
Zen 5 is finally here for desktop PCs and having already tasted what it is like with six cores, in the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X review, it's time to see what difference two more cores, four more threads, and a tiny bit more clock speed all makes—that's right, it's our review of the Ryzen 7 9700X.
AMD has stuck to the same fundamental floorplan for the 9700X as it has with the last generation 7700X and the Zen 3-powered 5700X. Underneath the heatspreader, you've got two chiplets: one CCD (Core Complex Die), which houses all the processing cores and cache, and one IOD (Input/Output Die) that's home to a tiny integrated GPU, PCIe and USB hubs, and the RAM controllers.