AMD Ryzen 9 7900X, incredible productivity and performance without sacrificing gaming power

Released in September of 2022, AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series of Zen4 processors arrived to intensify the battle between the most powerful offerings in the market so far. Superceded by the 7950X and overshadowed by the 3D Cache versions that many believe are released to suplant these CPUs, the Ryzen 9 7900X still finds a spot in the top of the charts thanks to its performance transcending its middle-of-the-road positioning.

In a landscape where high-tech demands often come with exorbitant price tags, the Ryzen 9 7900X emerges as a beacon of affordability without compromising on performance. Neither positioned as the most powerful work processor nor marketed as the best option for gamers, where does the Ryzen 9 7900X actually stand?

We’ve spent the last few weeks trying out this CPU, putting it both through stress tests on several benchmarks as well as using it on a daily basis for a variety of activities that depend heavily on processing power. And what we found is a fantastic workhorse of a CPU that offers some of the best performance available in its price range without compromising on the comforts gamers seek.

Punching above its weight

It’s important to understand that by absolutely no means would this AMD processor should be considered an underdog. Priced at $549.99, the Ryzen 7900X is competing both against the most powerful AMD processors as well as Intel’s Core i9 and Core i7 chips, and yet its performance goes toe-to-toe with all of its competitors and stands well above anything below it.

Ryzen 9 7900X full specs

PC Test Bench specifications

Methodology

We tested the Ryzen 9 7900X with a variety of stress tests and benchmarks focused not on the graphics capability of the processor, but on its performance capabilities and processing power.

We also tested it against a wide variety of games, listed below with their respective results. These were performed on low settings at 1080p resolution.

It’s important to remember that most games will use, on average, only 4-6 cores of a processor while running, which means that performance depends highly on how much games demand of them with specific processes. Something that can’t be easily seen without regular play (instead of simply running benchmarks) is that titles like Civilization VI, a strategy game that after dozens of hours per game can run hundreds of simulations per turn, is probably the most demanding of the bunch. Even so, the Ryzen 9 7900X easily handles all of the load, although it pales in comparison to its bigger brother, the 7950X, which boasts a higher core and thread count.

Full screen

Results

Our tests showed that, as expected of one of the most costly CPUs available from AMD at the moment, the Ryzen 9 7900X is an absolute workhorse that is more than capable of tackling anything you could throw at it as a regular user. Apart from gaming, where it’s able to compete even with Intel’s most powerful chips, this processor shines when it comes to productivity.

Yes, when it comes to multi-threaded processes, it’ll lose against the 7950X. Benchmarks like Cinebench and actual processing loads (like rendering in Premiere, Blender, Vegas and such), but this only happens because of the amount of processes it is able to do at the same time because of its core count. When you compare them in single-core tasks, both are actually competing at extremely similar levels, with the 7900X actually beating its bigger brother thanks to its slightly higher clock speed. (4.7 GHz on the 7900X vs 4.5 GHz on the 7950X).

When dealing with a saturated workload, the 7900X will also run at an amazingly stable rate, being able to reach its max speed of 5-6GHz at a lower energy consumption (and heat) than its bigger brother.

As an added bonus, during our time with the processor we’ve also put it to the test while working on a variety of game development software, including testing out small prototypes on Unity, Unreal Engine 5, and Godot. Aside from some of the most powerful options on the Epic Games engine we feared might make our test bench actually melt down, like its Niagara particle-effect system and the Nanite virtualized geometry system (which, admittedly, was more of us fiddling around with these options instead of actually using them correctly as professional developers might), every process we tried ran smoothly and at an extremely stable rate. From quickly swapping active assets in Unreal to swiftly jumping into testing gameplay on a Unity project, load times were kept at a minimum and debugging was swift and easy.

Conclusion

So, is the Ryzen 9 7900X worth the MSRP of $549.99 US? If you’re the kind of user who consistently works on video editing, animation, software development, and the sort of workload that demands constant heavy processing loads, then it’s difficult to recommend anything else. This processor is probably the most affordable chip on its tier, going for almost $150 less than the next CPU in the family only for more multi-core performance, with results that far outrun anything below it.

Of course, if you’re only going to use it for gaming, then perhaps this isn’t the best option for you. Not because of its performance, but because it is probably a bit of overkill to get something so powerful if you won’t really push it to its limits. However, If you’re looking to use streaming software (like OBS) while gaming on the same PC, then this is definitely an option that won’t leave you hanging whenever you go live.