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AMD Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X review: Zen 5 impresses, but 7800X3D still reigns for gaming

The Digital Foundry review of the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X from Will Judd. Is Ryzen 9000 a worthwhile evolution over Ryzen 7000's 7800X3D for gaming?

AMD's Ryzen 9000 CPUs have arrived, marking the debut of the more powerful and efficient Zen 5 architecture and a quartet of Dragon Ball Z meme-adjacent processor numbers: 9600X, 9700X, 9900X and 9950X. | Image credit: AMD/Digital Foundry We expect to see a fair uptick in most workloads, with AMD's figures showing an average 16 percent increase to IPC (instructions per clock, an indicator of single-core grunt) at similar clockspeeds to the outgoing Ryzen 7000X CPUs and on the same AM5 socket and 700-series motherboards. Intel motherboards are also typically more aggressive when it comes to power delivery at stock settings, which is particularly helpful for these sorts of all-core workloads but does result in higher energy consumption and more heat to dissipate.

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