Is Zen 5 Finally Better for Gaming? Ryzen 9600X vs. 7600X

Possibly one of the most controversial product releases in the PC world in recent years was AMD’s Zen 5 series. It was certainly not what we were expecting, and it turned into a real cluster. Released in late 2024, we were all excited for AMD’s latest offering – their next step on AM5 – and everything coming out of the company leading up to the release sounded promising. We were expecting double-digit performance gains for games thanks to a 16% IPC increase over Zen 4. Sadly, this isn’t what we got.

Late last year, we were ready for some meaningful gaming performance gains. But when Zen 5 arrived, we were left stumped. The 9700X was only about 1 – 2% faster than the 7700X, while the 9600X was just a few percent faster than the 7600X. Although performance margins varied between review outlets due to different testing methods, the recurring theme was clear: for gaming and most general productivity applications, Zen 5 offered little to nothing over Zen Even AMD seemed unsure about how much faster Zen 5 was supposed to be compared to Zen 4, leading to widespread confusion.There were even instances where Zen 5 processors were slower in gaming than Zen 4. While some initially thought this was a mistake, AMD’s own review guide confirmed it was possible. In fact, AMD’s internal testing showed cases where the 9700X performed worse than the 7700X in certain games.

The wild goose chase for the alleged missing Zen 5 performance took many twists and turns, eventually leading to a few important discoveries. Initially, AMD claimed that running Windows 11 in a special Administrator mode fixed the issue. They stated this was a Windows 11 bug and that enabling this mode would restore Zen 5’s expected performance.