AMD Ryzen 7 9700X Takes On 7.1GHz Core i9-14900K In Single-Threaded Benchmark Battle
His previous two videos were an overclocking guide for the Zen 5-based Ryzen 7 9700X and then a video showcasing extreme overclocking ("XOC") using liquid nitrogen cooling. Under liquid nitrogen, he managed to achieve an all-core clock rate of 6350 MHz, but he wasn't satisfied with that. For the first time, Skatterbencher decided to make use of AMD's Precision Boost Overdrive while overclocking with liquid nitrogen.
We'll go ahead and tell you the result: he hit a peak clock rate of 6,851 MHz on the Ryzen 7 9700X, and this allowed him to take the #1 spot in the OCCT AVX single-core benchmark. That's despite a more-than 250-MHz deficit against the competition, an Intel Core i9-14900KF. How did Zen 5 overpower Raptor Cove in this way? Mostly through being really, really good at AVX SIMD calculations.
Without getting too far into the weeds, the biggest changes in Zen 5 over Zen 4 have to do with the new core's ability to crunch massive amounts of math: four 512-bit vectors simultaneously. This capability isn't really useful in most desktop tasks nor in gaming, which is why Zen 5 was a little disappointing for your average gamer. However, for HPC workloads, Zen 5 is an absolute monster.
Skatterbencher talks about some issues that he encountered during the XOC process with Zen 5. For starters, the system would refuse to POST if the CPU temperature was below 0°C; that was work-around-able by simply letting the processor warm up to room temperature before booting it. However, THAT process was complicated by another issue: a surprisingly large delta between the temperature of the CPU cores and the temperature of the base of the LN2 pot. It really highlights the incredible thermal density of modern processors.
The overclocker's final result was some 3% ahead of the previous top result set using the Core i9 processor. This is a solid achievement, although we have to note that the previous record in this benchmark was also held by Skatterbencher. For good measure, he also took his chip around to Geekbench 6 and the CPU-Z benchmark, taking records in both of those tests too—albeit only for this specific processor.
The Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 CPUs are highly efficient, and take well to a bit of overclocking with Precision Boost Overdrive. However, Zen 4 CPUs were pretty overclockable as well. As ever, the recommendation for gamers remains to pick up a Ryzen 7 7800X3D. Arrow Lake might give AMD some strong competition later this year, though; it will be interesting to see if AMD can steal Intel's thunder with an X3D release around CES time.
