AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 7 7700X review: maximal design

Following on from our Ryzen 9 7900X and Ryzen 5 7600X review, it's finally time to look at the two remaining CPUs in AMD's Ryzen 7000 family: the $449/£439 Ryzen 7 7700X, a potential gaming value champ, and the $799/£769 Ryzen 9 7950X, a sixteen-core titan expected to outperform almost every consumer CPU in content creation workloads. We've seen significant price cuts on Ryzen 7000 processors since launch - so are these CPUs worth buying in 2023?

As a quick recap, these Zen 4 processors are profoundly different from AMD's last-gen Ryzen 5000 parts. There's been a shift to a new socket, AM5, with an LGA design that can provide up to 230W of power, as well as a new 6nm I/O die, integrated graphics on all models and support for two key technologies: DDR5 and PCIe 5.0.

These upgrades unlocked some impressive gen-on-gen gains in the case of the 7600X and 7900X, and there's the potential for even greater improvements with the 7700X and 7950X. As AMD uses a chiplet-based design with up to eight cores per CCD, the eight-core 7700X and sixteen-core 7950X ought to represent the maximum performance possible from single-CCD and double-CCD designs respectively - and reports suggest that in some titles, the performance penalty of splitting a gaming workload across multiple CCDs could counteract the gains from having access to a higher number of threads, leaving the 7700X as a CPU of particular interest.

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