AMD Ryzen 5 7500F review: a great value gaming CPU if you can get it

Counter-Strike: GO, Metro Exodus EE and Black Ops Cold War.

Review by Will Judd Deputy Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on Nov. 28, 2023

We've run our CPU benchmarks this time around at 1080p and 1440p, as we rarely see prominent differences at 4K. (There's an argument for testing at 720p to make these deltas even more visible, but even mainstream PC gaming has long since moved onto 1080p.) We're using an Asus RTX 3090 Strix OC graphics card and DDR5-6000 CL30 memory for these results.

Our third page is all about FPS fps, with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. The latter two are RT-enabled benchmarks, as creating the BVH structure for ray tracing actually has a significant CPU impact.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Counter-Strike remains the gold standard for competitive FPS, and (running in its Global Offensive legacy branch) is unique amongst our benchmark suite as a DX9 title typically played at hundreds of frames per second. However, competitive-minded players still value high-end CPUs, as guaranteeing a strong and stable frame-rate up to and beyond the refresh rate of their monitors provides a critical boost to responsiveness. As monitors get faster - up to 500Hz these days - CPU requirements continue to climb.

I think it's fair to say that the 7500F is easily fast enough to allow you to excel at Counter-Strike, with a result comfortably in the 300-400fps range. The 7600X is just five percent faster, while the 7800X3D and 7950X3D's extra cache comes to naught with a paltry seven and eight percent lead over the 7500F respectively. This is a great illustration of the sort of PC build that the 7500F makes a lot of sense in - you're paying for the Zen 4 architecture and its IPC advantage over earlier Ryzen generations; more frequency and more cores bring just a minor bump in performance.

By comparison, the 13400F manages just 80 percent of the total frame-rate and wouldn't even max out a 360Hz monitor - definitely subpar, even if it would be more than sufficient for the vast majority of the gaming population!

Counter-Strike 2 has now been released, so expect CS:GO to be replaced in our CPU benchmarks in their next iteration.

CS:GO: DX9, Very High, AF off

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition is an RT-only variant of the vanilla game, run here with DLSS engaged to uncouple the GPU and push the strain onto the CPU as much as possible. The test scene we're using comes from the very beginning of The Volga level, with Artyom and Anna discussing their hopes for the future before running into a hostile camp.

Metro Exodus EE is easy to benchmark but often difficult to explain, with lower core-count CPUs outperforming their higher-end counterparts and other occasional weirdness. That's good news for the 7500F, which manages to turn in a result that is within a couple percentage points of the 7950X3D (!) and a weighty 16 percent ahead of Intel's latest flagship, the 14900K. (Perhaps we're seeing why Intel chose this as one of two titles to receive its APO boost on 14th-gen processors; note that this requires motherboard support that didn't exist at the time of our testing so our 14900K result doesn't reflect this.)

Metro Exodus EE: DX12, Ultra, RTX, DLSS Performance

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War

Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War is the latest game in the Call of Duty series to feature ray tracing - despite the launch of three COD titles in the interim. These extra calculations add on a nice bit of CPU load that we can use to differentiate different models, hence the game's inclusion in these benchmarks.

The 7500F comes within three percent of the fastest six-core CPU, the 7600X, and narrowly edges ahead of the 13400F by around the same margin. There is a big gap to the two X3D models, around 22 percent, and from memory of our previous iterations of this benchmark we'd expect to see less than half of that advantage going from the 7600X to the 7700X, 7900X or 7950X.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War: DX12, Low, TAA

We conclude our gaming tests on the next page, where we take on Cyberpunk 2077 and two new editions of Digital Foundry favourites: Far Cry 6 and Crysis 3 Remastered.