AMD's Zen 5 Challenges: Efficiency & Power Deep-Dive, Voltage, & Value

This deep-dive looks at the AMD Zen 5 CPU efficiency for the Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X, introducing gaming efficiency and compression efficiency to our testing suite. The benchmarks find that AMD's Zen 5 is at times extremely efficient, like in some all-core workstation tasks (such as rendering), but can also be remarkably inefficient in some gaming scenarios. Even when FPS-normalized (locked to 60FPS) or power normalized (locked to 50W PPT), the Zen 5 CPUs can prove less efficient than Zen 4 in many scenarios. This also introduces testing of the 7700 non-X and 7600 non-X, as those were lower TDP parts more directly comparable to the 9700X and 9600X for power testing.