AMD Ryzen 5 7500X3D Review
Conclusion
Conclusion
Quite often when we’re summarising processors, particularly recent Ryzens, our conclusion is simple. Buy it. The Ryzen 5 7500X3D is, in parts, just as simple. But there are a whole host of caveats it would be unfair to gloss over.
Gaming performance is one area where it does very well. That’s a familiar tale with all X3D processors. The whole raison d’etre of the 3D V-Cache idea is higher framerates. For the money, when you look at the options around it in our graph, it clearly punches above it’s weight. Our favourite is probably the 3DMARK Speed Way benchmark, where you get the highest score we’ve seen from our RTX 4090. As our testing of much more heavyweight Ryzens has shown, the X3D technology can give you a lovely boost. It’s not going to turn a sows ear into a silk purse, but if you’ve already got a lot of intrinsic performance it will polish it. Hold onto that thought.
Creation Performance
As was clear from our non-gaming benchmarks though, you’re paying a steep price for these extra frames. The Ryzen 5 7500X3D regularly found itself propping up our graphs. In fact we had to delve into much older results – Intel 12400 and 13400 – to have anything even close to it. Half the performance of the AMD Ryzen 9600X. A CPU which is around £70 cheaper. If you plan to, even slightly, do anything but gaming for the majority of your time then you’re better off looking at that.
One final thought on that subject, and yet more caveats, is to pay attention to those numbers. Yes we’re seeing 200 FPS in places. Does your monitor support that? Does the game you plan to play need that? Returning to the 9600X for a moment, let’s look at Far Cry 6. A FPS game being one that will benefit most from higher frame rates. The 7500X3D averages 189 FPS. The 9600X averaged 170 FPS. So yes, the 7500X3D is out-kicking it’s coverage when looked at in a vacuum, but will you notice 20 FPS when you’re already way past 160 FPS? Will you notice that more than you’ll notice it taking 6 minutes longer to render a Blender frame than the 9600X? A speed difference that will also show up in video encoding.
Final Thoughts
All of which places the Ryzen 5 7500X3D into a very tiny box. At £245 it’s a chunk of change more than other options from AMD or Intel that have much better productivity scores. Go much further up the Ryzen price ladder and you’re into processors which are just inherently fast enough to overcome their lack of X3D-ness. The productivity scores on the 7500X3D are just so mediocre. However, the AMD 3D V-Cache continues to be as startlingly beneficial as it’s ever been. It sells in big numbers for a reason, and the gaming performance bore this out. It’s a tiny bit over-priced, and you have to really only want to game with it. If that’s you though, you’ll be pleased with your purchase.
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