AMD Ryzen 7 9700X review

pcgamer.com:

Zen 5 is finally here for desktop PCs and having already tasted what it is like with six cores, in the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X review, it's time to see what difference two more cores, four more threads, and a tiny bit more clock speed all makes—that's right, it's our review of the Ryzen 7 9700X.

AMD has stuck to the same fundamental floorplan for the 9700X as it has with the last generation 7700X and the Zen 3-powered 5700X. Underneath the heatspreader, you've got two chiplets: one CCD (Core Complex Die), which houses all the processing cores and cache, and one IOD (Input/Output Die) that's home to a tiny integrated GPU, PCIe and USB hubs, and the RAM controllers.

Where the CCD in the 9600X has two cores disabled, the 9700X comes with a fully enabled eight-core chiplet and a marginally higher boost clock (5.5 vs 5.4 GHz).

That 8.3 billion transistor CCD sports the latest AMD Zen 5 architecture, of course, with more L1 cache, more internal bandwidth, superior floating point support, a fancier branch prediction unit, and so on. The changes are pretty comprehensive and AMD claims that Zen 5 has an average IPC (instruction per clock) uplift of 16% over Zen 4, though not every application is going to see such an increase. 

Cores: 8
Threads: 16
Base clock: 3.8 GHz
Boost clock: 5.5 GHz
L3 Cache: 32 MB
L2 Cache: 8 MB
Unlocked: Yes
Max PCIe lanes: 24
Graphics: Radeon Graphics
Memory support (up to): DDR5-5800
Processor Base Power (W): 65
Maximum Package Power (W): 88
Recommended customer price:  $359 | £340

I won't reiterate all the motherboard swapping and BIOS shenanigans I experienced testing the 9600X in this review, but it's worth noting they impacted the Ryzen 7 9700X just as much. Basically, the AM5 motherboard I used (a ROG Crosshair X670E Hero) was supplying the chip with a little bit too much power when idle, resulting in slightly elevated temperature—this isn't something exclusive to Asus boards but not every configuration will experience the issue.

That said, the 9700X