Wired2Fire Predator X7 Gaming PC

An excellent way to climb aboard the Ryzen 000 train, with quiet running matched by great all-round speed

- TIM DANTON

PRICE from pcpro.link/340wired2fire

This is our first look at a system based around AMD's Ryzen 7600X processor, one of four chips announced at the launch of the Ryzen 7000 series (see issue 339, p44).

It's a new beginning for AMD as it bids farewell to the AM4 socket that has served it well for six years, with the move to AM5 boards also bringing the need for costly DDR5 memory - and rather dear motherboards as well.

Wired2 Fire has chosen the mid-range MSI Pro B650M-A WiFi board, but even this costs around £230. That's almost two-thirds the price of the processor (£349). With RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards selling for £500, it doesn't take a mathematician to realise why this computer costs as much as it does.

The excellent news is that you're buying a potent machine. Not at the cutting edge, as demonstrated by Chillblast's £3,000+ PCs (see p60), but potent enough to race through the demanding tasks it's designed for. For example, it scored 8,849 in PCMark 10, which is up there with the highest I've seen.

The Ryzen 7600X has eight high-performance cores, and Geekbench 5 illustrates their power.

In the single-core test the Predator X7 scored 2,158 compared to 1,934 for the Core i5-13600KF in the PCSpecialist Arc Elite R opposite, and it completed the photo-compression test in the PC Pro benchmarks three seconds quicker (39secs versus 42secs).

Having 32GB of 5,200MHz RAM is SOUQUNLERICO msi GEFO never going to hurt, either.

Where Intel's chip shows its comparative strength is in any benchmark that utilises all 20 of its threads, compared to 16 in the AMD processor.