Introduction

AMD today expanded its Ryzen 7000 “Zen 4” desktop processor lineup with three new affordable models that are designed to take the fight to Intel’s expanded 13th Gen 65 W “Raptor Lake” series. In this review we take a closer look at the Ryzen 5 7600 6-core processor, the company’s most affordable addition, which has the potential to become its most important one. Historically, Ryzen 5 non-X SKUs such as the 2600 and 3600, ended up being best-selling processors for AMD, as they struck incredible levels of value, competing very well with Intel’s popular Core i5 65 W SKUs. With Zen 4, AMD is standardizing integrated graphics, and so a whole new market for AMD has opened up—businesses that buy 65 W Core i5 and Core i7 processors for their offices, and only need integrated graphics. The company’s APUs from the past had been novelty products that compromised on CPU features in favor of strong iGPUs—not really something businesses need. With the new 65 W processors reviewed today, the company also includes a cooler in the box, which improves its value-proposition.

The new “Zen 4” microarchitecture and Socket AM5 platform modernize the processor for AMD. The new core introduces a 13% generational IPC uplift over “Zen 3,” which when combined with boost frequencies in excess of 5 GHz enabled by the new 5 nm foundry node, improve single-threaded performance by as much as 29%. The new architecture also introduces several new instruction-sets, including support for AVX-512. The lowering of the TDP down to 65 W with 95 W package power tracking (PPT) should technically have no impact on single-threaded performance, or even performance for less-parallelized workloads, but could impact multi-threaded performance compared to the Ryzen 5 7600X, which enjoys 105 W TDP and 140 W PPT.

Unlike Intel, which really likes to segment their processors by taking away overclocking features, or limiting memory speeds, AMD doesn’t do such a thing. All Ryzen 7000 non-X processors come with unlocked multipliers and even the mid-range B650 motherboard chipset offers CPU overclocking features.

The Ryzen 5 7600 is a 6-core/12-thread traditional multi-core processor. Each of its six cores is a high-performance core, comes with 1 MB of dedicated L2 cache, and 32 MB of on-die L3 cache is shared among the cores. The processor boosts up to 5.10 GHz, compared to 5.30 GHz of the 7600X. AMD is including a 65 W-capable Wraith Stealth stock cooling solution with the processor, and is pricing the 7600 at US $230, a price at which it squares off against several upcoming 65 W Core i5 “Raptor Lake” SKUs, such as the i5-13400 and i5-13500.