AMD, NVIDIA and Intel regularly announce products that are exclusive to certain regions of the world… This is notably the case with the Ryzen 5 7400F, which is exclusive to the Chinese market. The main attraction of this model lies in its low price – $116 – and generous configuration. However, in order to save money, AMD has not soldered the processor’s IHS!
Ryzen 5 7400F: internal paste!
As a reminder, the 7400F has a total of six Zen 4 cores and twelve threads. These are backed up by 1 MB of L2 cache, while there is a total of 32 MB of L3 cache. The latter also supports PCIe 5.0 but does not have an iGPU, so a dedicated graphics card is required to get the most out of your system. In terms of frequency, it operates at 3.7 GHz as standard, with a turbo at 4.7 GHz. Finally, it offers a TDP of 65W and comes with a Wraith Stealth radbox.
Now, offering such a low price for a Zen 4 CPU with a six-core configuration, AMD must have made savings somewhere. And it’s under the IHS that these savings have been made. While other processors in the range are soldered, this is not the case here. When removing the heatspreader, the small metal plate, Melon Master discovered that AMD was using thermal paste instead of indium solder.
While soldering offers better durability and performance, thermal paste has the advantage of being more affordable. What’s more, for overclockers, it makes delidding simpler and less dangerous. We all remember an attempt last August that resulted in the complete destruction of a Ryzen 9000!
As for performance, the 7400F was compared with the 7500F, a model that is more widely available and runs faster: 5 GHz in turbo mode. This resulted in a Cinebench R23 score of 13,508 pts for the Ryzen 5 7400F, compared with 13,580 pts for the 7500F.