AMD's new Ryzen 5 7500F may be the best low-cost AM5 gaming chip ever.

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AMD's new Ryzen 5 7500F may be the best low-cost AM5 gaming chip ever.

A new CPU from AMD is in sight. It has appeared in Puget Systems' benchmark database and is known as the Ryzen 5 7500F. That alone is interesting, but after it appeared in this database, a Korean retailer listed (and removed) the 7500F at a KRW street price of US$170-180. The 7500F's specs are open to speculation, assuming AMD is following Intel's nomenclature. then it is likely that the 7500F will not have integrated graphics.

Puget Systems entry found by @harukaze5719 listed as part of a system that included an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 and an Asus X670E-F Gaming motherboard. The 7500F system is listed in the same Puget Bench benchmark, i.e., close to the score of a comparable Ryzen 5 7600 system in DaVinci Resolve.

The lack of IGP is one thing, but what about the actual chip under the Ryzen 5 7500F heatspreader: one is that it is based on the existing single CCD Raphael design, which includes the 7600 through 7800X3D. The other, less likely, is based on a mobile CPU. [The Ryzen 5 7600 is a 6-core desktop processor. It has a single 8-core die (2 cores are disabled) and another I/O die that includes RDNA 2 integrated graphics. So the 7500F is a downclocked version of the 7600 with IGP disabled, probably for yield reasons; AMD should have plenty of 12nm IO dies already, so such a model makes sense.

AMD also makes monolithic mobile CPUs with up to 8 Zen 4 cores, but given the powerful integrated graphics and the engineering costs of porting these designs to the AM5 platform, the 7500F is based on these chips I think it is unlikely. Also, it is too early to have harvested die inventory. My guess is that the 7500F is a downclocked version of the 7600 with IGP disabled.

Although the Korean listing has been removed, presumably at AMD's behest, Videocardz obtained the specs before it was removed The CPU boost clock is set at 5.0 GHz, 100 MHz lower than the Ryzen 5 7600 The L2 and L3 caches are identical (38MB total), and given that the 7600 is priced at $229 before discount, a price of under $200 seems like a safe bet, loosely confirmed by the now-deleted Korean listing.

The Ryzen 5 7500F would be a welcome addition to the AM5 family; the purchase cost of AM5 systems has come down in recent months, especially with the significant drop in DDR5 prices, but the $229 Ryzen 5 7600 is still the cheapest model. At this time, no Ryzen 3 chips have been released. This makes the 7500F a particularly interesting budget gaming CPU. While it may not be able to compete with the superior Core i5 13400F, the AM5 socket still has a few years of life left in it, and if a Zen 5 or Zen 6 replacement chip is introduced in the future, this platform will have a promising upgrade path.

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