Ryzen 5 7400F: AM5 platform finally viable for lowend gaming PC builds?
AMD announced several CPUs at CES 2025 during the keynote now notorious for the absence of Radeon graphics cards – Ryzens 9 9900X3D and 9950X3D with V-Cache, Strix Halo extreme laptop CPUs, Krackan APUs and Ryzen Z2 for handhelds. Later we found out AMD stealthily launched even more CPUs, among them Ryzen 5 9600. It turns out there is yet another potentially attractive AM5 CPU that has been launched to market in this manner.
The cheapest model on the AM5 platform AMD offers is the Ryzen 5 8400F right now, which is unfortunately based on the Phoenix 2″ APU with Zen 4/Zen 4c hybrid cores, a small cache, and stripped-down PCI Express connectivity, so gamers are better off with the slightly more expensive Ryzen 5 7500F, which is available on a limited basis at some retailers. But now, the new Ryzen 5 7400F is set to come out, which could be a better replacement for the 8400F while being cheaper than the 7500F SKU. AMD hasn’t talked about it anywhere, but now the processor has appeared on the company’s website, with full specifications.
The Ryzen 5 7400F is a 65W model and, like the 5700F, offers six Zen 4 cores that also retain SMT capability, providing 12 threads. And it also has 32MB L3 cache. This eliminates basically all potential “caveats” that could have ruined the gaming performance of this model compared to the Ryzen 5 7500F or 7600 in the event AMD decided to cut the CPU down in these specs. The processor even keeps PCIe 5.0 ×16 support for a graphics cards. The processor is based on the same chiplet design as the other Ryzen 7000 “Raphael” CPUs. It has the integrated graphics core disabled, which is indicated by the F in the name, but this drawback is a feature of the 7500F model as well.
The only difference seems to be in the lower clock speeds of this model. The base clock speed is only 3.7 GHz and the maximum boost is only 4.7 GHz, a 300 MHz reduction from the 7500F, which still reaches 5.0 GHz boost clock speed. This means a loss of about 6% of single-threaded performance.
However, this processor is still unlocked for overclocking, so you can manually compensate for this deficit. It’s possible that this model will use worse bins (lower-quality pieces of silicon) that can’t handle such high clock speeds in a stable manner, but 4.7–5.0 GHz is quite far from the ceiling of Raphael processors, so a few hundred MHz of overclocking headroom is most likely possible (but as always, overclocking is without warranty and at your own risk).
Already released, globally?
According to AMD’s website, the Ryzen 5 7400F has already been released (the launch date is listed as January 9, 2025). It is also marked as a processor that should be globally available, so it shouldn’t be a China-only specialty, as is sometimes the case with such processors and GPUs. There is some chance that it will be mostly or only sold to OEM manufacturers for use in complete computers, in theory. Hopefully this is not the case, because according to AMD’s website, the 7400F will be sold in a box package, with a bundled Wraith Stealth cooler.
After all, that was was supposed to be the situation with the 7500F, and yet for the last year that processor has been freely available in retail stores, even if it is not carried by all etailers out there. And it has been probably the most cost-effective inexpensive processor on the AM5 platform for this year, with a price of only around 160 EUR.
Thus, one can hope that the Ryzen 5 7400F will become available to DIY PC builders in a similar manner. With this model, perhaps the price could even get deeper below 160 EUR, so the AM5 platform could perhaps become more viable for the cheapest PCs, where people still tend to gravitate to the old AM4 platform due to the pricing.
However, we do not know the official price of the 7400F yet. It is possible that like other processors it will enter the market at a relatively higher pricing initially and will only move to a position where it will be cheaper than the 7500F model over time. At the moment, European price search engines are not yet turning up any shops that would have the Ryzen 5 7400F in stock or available for preorder with a price sticker attached.
Sources: AMD, TechPowerUp
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
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