AMD’s latest China-exclusive CPUs benchmarked — Ryzen 7 8700F and Ryzen 5 8400F aren’t much slower than costlier models

AMD recently announced the Ryzen 7 8700F and Ryzen 5 8400F, two exclusive Zen 4 processors for the Chinese market. Thanks to Chinese motherboard manufacturer JGINYUE, we now have the first benchmarks of the China-exclusive chips and can see how they compare to the Ryzen 7 8700G.

The Ryzen 7 8700F is fundamentally a lower-clocked variant of the Ryzen 7 8700G without the integrated RDNA 3 graphics engine. Regarding clock speeds, the base and boost clocks on the Ryzen 7 8700F are only 100 MHz and 50 MHz lower, respectively. Therefore, the performance between the two chips should be very close.

The Ryzen 5 8400F is a hexa-core, 12-thread Zen 4 processor similar to the Ryzen 5 7500F. The clock speeds are all over the place, though. The Ryzen 5 8400F has a 500 MHz higher base clock than the Ryzen 5 7500F, but the latter flaunts a 250 MHz higher boost clock. More importantly, the Ryzen 5 7500F has double the L3 cache than the Ryzen 5 8400F, giving the former a performance edge in many computing benchmarks. It’s a shame that the motherboard vendor didn’t add the Ryzen 5 8500G in comparison, as the Ryzen 5 8400F is closer to the Ryzen 5 8500G in terms of L3 cache.

The Ryzen 7 8700F and Ryzen 7 8700G shared similar single-threaded performance in CPU-Z. However, the latter was close to 2% faster in multi-threaded performance. Whereas in Cinebench R23, the Ryzen 7 8700G outperformed the Ryzen 7 8700F by 2% in both single- and multi-core performance. We saw a similar margin in the Master Lu benchmark, which is very popular in China.

The Ryzen 5 7500F consistently beat the Ryzen 5 8400F across the different benchmarks. In CPU-Z, it was 2% faster in single-threaded performance and 9% faster in multi-threaded performance. The Ryzen 5 7500F also bested the Ryzen 5 8400F by 7% and 12% in single- and multi-core performance on Cinebench R23. Lastly, the Ryzaen 5 7500F posted a 9% higher score than the Ryzaen 5 8400F in the Master Lu benchmark.

Although AMD has revealed the Ryzen 7 8700F and Ryzen 5 8400F, the chipmaker hasn’t shared the pricing for the Zen 4 processors. The Ryzen 7 8700F and the Ryzen 7 8700G case are interesting because the performance difference between the two is a meager 2%. The Ryzen 7 8700G has a $329 MSRP, so AMD will have to price the Ryzen 7 8700F very aggressively to convince consumers to buy the iGPU-less model over its counterpart. The Ryzen 7 8700F would look appealing if AMD can keep the MSRP below $300.

Meanwhile, the Ryzen 5 7500F delivers up to 12% better performance than the Ryzen 5 8400F. Above all else, the Ryzen 5 7500F is already an affordable chip at $179, so there isn’t much headroom in terms of pricing for the Ryzen 5 8400F. It shouldn’t be long before Chinese retailers start stocking the Ryzen 7 8700F and Ryzen 5 8400F, so we’ll know the MSRPs very soon.

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.