MORE POWER, MORE VALUE

Last year, AMD released its highly-anticipated Zen 4 microarchitecture and AM5 platform. However, users on tighter budgets would have found it difficult to build on a brand new platform.

- Aaron Yip

AMD RYZEN 7000-SERIES CPU

A GLANCE

PROCESS

TSMC 5nm

FinFET

CORES/THREADS

12/24 (7900),

8/16 (7700)

CLOCKS (BASE/BOOST):

3.6GHZ/5.4GHZ (7900),

3.6GHZ/5.3GHZ (7700)

CACHE (TOTAL)

76MB (7900),

40MB (7700)

TDP

65W

PRICE

US$429 (7900), U

S$329 (7700)

The new Ryzen 7000 family of non-X processors.

To address this, AMD has now introduced three new processors for budget users to experience the benefits of the Zen 4 architecture without the steep financial investment. The AMD Ryzen 9 7900, Ryzen 7 7700, and Ryzen 5 7600 also have lower TDPs of just 65W.

Along with the new CPUS, AMD is also reintroducing its Wraith CPU coolers. The Ryzen 9 and Ryzen 7 CPUs will come with a Wraith Prism cooler, while the Ryzen 5 will come with a Wraith Stealth cooler.

However, to compensate for the lower TDP compared to the X-series models, AMD has lowered the clock speeds of these new chips. While the boost clocks are still relatively high, reflecting the chips' performance in lighter workloads, the base frequency clock speeds have been significantly reduced in order to keep power usage in check during more heavily multithreaded scenarios.