add arrow-down arrow-left arrow-right arrow-up authorcheckmark clipboard combo comment delete discord dots drag-handle dropdown-arrow errorfacebook history inbox instagram issuelink lock markup-bbcode markup-html markup-pcpp markup-cyclingbuilder markup-plain-text markup-reddit menu pin radio-button save search settings share star-empty star-full star-half switch successtag twitch twitter user warningwattage weight youtube
  1. Forums
  2. Hardware
  3. CPUs

Ryzen 7600 or 7700

gntan83
gntan83
  • 4 days ago

I'm currently having a hard time deciding between these two CPUs. I can pick up the 7600 for (in my country's currency) $230, or the 7700 for $300.

I will be gaming at 1080p and 1440p on mostly simulations (e.g. Forza, Assetto Corsa, flight sims), single player RPGs (e.g. FF7 Remakes), and action RPGs. The 7600 should be fine in this area, but I'm worried about how long the 7600 can last me if more games from this year onward start to use more than 6 cores. I don't plan to switch the CPU during the time that I have this PC (at least 5 years) unless there's a very compelling reason, so I wonder if I should pay a bit more for the 7700 to 'set and forget'.

The other use for the CPU is running LLM AI models. For larger quantized models that won't fit inside my VRAM, I will load it into RAM and run them using both the CPU and GPU and accept the slower speed compared to GPU-only. I'm not sure if the additional 2 cores/4 threads of the 7700 will be beneficial here or if 6 cores/12 threads is good enough. Some say it will help for prompt processing (I can't find benchmarks showing by how much though), others say it won't matter much compared to memory bandwidth since the workload doesn't get significantly faster with more cores and threads. I've only begun to scratch the surface of local LLM usage so my knowledge in this area is lacking.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Log in to rate comments or to post a comment.

Comments

Gilroar
  • 4 days ago

but I'm worried about how long the 7600 can last me if more games from this year onward start to use more than 6 cores.

AMD has these configured in Windows as quad cores with the rest as low priority cores.

It's why even in titles that should scale with cores these really don't see the expected performance increase from more cores.

Considering the other use case, I'd reposition this a little into a 7600 or I7/I9/R9 depending on how you want to allocate performance.

Gaming the 7600 makes more sense.

AI is where cores really start to matter.

Two more low priority cores doesn't meaningfully change things unlike say a 7900 which doubles things.

gntan83
  • 2 days ago

Okay, I decided to get the 7600 and put the $70 somewhere else. Not enough to upgrade a GPU tier, but maybe some more storage or RAM. Thanks everyone.

LIVE_AMMO
  • 3 days ago

The extra cores on the 7700 can help a bit, mainly when loading prompts, handling multiple requests and/or doing other stuff (background processes/multi-tasking) at the same time but it won’t make a huge difference overall. Most of the slowdown with big models comes from RAM speed/bandwidth, not the number of cores. The 6 core 7600 already performs well for local LLMs and should be your only option if you haven’t yet secured at least 32GB of memory.

For gaming the 7600 is plenty. I'm not a flight sim'mer myself, but i've seen few reports in the past with some of the newer titles making noticeably better use of additional cores in demanding environments. Although i suspect nothing significant to compel the additional spend.