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AMD Ryzen 9 7950X & Ryzen 7 7700X CPU Review – A New Era of Zen Begins Today!

Hassan Mujtaba

CPU & VRM Temperatures

The AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs either have two or three chiplets, one or two of which are the aforementioned AMD Zen 4 CCDs fabricated on the 5nm process node, and then we have the larger die around the center which is the IOD and that is based on a 6nm process node. The AMD Ryzen 7000 CCD measures at a die size of 70mm2 compared to 83mm2 for Zen 3 and feature a total of 6.57 Billion transistors, a 58% increase over the Zen 3 CCD with 4.15 Billion transistors,

Scattered around the package are several SMDs (capacitors/resistors) that usually sit under the package substrate if we consider Intel's CPUs. AMD is instead featuring them on the top layer and as such, they had to design a new kind of IHS which is internally referred to as the Octopus. We've already seen the delidded IHS before but now we get to see a final production chip with no lid on it to cover those gold Zen 4 nuggets!

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With that said, the IHS is an interesting component of the AMD Ryzen 7000 Desktop CPUs. The one picture shows the arrangement of the 8 arms which Robert Hallock 'Director of Technical Marketing at AMD' refers to as the 'Octopus'. Each arm has a small application of TIM beneath it which is used to solder the IHS to the interposer. Now delidding the chip is going to be really hard since each arm is right next to the massive array of capacitors. Each Arm is also slightly raised to make room for the SMDs and users shouldn't worry about heat getting trapped beneath.

The most interesting area of the AMD Ryzen 7000 Desktop CPU IHS, besides the arms, is the gold plated IHS which is used to increase thermal dissipation off of the CPU/IO dies and directly to the IHS. The two 5nm Zen 4 CCD's and singular 6nm IO die have liquid-metal TIM or Thermal interface material for better heat conductivity and the aforementioned gold plating does help a lot with heat dissipation. What remains to be seen is whether the capacitors will feature silicone coating or not but from the previous package shot, it kind of looks like they do.

The thermal testing was carried out with the Corsair H1150i AIO liquid cooler:

Temperatures (Stock)
Gaming Load
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
AMD Ryzen 7 2700X
45
Intel Core i9-9900KS
50
Intel Core i5-8600K
51
Intel Core i5-10600K
51
Intel Core i9-9900K
52
AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
52
Intel Core i5-12600K
54
AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
52
Intel Core i7-8700K
56
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
55
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
56
Intel Core i9-10980XE
58
AMD Ryzen 9 3950X
59
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
64
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
66
Intel Core i7-10700K
68
Intel Core i9-10850K
68
Intel Core i9-12900K
71
Intel Core i9-11900K
70
Intel Core i9-10900K
72
Ryzen 7 7700X
75
Ryzen 9 7950X
84
Temperatures Overclocked
Gaming Load
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
AMD Ryzen 9 7950X OC
99
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X OC
99
Intel Core i9-12900K OC
98
Intel Core i9-10900K OC
92
Intel Core i9-11900K
90
Intel Core i7-10700K OC
86
Intel Core i5-12600K OC
71
Intel Core i5-10600K OC
69

You can find additional information about our hardware review process and ethics policy here.

Hassan Mujtaba Photo

About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.

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