How does the new Ryzen 9 7900 compare to the Ryzen 9 7900X? Specs, performance, pricing, and more compared

The Ryzen 9 7900 was launched as a budget alternative to the costlier high-end Ryzen 7000 chips. It comes with a tighter power budget and slower clock speeds, which helps in bringing the cost down. However, the newer chips are slower than the ‘X’ offerings that were launched earlier.

The 7900 was showcased at CES 2023, and the chip is now available at leading retailers for $429. This makes it much cheaper than the 7900X, which comes with a similar core count and cache.

While building a high-end gaming PC, gamers might be confused between these offerings. Thus, this article analyzes and determines which processor is a better deal for an optimal high-end gaming rig.

Note: This article is subjective and solely reflects the opinions of the writer

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The Ryzen 9 7900 is a good deal, but its performance marks are questionable

The Ryzen 9 7900 shares a lot in common with the 7900X. AMD markets it as a gaming processor, which suggests that the tighter power budgets and price points have been adjusted to make it more lucrative for the high-end gaming crowd.

A quick look at the specs reveals that the 7900 does pack some heat. It comes with 12 cores and 24 threads that can boost to 5.3 GHz.

	Ryzen 9 7900X	Ryzen 9 7900
Architecture	5nm Zen 4	5nm Zen 4
Socket	AM5	AM5
Cores	12	12
Threads	24	24
Base clock	4.7 GHz	3.7 GHz
Boost clock	5.6 GHz	5.3 GHz
L3 cache	64 MB	64 MB
TDP	170W	65W

It is worth noting that the Ryzen 7000 processors will boost to much higher than the advertised TDP. Based on the review data, the 7900X has been seen to draw up to 88W while delivering peak performance. This makes it much more power efficient than the Ryzen 9 7900X and the 7950X, the latter of which draws up to 217W, as we found in our testing.

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Performance differences

The Ryzen 9 7900 is a solid entry into the high-end Ryzen 9 lineup. However, its performance marks are rather disappointing.

According to review data from multiple sources, the chip delivers a similar performance as the Ryzen 7 7700 in video games, which is a cheaper processor with much fewer cores.

The difference between the 7900 and the much costlier Ryzen 9 7900X lies between 1% and 5%, depending on the video game it is being tested in. In addition, the last-gen Ryzen 7 5800X3D is almost as fast as, if not better than, the new chips in the market when compared to video games.

The 5800X3D comes with multiple benefits over these offerings like wider motherboard support, including cheaper options, and support for DDR4 memory, which is available at throwaway prices these days.

This shows that single-core performance marks are more important for video games. All of the latest Ryzen 7000 chips come with a solid single-core performance, with each chip scoring over 2,000 points on the Cinebench R23 benchmark.

Since the 7900 and the 7700 have nearly similar single-core performance, the extra cores of the $430 chip do not prove to be beneficial.

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Conclusion

In such a market, the Ryzen 9 7900 turns out to be a poor deal for gaming workloads.

The chip is better suited for workstations and for users who will be utilizing the processor’s multi-core performance marks. Gamers are better off with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D or a Ryzen 7 7700.