AMD Ryzen 5 7600X

A beastly "budget" gaming CPU that Christian Guyton has found has one big temporary drawback.

- Christian Guyton

MD isn’t messing around this time; Intel’s nifty Alder Lake core architecture put Team Blue in front in the current generation, and with 13th-gen Raptor Lake chips on the way, AMD clearly knew it had to swing for the fences. AMD is giving us a similar generational upgrade, but without resorting to ‘efficiency’ cores to save power; the result is a chip that dominates in single-core workloads, and still performs reasonably well when firing on all cores.

The new 5nm manufacturing process used by TSMC to produce the Ryzen 7000 chips is clearly excellent – and that’s even bearing in mind that Ryzen 5000 was an extremely solid generation of CPUs. It’s worth noting, though, that Zen 4 comes with a new socket, meaning AMD is finally leaving the trusty AM4 socket behind and mandating upgrades to new AM5 motherboards.

Socket to ’em