Ryzen 7 2700
The tinkerer’s choice
AMD’S GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT with its first-gen Ryzen processors came from one tiny little CPU: the 1700. At first glance, amid all the hype and hubbub surrounding the 1800X and, more importantly, the hex-cored 5 series that followed soon after, we’d dismissed the lower-powered 1700 as nothing more than a superficial part, a lineup-filler designed for those on a budget, or power users looking for particularly good energy savings.
The reality was completely different. Shattering all our expectations, our sample, at least when overclocked, easily kept up with—and in some cases surpassed—the 1800X in our tests. All it took was a little elbow grease, some additional voltage, and a bump up in the multiplier, and bam! 4.0GHz was a cakewalk. In short, it was enough to convince this overclocking-obsessed reviewer to invest in one, and although we were fooled once by the inauspicious nature of AMD’s sleeper agent, we sure as hell weren’t going to be fooled again.
At its heart, the 2700 is quite a curious part. Much like the rest of this second generation of Ryzen, there’s no architectural change here, no grand shift in manufacturing process, no new socket, or increased TDP—nothing. All the performance gains are leveraged through intelligently designed smaller transistors, and a rethinking of how Ryzen deals with memory latency. Because of that, AMD reckons you’ll net a 10–15 percent performance increase across the board with its new generation of processors compared to the previous gen. That’s a bold claim, for sure, but nothing that we haven’t seen already with last issue’s look at the 2700X.
As far as performance is concerned, the 2700 does exactly what you’d expect across our computational benchmarks in contrast with the last generation—the 2700 managed an increase of around 12 percent across all four of our tests. In fact, it looks a lot more like a Ryzen 7 1800X than anything else right now. In Cinebench R15, it scored 163 points in single core versus the 1800X’s 161, and 1,603 in multi versus the 1,640 of the 1800X. BETTER AND BETTER So, you get eight cores at 3.5GHz (or 4.1GHz for a single core), it’s $15 cheaper than the 1800X, which it almost beats, and on top of that, it comes with a cooler. Can it get any better? Yes it can.
This next bit should come with a little disclaimer, and that’s the fact that the 1700 and 2700 series are arguably more susceptible to the silicon lottery than anything we’ve seen from AMD to date. From our own experience with multiple 1700s, maximum overclocks on these parts can vary by as much as 400MHz, depending on the chip in hand and the motherboard you overclock it on. That said, we managed an additional overclock of 800MHz across all eight cores of our Ryzen 7 2700—that’s a final clock of 4.3GHz @ 1.45V. With a 360mm radiator chilling it, we never saw temperatures rise above 68 C. Let’s be frank—that’s damn impressive. We tried edging it up to 4.35GHz, but decided to back off at 1.5V in fear of damaging the chip. In Cinebench R15, that 4.3GHz netted us an awesome 1,911 points, outclassing even last issue’s 4.2GHz score from the 2700X at 1,888 points.
Are there any flaws in this grand overclocker’s dream? Sort of. There’s the power draw. We saw an increase of 31W from the wall under load versus last gen’s 1700, from 110W to 141W. But to be honest, 141W of juice from the wall for an eightcore, 16-thread part—when you can pick up a respectable 750W PSU for less than $75—really does seem like we’re splitting hairs. On top of that, temperatures were pretty damn good, too; at stock, we never saw anything above 45 C, and as we only managed 68 C at 1.5V under the triple rad, that’s pretty good, too.
AMD really has smashed it out of the park with the Ryzen series, and the 2700 is a fantastic improvement over last gen, too. Whether it’s price, performance, or overclocking capability, the 2700 hits the mark for the lot.