For reference, the Ryzen 7600X is available from Tech Next Day for £315 with the code, while the Ryzen 7700X (£390), Ryzen 7900X (£542), and the Ryzen 7950X (£708) come from Ebuyer’s eBay store. Firstly, let’s take a look at the general motivations for grabbing one of these Ryzen 7000 series chips. The fact is that AMD’s latest lineup of processors offer some especially speedy performance, not only down to the fact all four of them can achieve boost clocks of above 5GHz, which is insane, but also the fact that they support both PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 RAM, meaning you’ll be able to take advantage of more newfound speed to make those intense tasks and gaming even more of a breeze. In taking the chips individually, the 7950X is the most potent one in the lineup, and packs in 16 cores and 32 threads, making it a true powerhouse processor for video production, 3D rendering and gaming. The 7900X is only a small step down from the 7950X, with a 12-core design at a lower price - making it a extremely powerful gaming performer and faster at content creation than last year’s 5950X. If you don’t need the insane power levels of the top-end Ryzen 9 processors, and want to go for more of an upper mid-range processor, the Ryzen 7 7700X is going to be more than good enough. Intriguingly, despite it (only!) having eight cores and 16 threads, its performance doesn’t look to be too far off the much more expensive chips above, meaning it’s a sound choice for anyone mostly gaming but occasionally needing the extra cores and threads for content creation, programming or other more intensive use cases. At the bottom end of prices comes the Ryzen 5 7600X, and while it may be the cheapest processor in the lineup, it definitely isn’t slow by any means. In fact, the 7600X offers a bigger increase in FPS over its predecessor than the 7700X does, and even provides gaming performance that’s very close to that of the top processors that are several times more expensive. A boost clock of 5.3GHz is also living proof of the fact AMD has managed to get all of those new chips above the 5GHz barrier, which is testament to how speedy they really are. Of course, the only issue with grabbing these CPUs is that, as they run on a new socket, the AM5, you will need to grab a new motherboard, and getting the best performance out of them can get expensive, especially with DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 in their infancy as standards. Not to worry though, as eBay also has handy discounts on motherboards that’ll play nicely with the 7000 series. The Gigabyte X670 and X670E boards are down to £326 and £475 respectively, while the Asus ROG Crosshair X670E is £612, all with the same NOW10. Sure, they’re still quite expensive, but should provide a solid platform that you won’t need to swap out for a few years, given the support for brand new and emerging standards. The fact is, these Ryzen 7000 processors may not be cheap, especially at the top end, but to seem them discounted so early on in their life cycle is such a rare occurrence that it may just make grabbing one all the more worthwhile, especially if you can get a motherboard to go with ’em for cheaper, too.
