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. Today we’re looking at the first two processors, the six-core 9600X at £269/$279 and eight-core 9700X at £339/$359. These mainstream offerings are due to go on sale on August 8th, with the 12-core and 16-core Ryzen 9 models scheduled to arrive one week later.
With faster-in-games X3D variants rumoured for later this year and heavily discounted Ryzen 7000 parts already on the market, are the new Ryzen 9000 models worth picking up in the meantime? And how do these processors compare to the high-flying Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which we’ve been recommending as the best high-end gaming CPU?
To find out, we’ve tested these processors and some of their closest AMD and Intel rivals in a gauntlet of demanding games from 1080p to 4K, plus taken a look at synthetic and content creation benchmarks to get an idea of whether these new Ryzen 9000 processors offer a noticeable improvement over their predecessors.
