When AMD announced the Ryzen 9000 series CPUs at COMPUTEX, one little piece of information caught my eye: the 8-core Ryzen 7 9700X has a very respectable TDP of 65W. This is well below the 105W and 120W TDPs of the Ryzen 7 7700X and Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

New rumors suggest that AMD has gotten ahead of itself in this regard, at least when it comes to gaming performance; Donnie Woligroski, AMD's senior technical marketing manager for consumer processors, has stated that even though the 9700X is strong for non-gaming workloads, it will not be as strong for gaming as the 7800X. Donnie Woligroski, AMD's senior technical marketing manager for consumer processors, confirmed that while the 9700X is strong on non-gaming workloads, it is not strong enough to beat the 7800X3D in games.

According to information provided to Wccftech, AMD is considering changing the specifications of the very slow 9700X by increasing its TDP to 120W from the previously announced 65W. This is not necessarily a welcome change, but if the gaming performance gap with the 7800X3D is close, the power boost should allow the 9700X to achieve a higher base clock and boost clock, which should be enough to push the 9700X up.

Unless this change has been planned for some time, my guess is that it is too late to make such a dramatic change. Even if the higher core count 9000 series CPUs have higher TDPs, this kind of change takes time to test and validate, and if the chips are already shipping as expected, AMD's board partners will introduce something like a 120W gaming mode, which can be enabled in the BIOS or AMD's I would lean towards enabling it in the Ryzen Master app.

AMD has confirmed that this CPU will be available in July, probably around the end of July, so the wait won't be long.

Why would AMD do this so close to launch; AMD wants to claim that the 9000 series chips are the best gaming CPUs. They don't want to go up to the podium and imply that gamers should stick with the previous generation processors.

The 7800X3D has also been the subject of significant discounts recently. The cheaper and faster 7800X3D is not the best advertisement for the 9000 series chips, even if gaming is only one of many measures of performance.

Of course, we know that AMD will eventually release a 9000 series X3D chip, and we know that the 5800X3D and 7800X3D, whatever they are, will be very strong gaming options thanks to their large amounts of cache. will have these chips ready for when Intel launches its competing Arrow Lake desktop CPU family in the coming months.