Zen 5 promised major gaming performance gains but delivered minimal improvements over Zen 4. After a year of updates, price drops, and testing, we examine if Zen 5 is finally worth the upgrade.
Is Zen 5 Finally Better for Gaming? Ryzen 9600X vs. 7600X
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Burty117
Posts: 5,996 +5,086
That Baldur's Gate 3 9800X3D lead is wild. Over 80% faster is pretty nuts.
Theinsanegamer
Posts: 8,735 +17,801
The big gain with Zen 5 is AVX workloads. If you are using AVX 256 or 512, Zen 5 is noticeably faster. Otherwise, it is very meh.
With a 5090. I'd like to see Baldur's Gate 3 included in their next GPU scaling article. Maybe there's a game where you get some notable improvements with the 9800X3D without pairing it with a 5080 or better GPU.
Its 2025 speller checkers, grammar checkers and AI can correct articles.
Yet I see this line
"CPUs simply handled those tasks more better." More Better! haha.
More better! unforgivable and sort makes the rest of the article suspect.
Yet I see this line
"CPUs simply handled those tasks more better." More Better! haha.
More better! unforgivable and sort makes the rest of the article suspect.
Burty117
Posts: 5,996 +5,086
I'd argue it shows it was written by a human, rather than an AI with just some bits edited by a human.
Plus it's a funny mistake and not one that changes the narrative.
BogdanR
Posts: 603 +1,039
OK, so it turns out Zen 5 is only slightly better than Zen 4 not “more better”.
More better, that’s funny!!!
More better, that’s funny!!!
Thank you for making my point and my mistake less embarrassing, lol, no one is perfect and mistakes will inevitably happen.
It is nuts but remember the other parts are 6 core. So Baldur’s must need 8 cores (and x3D) to hit the highest frame rates.
amghwk
Posts: 1,870 +1,885
Unless you are a professor marking English exam answers by foreign students (or local English students for that matter), "more better" does NOT necessarily mean the death of English language. Come on, if a single incident like this triggers you, I wonder if you took back home the message of this article. Or...you just find it ...funny?
**Shrugs**
Revolution 11
Posts: 385 +676
The main takeaway from this article is how horrendously dogshit Microsoft is at developing and testing Windows 11 updates.
Theinsanegamer
Posts: 8,735 +17,801
Well, they are the fastest. The 78003d was clocked very conservatively by comparison.
There are games where it is immediately noticeable, but they are not new. Starcraft 2 and sins of a solar empire/rebellion both benefit tremendously from the 3d cache. In late game 8 to 10 player maps, non 3d chips are unplayable slow in Sins, and this is true even for arrow lake and zen 5.
Mr Majestyk
Posts: 2,519 +2,344
Zen 5 was clearly more of an upgrade for Zen3 or older cpu's. If I had bothered with Zen 4 I would definitely have been waiting for Zen 6. Honestly only good thing about Zen 5 on Windows is the improvements made to X3D variants so they are just as strong for productivity as their non-X3D brothers. But stupendously bad prices made them a no go too.
As only a casual gamer more focused on productivity I'd still take Arrow Lake Ultra 7 265K/KF over anything below 9950X.
If we had seen the uplifts of EPYC running Linux OS, on windows Zen 5 would have been awesome, but clearly desktop was a mere afterthought for AMD this gen. Plenty of outright lies like they did with RDNA3's claimed huge uplifts.
Roll on Nova Lake and Zen 6.
As only a casual gamer more focused on productivity I'd still take Arrow Lake Ultra 7 265K/KF over anything below 9950X.
If we had seen the uplifts of EPYC running Linux OS, on windows Zen 5 would have been awesome, but clearly desktop was a mere afterthought for AMD this gen. Plenty of outright lies like they did with RDNA3's claimed huge uplifts.
Roll on Nova Lake and Zen 6.
Burty117
Posts: 5,996 +5,086
You're gunna have to explain that one, as currently, Intel doesn't even have an answer to the 9800X3D or 9950X3D, their highest end CPU that's considerably more expensive than the 9800X3D is also, substantially slower.
And if you wanted the productivity power of the 285K but the gaming chops of the 9800X3D, the 9950X3D does that whilst costing the same as a 285k, and on a platform that'll get upgrades still.
Thank you so much for this article! What's most shocking for me is how far ahead the 9800X3D is! I never thought a CPU would affect FPS that much in 2025, thought it was mostly GPU dependent. Very interesting performance gap and I'm looking at my 13700k and thinking wtf?!
I think Zen5's biggest issue is it's IO die limiting it's bandwidth and latency to system memory which is very important for gaming. Fully expect Zen6 to have huge gains over Zen5 due to the new IO die, the same way Zen3 was huge gains over Zen2 when the CCX was changed from 4 cores to 8 to avoid latency issues between cores.
Most games are still GPU bound at high resolutions. These results are with a 5090. Once you go below a 5080, you won't see much difference as long as you have a 6+ core Zen 4 or equivalent era Intel CPU.
Why should AMD care about gaming? Much bigger prizes are available on servers.
On Zen5 AMD managed somehow solve problem with AVX-512: usage would mean lower clock speeds because of huge power consumption. With Zen5, AVX-512 can finally be used without basically any drawbacks. In other words, AMD basically pulled a biggest single generation CPU improvement of this century. And that is NOT an overstatement in any way. AVX-512 without clock speeds penalty is groundbreaking. Well, software still sucks but that is not AMDs fault.
And then there is gaming. How many games use AVX-512? Yep...
I wish I would have seen this article sooner so I could offer my comment.
I built a new rig in July using the 7700x after reading a lot of reviews. I thought I had fully researched my choice but I made a mistake. I did not put enough import in the reviews that said the chip runs hot [I don't see that mentioned in this article]. The performance difference in the 7700x vs the 9700x in minimal but the 7700x is rated at 105 TDP while the 9700x is rated at 65 TDP. That is a huge improvement. I started with a bundle, the 9700x would have been just $60 more. Unfortunately I used a low end thermal solution. The 7700x hits 90 C running moderate loads. I should and have rethought the cooler. The low end heat sync could probably handle the 9700x much more efficiently for my purposes.
I built a new rig in July using the 7700x after reading a lot of reviews. I thought I had fully researched my choice but I made a mistake. I did not put enough import in the reviews that said the chip runs hot [I don't see that mentioned in this article]. The performance difference in the 7700x vs the 9700x in minimal but the 7700x is rated at 105 TDP while the 9700x is rated at 65 TDP. That is a huge improvement. I started with a bundle, the 9700x would have been just $60 more. Unfortunately I used a low end thermal solution. The 7700x hits 90 C running moderate loads. I should and have rethought the cooler. The low end heat sync could probably handle the 9700x much more efficiently for my purposes.
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Melkor Unlimited
Posts: 364 +334
You can not and should not rely on spell checkers.
I have read a lot of articles, stories, ... etc run trough some spellcheckers, yet full of wrongly used words.
Problem is .. the word is correct. It exists and there is not typo in it. It just is not the word that has to be used in that sentence.
This is where the 2nd level of checking should be applied. One that works with sentences.
TDP as AMD defines it is absolute maximum power consumption for CPU package. It has very little to do with actual power consumption outside full load. At least with AMD number actually tells something. Intel definition of TDP is basically "it tells absolutely nothing".
Anyway you could probably (depending on motherboard) adjust CPU voltage lower and/or adjust voltage-frequency curve and/or lower CPU TDP. Those may be available without even changing cooler.
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