 You've disrespected me. You've hurt me. But I won't let you defeat me. Two years ago, AMD took the gaming performance crown with Ryzen 5000, but that was two years ago. And since then, Intel has changed their position from punching bag to punching down. But AMD promised us big gains today. Even going as far as to say that their entry level, Ryzen 5 7600X will outperform Intel's Core i9-12900K in gaming at just half the price. So then what's with the title of this video? Well, let's put it this way. Now that I have the data back from our labs team, it's clear that while AMD's spin on the story here is technically true, the best kind of true, the whole picture is a lot muddier. Like this transition to our sponsor, Ugreen. Their new Nexode 140 watt charger provides fast charge times for all your devices in one package. Thanks to power delivery 3.1, it can even charge a MacBook Pro 16 from zero to 60% in less than 35 minutes. Learn more at the link down below. (*upbeat music*) Coming at us with the launch of Ryzen 7000 is a host of changes starting with AMD's switch to a brand new land grid array or LGA socket. Hooray, say goodbye to the fear of bent pins on your expensive CPU and hello to the fear of bent pins on your expensive motherboard. They've also made the switch to DDR5, though unlike Intel's 12th gen, there will be no DDR4 support to help ease the transition. And now everything is an APU. That's right, integrated graphics are no longer restricted to a select few team red skews and now come standard with all the new chips we're testing today. About those tests. Thanks to the extra horsepower afforded to us by our labs team, this will be one of our most thorough CPU reviews ever. Data nerds rejoice and as for everyone else, do stick around, there's a lot of cool stuff to learn. Enough preamble though, let's get to the numbers. While Intel has long held the gaming crown thanks in no small part to 12th gen's wild five gigahertz plus clock speeds, AMD has responded in kind. Every chip top to bottom got a nearly one gigahertz bump to both base and boost clocks with single core boost on the 7950X reaching an eye watering 5.7 gigahertz. Additionally, they have doubled their level two cache to one megabyte per core and AMD showed us just how impactful large caches can be even without other architectural changes. Except we did get architectural changes. Ryzen 7000 marks the debut of AMD's all new Zen 4 core architecture built on TSMC's cutting edge five nanometer FinFET process and boasts a 13% increase in instructions per clock or IPC. And this is immediately apparent in our first gaming test where we see the Ryzen 7950X rip out of the gate with an 11% increase in average FPS over AMD's previous flagship in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. That is pretty impressive. But the real gains are in the minimums where we see a whomping 30% improvement. That means functionally no stutter when you are playing this game. Adding insult to injury for Team Blue, every single new Ryzen chip won in average frame rates over the 12900KS. Wow, but AMD does have a problem here. It's called AMD. And we see a similar story in F1 2022 where these new Ryzen 7000 chips are huddled together at or around the performance of the 12900KS yet still get beat by their own last gen cousin, the 5800X3D. In the great equalizer that is Flight Simulator, we see the scores all get closer with the new lot beating all of last gen except the 5800X3D who soars above the competition. And the same goes for Overwatch. But there are some exceptions. In CSGO, AMD's redlined 7000 series does dominate all but the 12900KS which ekes out a small win. And in Hitman 3, we see the new chips just barely squeak past the 5800X3D. That's a lot of numbers. So let's summarize. Compared to Intel's flagship 12900KS, the 7950X manages a small but measurable 5% lead in gaming. That's pretty good. But more impressively, the 7600X, the very bottom tier, is just 3% shy of a CPU that retails for nearly two and a half times the price. As for the 7700X, well, it ends up in a somewhat awkward position. On the one hand, it is cheaper than the 5800X3D, but on the other hand, last generation AM4 motherboards and DDR4 memory are affordable and plentiful. So you will be spending an awful lot more on the accompanying components to get worse performance almost across the board. And awkwardly, the same thing can also be said for Intel's 12th gen mainstream chips, which get the benefit of using DDR4 if you wanna save a buck. Fortunately, when it comes to productivity, these new chips slay. Look at this display of sheer dominance in Cinebench. Not only do all the new chips nearly match the 12900KS in the single threaded test, but good gravy these multi-threaded numbers. A nearly 40% increase over last gen Ryzen and Intel's latest and greatest. And the rendering smackdown continues in Blender where we see similarly large generational leaps. However, while Intel might be getting bullied on the high end where they rely on weaker E or efficiency cores to pad out their numbers, the 12700K and 12600K actually end up trading blows with these next gen AMD counterparts. And we see the same thing in V-Ray where AMD does live up to their promises, but doesn't really impress at the price points that most users can actually afford. Our Chromium compile test will have managers rejoicing and developers crying as their compile time coffee breaks fall to as short as just 38 minutes. In 7-Zip, the 7000 series extends AMD's already commanding lead and data compression. And in our single thread sensitive flacking code, all but the weakest of AMD's new generation, wipes the floor with the rest of the competition. And what about AVX 512 performance? AMD felt compelled to bring this up, so I guess we'll talk about it. In Y-Cruncher, the 512 bit extension allows AMD to calculate pi to 5 billion digits, 30 seconds faster than the 12900KS and over 75 seconds faster than the previous 5950X. Why calculate pi to 5 billion digits? I guess for really nice circles. No, in all seriousness though, AVX 512 mostly doesn't affect desktop users much, but when it does, like for PS3 emulation, it can make a big difference. So we're gonna have to take a closer look at that sometime in the future. Like you should take a closer look at this extra hour of footage from the build with my sister, available exclusively on floatplane.com. Spec Workstation gives us some deeper insight into professional productivity and zooming in on media and