The AMD Ryzen 9 7900, Ryzen 7 7700, and Ryzen 5 7600 Review: Zen 4 Efficiency at 65 Watts

CPU Benchmark Performance: Rendering And Encoding

Rendering tests, compared to others, are often a little more simple to digest and automate. All the tests put out some sort of score or time, usually in an obtainable way that makes it fairly easy to extract. These tests are some of the most strenuous in our list, due to the highly threaded nature of rendering and ray-tracing, and can draw a lot of power.

If a system is not properly configured to deal with the thermal requirements of the processor, the rendering benchmarks are where it would show most easily as the frequency drops over a sustained period of time. Most benchmarks in this case are re-run several times, and the key to this is having an appropriate idle/wait time between benchmarks to allow for temperatures to normalize from the last test.

One of the interesting elements of modern processors is encoding performance. This covers two main areas: encryption/decryption for secure data transfer, and video transcoding from one video format to another.

In the encrypt/decrypt scenario, how data is transferred and by what mechanism is pertinent to on-the-fly encryption of sensitive data - a process by which more modern devices are leaning to for software security.

We are using DDR5 memory on the 12th and 13th Gen Core parts, as well as the Ryzen 7000 series, at the following settings:

• DDR5-5600B CL46 - Intel 13th Gen
• DDR5-5200 CL44 - Ryzen 7000
• DDR5-4800 (B) CL40 - Intel 12th Gen

All other CPUs such as Ryzen 5000 and 3000 were tested at the relevant JEDEC settings as per the processor's individual memory support with DDR4.

Rendering

Focusing on rendering performance, the entry-level Ryzen 5 7600 starts to fall behind in comparison to the other SKUs. Even in terms of CineBench R23 single-threaded performance, it sits below Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake chips (albeit in a very packed field). Meanwhile in the multi-threaded test, it is blown away by the parts with 10 cores and above.

The real surprise is how well the Ryzen 9 7900 performs, as it is consistently better than the previous generation Ryzen 9 5950X, and even trades blows with the Intel Core i9-12900KS processor in quite a few tests. The Ryzen 7 7700 also performs well, but with just 8C/16T, and at 65 W, it basically bridges the gap directly in the middle between the Ryzen 9 7900 and the Ryzen 5 7600.

Encoding

As we saw in our rendering tests, the same thing can be said about performance in encoding. The Ryzen 9 7900 offers the highest levels of performance (as expected), with the Ryzen 5 7600 being one of the slowest chips we've tested so far since we updated our test suite for 2023. The Ryzen 7 7700 once again bridges the gap between the other two Ryzen 7000 65 W SKUs.

Despite not offering world-beating levels of performance, all three chips are running with a 65 W TDP and given the results, even the Ryzen 5 7600 performs above our expectations here.