at the overall CPU score which takes a few different synthetic benchmarks and combines the results to put together an overall score. This is a test that does favor multi-threaded performance over IPC. In Performance Test 10 the 9700X scored a 37699 which was just barely ahead of the 7700X. The 9600X was similar it just barely stayed in front of the 7600X. In Passmark Test 11 the 9700X did better but the 9600X was still running right with the previous 7600X.

Crossmark is from BAPCo which also makes SYSmark and this is a cross-platform test where you can compare performance between phones and both Windows and Mac computers. This is the start of our overall PC benchmarks and Crossmark uses a mix of real-world tests to output an overall score. Both the 9700X and 9600X struggled here compared to their last generation equivalents with the 9700X sitting behind the 7700X and the 9600X sitting behind the 7600.

PCMark 10 is a great test because it tests things like video calls, browser performance, Excel, and Word performance to give an idea of real-world performance. It tends to like higher clock speeds but does take raw core count into account as well which you can see. The great single-core performance we have seen in all of the tests helped here as well with the 9700X topping the chart and the 9600X sitting in third with just the 14900K in front of it. In the application test, the 14900K is still out in front but both the 9700X and 9600X did land in front of the 14600K.

Moving the focus over towards gaming my next test is using Dolphin 5.0 Benchmark. Dolphin 5.0 is a Wii emulator and like most emulators, it doesn’t care about high core counts at all. In fact, it only runs two in total. Clock speeds are king here most of the time which is why all of the 5 GHz+ CPUs are at the top of the chart here. The 9700X has a boost clock of 5.5 GHz and the 9600X is just behind it with a boost clock of 5.4 GHz and of course, they are up near the top of the charts here. In fact, the 9600X topped the chart where the 9700X was sitting behind the 13900K and 14900K.

Before diving into game testing I wanted to check out synthetic performance using 3DMark. I tested with the older DX11 Fire Strike test as well as the newer DX12 Time Spy. I also added the new 3DMark CPU Profile benchmark into the mix as well which does a good job of showing the full range of thread counts that you might see being used in games as well as a max threads option that does everything above 16 threads. In the Fire Strike test, the 9700X scored a 37869 putting it ahead of the 14600K and behind the Ryzen 7 7900 with a big improvement from the 7700X which scored 35943. The 9600X scored a 32110 and is sitting between the 8900G and the 7800X3D and again with a big step up from the 30203 of the 7600X. In the Time Spy test the 9700X is just barely ahead of the 7700X, the 9600X is in the same boat with the 7600X as well. Then for the last test, we have the 3Dmark CPU profile which tests at 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and max threads. The single-threaded performance of both CPUs was once again faster than anything else tested. They kept them out in front through 4 threads but they fall behind a little at 8 threads and above, no surprises there.

I did of course test the two new CPUs in games as well. I will dive into testing the integrated GPU in the next section. Here though they are paired up with a powerful GPU (the RTX 4090) and I compare CPU to CPU performance. In Dirt 5 and Far Cry 6 you can see the raw single-threaded performance help pull both the 9700X and 9600X up near the top of the charts. But in games like Metro Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, you see an interesting situation where the two extra cores are needed, but the games do still need that single-core performance which is why the 9700X did really well in those games. Then in Borderlands 3, the 9600X underperformed slightly, but overall all of the CPUs performed where you would expect to see them.

Last up I also run a few tests in AIDA64, these take a look at cache performance for L1, L2, and L3 cache as well as memory speeds, Precision FLOPS, and Integer IOPS. Both the 9700X and 9600X had significant improvements when compared to their 7000 Series counterparts in the L1, L2, and L3 cache tests. Especially in the L1 cache with those numbers almost doubling in speed. Memory performance improved slightly, but performance jumped again in the single and double-precision FLOPs. Going from 1392 on the 7700X Single Precision up to 2683 with the 9700X. The AES-256 performance went down, but in the three Integer IOPS tests there was a big jump there as well.

Onboard Video Performance

For most people, CPU performance is the most important aspect when picking out a processor. But some people do still run without a dedicated GPU so I still take a look at the performance of the integrated GPUs as well. The 9600X and 9700X aren’t targeted at the iGPU market like the 8700G and 8600G were. But how do they compare overall? To start things off I tested with 3Dmark. I ran tests using the older Fire Strik benchmark, the DX12-based Time Spy, the newer Speedway test, and the latest test Steel Nomad which for that last one I tested using the light version. The 9600X and 9700X have the same RDNA 2 based iGPU so it's no surprise they performed similarly. In Fire Strike, the 9600X scored 2257 and the 9700X was at 2294. For comparison, this was lower than the 14660K and a touch lower than the Ryzen 7000 Series CPUs as well surprisingly. In Time Spy the 9600X scored a 714 and the 9700X scored 722. This was again below the 783 of the 14600K and slightly lower than the 7000 Series Ryzen CPUs. For the Speed Way test Intel’s iGPU didn’t support it at all but the 106 score for the 9600X and 112 for the 9700X are still well below AMDs flagship G APUs. The Steel Nomad test on the other hand had both of the 9000 Series CPUs out in front of the current generation Intel CPUs.

I did also slip in FSR testing as well and while the performance was just barely enough to run the test this did give us a peek at how FSR can improve performance. It is more noticeable on the 8700G and 8600G but going from 1.96 to 3.79 FPS is still a huge jump.

