A New King?

AMD RYZEN 9 7950X

- Aaron Yip

With the 7000 series, AMD stuck with the same specifications as the older 5000 series. For instance, the Ryzen 9 7950X shares the same number of cores and threads as its 5950X predecessor. There are improvements around clock speeds, with the 7950X now boosting up to 5.7GHz right out of the box. The bigger change is the Zen 4 architecture which uses TSMC’s 5nm node as compared to the 7nm node in the older Ryzen 5000 series. AMD says this allows the Ryzen 7000 to run as much as 30% lower power consumption at the same frequency.

However, performance is a lot more complicated than just the manufacturing process. AMD has increased the TDP of the 7950X to 170W (versus 105W of the 5950X).

Despite a new architecture and leap in specifications, the top-end Ryzen 9 7950X, with an SRP of $1,169, is actually cheaper than its predecessor at launch.

With the new Ryzen 7000 series, AMD has also launched the new socket AM5 and unlike its predecessor, is a zero insertion force flip-chip grid array (LGA) CPU socket. In simple terms, that means the pins are now on the socket instead of the CPU - so be very careful when handling the motherboard.

The Zen 4 architecture also meant AMD has finally made the jump to DDR5 memory as well as supporting PCIe 5.0.