AMD Ryzen 9 7900 vs Ryzen 9 7900X – Which one should you buy?

AMD Ryzen 9 7900 (₹38k) vs Ryzen 9 7900X (₹39k)

It’s the battle of two brothers, the Zen 4 counterparts that have stormed the market but which road should you go to? Should you buy the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X or its efficiency brother Ryzen 9 7900? Well, don’t worry here we will answer all of your queries!

In India, the price between both of these is just ₹2k whereas in the US both almost cost $420, so again it’s very confusing which one you should buy. So, here we will tell you which option you should go for and as we haven’t done a review of both of these, this will also be a kind of review for us as well:

AMD Ryzen 9 7900X vs Ryzen 9 7900 Specifications

Test Config Specifications:

• Motherboard: GIGABYTE Z690 UD AX WIFI Motherboard
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7900X/ 7900
• RAM: 32GB (2X16) Corsair Vengeance Performance DDR5 Memory
• Primary SSD: Western Digital SN850 500GB PCIe Gen 4 SSD
• Secondary/Game SSD: 480GB Crucial SATA SSD, WD Green 960GB SATA SSD
• Power Supply: Antec HCG-1000-EXTREME PSU
• GPU: AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT
• CPU Cooler: DEEPCOOL GAMMAXX L360 ARGB
• Cabinet: Cooler Master MasterBox K501L
• OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro

Performance

Both these 12-core AMD chips are based on Zen 4 architecture and are based out of a 5nm process node, these are really efficient but the non-X chip here is the most efficient one out of both. In terms of specifications, as you saw the Ryzen 9 7900X has a higher TDP of up to 170W whereas the Ryzen 9 7900 has a TDP of 65W, which is the key differentiator here.

While the non-X CPU comes with an in-house box cooler, the 7900X doesn’t have one because it has a higher TDP and AMD recommends a liquid or high-end air cooler for the best performance. If you will notice, the base clock speed of the 7900 is lesser so even with lower cooling or in a small form factor one can get good performance without heating issues.

Here are some popular benchmarks for your reference:

As you will see both these AMD Ryzen 7000 series chips battling against each other and the scores are very similar with a very thin line of difference. However, the major difference between the both is in power draw, benchmarking i.e. with a load while the 7900 only draws up to 89W TDP, on the other hand, the 7900X draws up to a staggering 176W TDP, almost double that of the non-X variant.

This goes to show the efficiency of the Ryzen 9 7900, which by the way is a better buy if you are looking for an efficient Gaming PC build. Whereas if you want the best performance and want to spend more on the cooling side the 7900X is still a better buy in our opinion, however, I personally will slightly prefer the 7900.

Gaming

In Gaming, both these Ryzen 7000 CPUs perform very similarly to each other because except for the TDP and boost clock speeds almost everything is similar. So, anyone who gets the 7900 will actually benefit because you will see in the games, the numbers are very very similar and in a number of games, the story remains the same.

It became very boring for us after test 5 games and so didn’t benchmark further because in most triple-A titles both these 7900 series chips will perform neck-to-neck especially if the resolution is higher. Though at 1080p you maybe notice a 1-5% difference in performance at 1440p or 4K, the gap between both of these chips is marginal, so, again I will recommend users buy the Ryzen 9 7900 which has better value in my opinion.

Verdict

In this short review/comparison, one thing is clear the new AMD Ryzen 7000 series is really strong as now you comfortably get 100+ FPS with new RTX 40-series GPUs or even the Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs. Now, the choice between the Ryzen 9 7900 brothers is completely upon you because if you need performance the 7900X is a better buy but if you talk about raw value-for-money then the vanilla Ryzen 9 7900 is undoubtedly our pick.

Buy the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X: https://amzn.to/40D3YkR or get the Ryzen 9 7900: https://amzn.to/3GgnRXp