In Unigine Superposition I ran the 1080p medium detail and 720p low detail tests and once again both the 9600X and 9700X performed the same. They did outperform all of the 7000 Series Ryzen CPUs in both tests but they were still behind Intel’s current generation of CPUs with the 14600K sitting slightly ahead at 5291 to the mid 4900 scores on the 720p test and 1765 to 1437 on the 1080p test.

Then from there on, I jumped into game tests. Some of our tests are older games but I did also add in a few newer games as well to get an idea of newer games when tested at 1080p and low or medium settings. My goal with these tests was to see if base-level gaming at low or medium settings was possible at all. In F1 22 for example they came in just under 30 FPS which is just barely playable. But running FSR 1.0 improved on that up to 41 FPS on the 9600X. Both the 9600X and 9700X were in line with the 14600K in that test. In Ghost Recon Wildlands performance was low, both CPUs were in the mid 17 FPS range which isn’t playable and this was noticeably lower than the 7000 Series Ryzen CPUs which were all around 21 FPS and well under the 14600K which was at 26 FPS. In Tomb Raider, the 9600X came in at 43.2 and the 9700X at 42.8. This is 2 FPS below all of the 7000 Series and almost 20 FPS below this generation's Intel CPUs. For Hitman the 9600X was low at 19.5 but the 9700X was better at 22.7 FPS but sadly that was still lower than in the past and not close enough to playable at those settings. Borderlands was the same story as well, a few FPS below the last generation but nowhere close to a playable FPS which is a bummer because that was testing on the low setting. Far Cry 5, again the same story. The 9600X was 4 FPS below the 9700X here which is interesting. But other than the Ryzen 8700G and 8600G nothing was playable. Then last up in Shadow of the Tomb Raider the 9600X averaged 21FPS and the 9700X was at 20 FPS. This was in line with the 14600K but still 2 FPS lower than the whole lot of the 7000 Series Ryzen CPUs.

Power Usage and Temperatures

For some people, performance is the only thing important, but for others, power usage and temperatures also play a role so we do take a look at both of those as well. This is especially important in SFF or even just smaller mid-sized builds and it affects the components you need to get for your system as well as your PSU and cooler. To take a look at power usage I ran three different tests. I noted the idle power draw of our entire system then I took a look at the load wattage of the system using two different workloads. One was wPrime and the second was AIDA64 using their FPU workload which is extremely demanding. At idle the testbench with the Ryzen 5 9600X pulled 94.6 watts. This was right in line with the 9700X which was just a hair lower and similar to Intel’s 14600K as well but higher than the 8700G and 8600G that we tested last year which are also 65-watt CPUs. The first under-load power test was when running wPrime and the 9600X pulled 183 during that benchmark, just two watts away was the 9700X at 185 watts. That is 10 watts lower than the previous generation 7600X which is good to see. Using AIDA64’s FPU stress test for the last test which is typically a little more demanding, neither of the CPUs has too much of a spike with the 9600X going up 3 watts and the 9700X dropping a few watts.

I’ve spoken in the past about how temperature testing isn’t an end-all-be-all-be-all result. CPU to CPU with the same CPU can be different and that gets even more complicated once you add in different motherboards and BIOS revisions as well. Not to mention different coolers. In this case, both the Ryzen 5 9600X and the Ryzen 7 9700X were tested with a standard 240mm AIO cooler. This is an area where AMD focused on improving with this generation of CPUs with chip layout optimization, changing the location of temperature sensors to reduce thermal resistance. All together both of the CPUs tested today came in noticeably cooler than the previous generation. The 9600X was a little warmer at 68c whereas the 9700X was at 65c. The 9600X does have a slightly higher base clock which might have contributed to that, or it just could be CPU variance like I mentioned at the start. For comparison, the 8600G ran at 80c when I tested it and the 7700X and 7600X were at 94c and 87c. This was a huge move in the right direction. I don’t mind my CPU running warm, but scorching hot was concerning and put even more heat into the room which can compound the problem if you don’t have air conditioning.

Overall and Final Verdict

With all of the testing out of the way and the dust has settled how did AMDs two new CPUs perform? Well, they did overall improve on their previous generation counterparts with the 9700X compared to the 7700X and the 9600X compared to the 7600X. In a few tests, it is a big jump, but for every test that sees a big improvement, there are some with small improvements and a few with no improvement at all. That improvement though is a lot more impressive once we add in that the 9700X and 9600X are both 65-watt CPUs whereas the 7700X and 7600X were both 105-watt CPUs. That lower TDP made for huge improvements in our power testing and the same goes for temperatures in our tests while still improving on the past generation's performance. I would call that a win. Both CPUs performed especially well in all of the single-threaded tests and that translated to solid gaming performance in most games with the 9700X doing especially well. I did also test out the integrated GPUs as well and both the 9700X and 9600X have the same iGPU as the Ryzen 7000 Series but at least in my tests, they performed slightly lower, most likely from the new lower TDP.

Where things do get complicated is when it comes to pricing. The AMD Ryzen 7 9700X is launching with a suggested price of $359 which is an improvement over the $399 that the Ryzen 7 7700X sold for at launch. But currently, the 7700X is down to $294, so you are paying $65 more for what was a small 6-8% performance jump. The Ryzen 5 9600X on the other hand will be hitting stores tomorrow at $279. The 7600X launched at $299 but it is down to $200 putting the 9600X in a similar position. All of that said, that is only looking at the performance numbers, that doesn’t take into account the now lower TDP which translates to less power being used and a lot less heat being generated. I personally would rather have the lower temperatures, less strain on the CPU with the lower wattage (see Intel right now), and also that impressive single-core performance. But there is an argument to be had either way.

Live Pricing: HERE

Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.