AMD Ryzen 9 7950X & Ryzen 7 7700X ‘Zen 4’ Review

1. Ryzen 7000 - Introducing Zen 4 and AM52. A Closer Look - AMD's Zen 4 Architecture3. A Closer Look - The AM5 Platform4. Testing Methodology5. Operating Clocks6. CPU Tests: Blender & Cinebench7. CPU Tests: Handbrake & 7-Zip8. Memory Tests: Memory Bandwidth and Latency9. Synthetic Gaming: 3DMark10. Gaming 1080p: ACV, BL3, F1 202111. Gaming 1080p: FC6, Hitman 3, SotTR, WDL12. Gaming 1080p - Relative Performance Summary13. Gaming 1440p - ACV, BL3, F1 2021, FC614. Gaming 1440p - Hitman 3, SotTR, WDL15. Gaming 1440p - Relative Performance Summary16. Technical: Power Draw17. Technical: Temperatures18. Overclocking19. Perf. Per Watt and £20. Zen 4 vs Zen 3 - Clock-for-Clock Comparison21. RDNA 2 Integrated GPU22. Closing Thoughts23. View All Pages

Temperatures

Temperature recordings were taken using 360mm AIO CPU cooler. Ambient temperatures were around 25°C.

Uber-high power consumption for the Ryzen 9 7950X unsurprisingly translates into extremely high temperature levels. And just as we saw with Ryzen 5000, the dense, concentrated heat-load applied to the eight-core processor also translates into high temperature levels for Ryzen 7 7700X.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these chips running at 95C, because that’s what Precision Boost 2 is allowing in order to squeeze out more frequency. Just like there’s nothing inherently wrong with the Core i9-12900K being close to 99C.

The key challenge comes from a CPU cooling perspective.

Not only will you need high-end cooling to get the close to even maximum stock-clocked performance from the processors, but the motherboard fan speed curve control algorithm will typically read 95C and slam the fans up to their maximum RPM. So, tuning a system for lower noise operation will certainly be more nuanced and hands-on versus the sub-70C Ryzen 9 5000 chips or the reasonable Core i7-12700K.

At least we don’t see any signs of concern for heat extraction from the soldered heatspreader on Ryzen 7000.

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