Were we wrong about Zen 5? [Video]

Recap: We got our first look at AMD’s new Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X processors last week, and it’s fair to say we weren’t impressed with what we saw. That said, online reviews were very mixed, despite reporting similar performance data overall. There were minimal gains in games, with mixed productivity performance. But that mixed reception from reviewers left readers confused, with many asking the question: Are these new Zen 5 processors good or bad? It’s a fair question, and the answer is, as usual, “it depends.”

Zen 5 reviews that focused primarily on server workloads, development software, and AI-type benchmarks found Zen 5 to be generally excellent, often offering good performance gains over Zen 4 with improved power efficiency. However, reviews that focused on gaming and more typical desktop productivity workloads, such as video editing, …