AMD’s current-generation Ryzen 7000 processors have proven to be some of the fastest gaming CPUs on the planet, but even the entry-level Ryzen 5 7600 and Ryzen 5 7600X CPUs are still a fairly big investment at $225/~£220 and $245/£240. Happily, there’s now an even cheaper model – the Ryzen 5 7500F – which cuts frequencies by a fairly insignificant 100MHz and drops the integrated graphics in exchange for a lower purchase price: $200 in the US or £255 in the UK with an A620 motherboard worth £80, working out to around £175 for the CPU itself.
British system builder AWD-IT is one of only a handful of retailers offering the chip – in a range of Ryzen 5 7500F plus motherboard bundles and pre-built systems – and they’ve graciously sent it over with its bundled AMD Wraith CPU cooler for us to test. We’ve now run it through our battery of game benchmarks and content creation workloads to see how it compares to a wide range of competitors, from the similarly-affordable Ryzen 5 7600X and Core i5 13400F to the high-end Ryzen 9 7950X3D, Ryzen 7 7800X3D and Core i9 14900K.
The question we want to answer here is simple: is there any convincing reason to choose the Ryzen 5 7600X or 7600 over the 7500F beyond broader retail availability? In previous Ryzen generations, the cheapest CPU at a given core count was often the best value option, but it’s sensible to test that assumption with these new Zen 4 parts.
| CPU design | Boost | Base | L3 cache | TDP | RRP | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 9 7950X3D | Zen 4 16C/32T | 5.7GHz | 4.2GHz | 128MB | 120W | $699/£699 |
| Ryzen 9 7950X | Zen 4 16C/32T | 5.7GHz | 4.5GHz | 64MB | 170W | $699/£739 |
| Ryzen 9 7900X3D | Zen 4 12C/24T | 5.6GHz | 4.4GHz | 128MB | 120W | $599/£599 |
| Ryzen 9 7900X | Zen 4 12C/24T | 5.6GHz | 4.7GHz | 64MB | 170W | $549/£579 |
| Ryzen 9 7900 | Zen 4 12C/24T | 5.4GHz | 3.7GHz | 64MB | 65W | $429/£519 |
| Ryzen 7 7800X3D | Zen 4 8C/16T | 5.0GHz | 4.2GHz | 96MB | 120W | $449/£375 |
| Ryzen 7 7700X | Zen 4 8C/16T | 5.4GHz | 4.5GHz | 32MB | 105W | $399/£419 |
| Ryzen 7 7700 | Zen 4 8C/16T | 5.3GHz | 3.8GHz | 32MB | 65W | $329/£349 |
| Ryzen 5 7600X | Zen 4 6C/12T | 5.3GHz | 4.7GHz | 32MB | 105W | $299/£319 |
| Ryzen 5 7600 | Zen 4 6C/12T | 5.1GHz | 3.8GHz | 32MB | 65W | $229/£249 |
| Ryzen 5 7500F | Zen 4 6C/12T | 5.0GHz | 3.7GHz | 32MB | 65W | $200/£255* |
As you can see from the table above, there’s very little separating the Ryzen 5 7500F and 7600, with a relatively modest step up to the 7600X from there. All told, the difference in quoted boost frequencies from the cheapest to most expensive six-core Ryzen CPU accounts for just 300MHz or just over five percent.