Enlarge / The Ryzen 7000 series is getting a little cheaper today, though the cost of motherboards and DDR5 remain barriers for budget buyers. (credit: AMD)
AMD is officially lowering the barrier to entry for the Ryzen 7000 series today, announcing a handful of new models aimed at more price-conscious buyers. For people on the money-is-no-object end of the spectrum, the company is also introducing new 3D V-Cache-enabled processors with extra L3 cache that will benefit games and other cache-sensitive workloads.
The three cheaper CPUs are versions of the existing 7600X, 7700X, and 7900X, but without the X suffix. The $229 Ryzen 5 7600, $329 Ryzen 7 7700, and $429 Ryzen 9 7900 all have the same core counts and cache sizes as their counterparts but with 65 W TDPs, slightly lower clock speeds, and bundled CPU coolers. That's an $80 reduction compared to the retail prices of the cooler-less 7600X and 7700X, and the 7900 is $120 cheaper than the 7900X.
As we found in our initial reviews of the Ryzen 7000 series, setting the chips to a 65 W TDP usually reduces their performance, but not by as much as you'd think—all three chips should run cooler than the X-series CPUs while still being comfortably faster than older Ryzen 5000-series CPUs, and the 7600 shouldn't need more than 65 W to provide peak performance. If you want to run the CPUs faster, setting higher TDP values and overclocking is still possible on all these processors.
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