entertainment, we can see that Ryzen is a rendering powerhouse. But what's really impressive is the substantial leap in encoding performance and handbrake over all previous gen CPUs. Guys, this is not hardware accelerated. This is pure software encoding, where those front end and branch prediction enhancements are paying off for AMD big time. In product development and life sciences, while the pricier AMD chips fare well, the mainstream 7700X and 7600X are bested by Intel, which is becoming a bit of a troubling pattern. As for financial services though, well, that's AMD's game and they went over their team blue counterparts every single time with energy and general operations ending up a little closer. So things are looking pretty good by this point, but don't worry, I am going to explain the title. First up, these performance enhancements do not come for free and the price you'll be paying, besides cash, is counted in Watts. Every Ryzen 7000 saw a significant bump in TDP over its 5000 series counterpart. So gone are the delightful 65 watt power targets of their mainstream chips, which have now been bumped to 105 Watts and the 7900X and 7950X leap from 105 Watts to 170, which obviously has an effect on thermals. Using Prime95 throughput benchmark, we can see AMD's careful thermal management in action here. Watch the behavior of the 7700X. During high load periods, we see temperature spikes up to 95 degrees with clock speeds dialing back accordingly. Then once our sustained load hits, we settle in at around 5.1 gigahertz average across all cores. That is well above AMD's advertised base clocks, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, AMD has really dialed in their throttling behavior to help you get the most out of your new rig. But on the other hand, if you or the manufacturer of your computer skimp on the cooling, you could end up with significantly lower performance than you might expect. For those of you who are worried about AMD's 95 degree target here, by the way, my gut feeling is that it's probably okay, even if it makes me uncomfortable. Cause here's the thing, if you opt for a manual overclock, instead of using performance boost overdrive, which is what targets that 95 degrees, these 7000 series chips will actually allow you to target as high as 115 degrees Celsius. Is it hot in here? Is it just me? Anyway, Prime95 is a worst case scenario and our 105 watt 7700X flattened out at just 63 degrees after 10 minutes of F1 2022, with all cores pegged to their highest boost rates. Not too shabby. Looks like our NH-D15 is happily overkill for at least gaming loads. Unless you plan to upgrade to a 170 watt chip like the 7900X, which hits 70 degrees in our air conditioned room. Digging into power consumption, we find that as has become customary in the tech industry, the TDPs on the tin are more like pirate code guidelines. Do you want to enable precision boost overdrive and blow past the 170 watt target, like this 7950X that's sitting 190 watts in Prime95? Or are you the kind of person who drives exactly the speed limit to maximize your fuel economy? I think I know what kind you guys are. And to be clear, even with the auto overclocking hacks that drive up power consumption, AMD's chips are hitting much higher clock speeds on much lower power budgets than the 12900KS. And even the top tier 7950X peaked at 208 watts, leaving a solid 22 watts of headroom for some manual overclocking before you'll hit the rated power delivery limit of socket AM5. Perhaps my favorite upgrade though is the integrated GPU. Like yeah, most gamers are not gonna use them day to day, but they are super nice to have, even if the ones in these chips are not that exciting. Ryzen 7000 APUs, or wait, are we just calling them all CPUs now? AMD? No? APUs have better onboard graphics? Okay, well, whatever they are, CPUs or APUs, they have the same old RDNA2 graphics, which does still unlock some cool tricks like hardware and code and decode, and the ability to build a capable little rig without a discrete GPU or limp along while your GPU is being RMA'd or whatever else. Just, you gotta keep your expectations in check. We're talking eSports at 1080p, 45 to 50 FPS, maybe 60 if you're willing to drop down image quality a little, which looks great. I mean, yeah, you need a new motherboard, and DDR5 is literally twice the price of DDR4, but Linus, you might say. The platform is an investment, and AMD says they're gonna support it beyond 2025. Well, yeah, but this is where things start to get a little complicated. First of all, don't purchase a Promise. AMD certainly has a better track record than Intel for supporting multiple generations of CPUs on their motherboards, but they've also broken these promises before too, like with socket STRX 40, and it's possible they'll do it again. Also, I think it's fair to say that a big portion of our audience, that's you, is gamers. And if you're a gamer, Zen 4 and DDR5 and PCIe Gen 5 might dazzle you, but what really matters is frames per second. And Ryzen 7000 hasn't really given us a clear reason to upgrade over a 5800X3D, unless you're looking to the 12 and the 16-core chips, because maybe your gaming rig is also your workstation? The last big wild card here is Intel's impending 13th Gen Raptor Lake launch. AMD's mainstream Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 fail to stand out in the same way that the top tier chips do. Today, and if Intel manages even a modest five to 10% generational uplift, and it's rumored to be substantially higher, AMD could find themselves scrambling to bring out a mid-generation refresh with maybe the same 3D vCache that turbocharged the 5800X3D. I would like to see that, just like I'd like to see this segue to our sponsor. Nexigo, if you're working from home and are in need of a new webcam, Nexigo has a wide variety to choose from to keep you looking sharp on your conference calls. Whether you're on a budget and need high quality video, or you want the best possible webcam, regardless of price, Nexigo has it all. Their selection of webcams and webcam accessories will help you look and sound your best, even if you're looking for something more in the middle, Nexigo has you covered. Take your webcam setup to the next level and get a Nexigo webcam using the link below. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go check out our review of the 5800X3D, because honestly, it is looking like a pretty compelling value with maybe a secondhand AM4 board and some DER4 memory. Spicy.