AMD Ryzen 7 3700X

Building a better mainstream 8-core chip.

AMD’s third generation Ryzen CPUs boast higher clockspeeds and more cores than the previous first and second gen parts, and the Ryzen 7 3700X is now one of the best CPUs for gaming. Zen 2 CPUs are so good that AMD almost doesn’t need the faster offerings. Its second-string 3700X is perfectly capable of running the offense, and it isn’t quite as demanding when it comes to signing bonuses and contracts. For those teams (aka PCs) with salary cap concerns that can’t quite justify chasing the 3900X, the 3700X is a versatile QB that can throw a quick short pass, scamper downfield for a modest gain, or even launch the long ball when occasion requires.

When it comes to playing football – running PC games – there’s not a huge difference between the 3700X and the 3900X. In fact, there’s hardly any difference at all. For gaming, the 3700X and 3900X are effectively tied, and you can safely ignore the barely faster 3800X. It’s 1-4 percent better (according to tests at Tom’s Hardware) for the extra cash. But I’m jumping ahead.

Maximum boost clocks on the 3800X are only 100MHz higher than the 3700X, but minimum ‘guaranteed’ clocks are potentially 300MHz higher. In practice, however, the 3700X mostly runs well above the minimum clockspeed, particularly in light to medium workloads. If you do a lot of 3D rendering or video encoding, moving to the Ryzen 9 3900X makes sense, but for everyone else the 3700X is a great choice.

As with other Ryzen CPUs, I didn’t do extensive overclocking tests on the Ryzen 7 3700X. That’s because it generally doesn’t help much. You sacrifice boost clocks for higher all-core clocks, though with the 3700X there’s at least a bit more gain from enabling Precision Boost Overdrive. It’s still only 200MHz extra at best, which means less than a 5 percent improvement, and often in the 1-3 percent range. The days of massive gains via overclocking your CPU are largely behind us now. Intel’s Core i9-9900K might get an extra 400MHz vs. stock, and AMD’s CPUs might get an extra 200-300MHz, which just isn’t that exciting. It’s the blessing and curse of increased competition.

All of AMD’s third-gen parts were tested in the MSI MEG X570 Godlike board (with similar results from Asus and Gigabyte boards). Besides the memory, I used a Gigabyte Aorus NVMe Gen4 2TB SSD for the main drive (another part of the AMD review kit), with a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition graphics card.

GAMING PERFORMANCE

Starting with gaming performance, here’s how the Ryzen 7 3700X stacks up. All ten games are tested at 1080p ‘ultra’ (generally the highest possible settings, outside of super-sample anti-aliasing), and each test is run multiple

As with other Ryzen CPUs, I didn’t do extensive overclocking tests on the Ryzen 7 3700X. That’s because it generally doesn’t help much..

Ryzen 7 3700X is a great CPU overall, and it’s arguably the sensible choice for most users. Why blow a ton of cash on your CPU and then have to cut back on your graphics card, storage, motherboard, and/or memory.

times to ensure the consistency of results. Minimum fps is calculated as the average fps for the bottom three percent of frametimes—find the 97 percentile frametime, and sum up all frametimes above that, dividing by the number of frames. This provides a more useful metric than pure minimum fps or pure 97 percentile.

Out of ten games tested, the 3700X and 3900X are pretty much tied, with the 3900X hanging on to a scant 0.5 percent lead in framerates. That’s well within margin of error, and that’s with an RTX 2080 Ti at 1080p; move up to 1440p or 4K, or downgrade to a slower GPU, and the gap would almost completely disappear.

What about Intel and its Core i7-9700K and Core i9-9900K? The 9700K actually tops the overall gaming performance chart – yup, Hyper-Threading isn’t always beneficial for games. That makes the 9700K 10 percent than the 3700X, while the 9900K is 9 percent faster. Of course, that’s when running games at 1080p with the fastest current GPU available. The gap would be substantially smaller at 1440p and basically non-existent at 4K.

In other words, like the 3900X, AMD can’t lay claim to the gaming performance crown and in fact comes in behind even the older i7-7700K, depending on the game. If gaming is your number one priority, you’re still better off with an Intel CPU (never mind the various security exploits that have been patched over the past 18 months).

AN IMPRESSIVE CPU

AMD’s Ryzen processors continue to put the pressure on Intel, forcing increasingly potent CPUs into mainstream pricing. With third generation Ryzen, AMD effectively sounds the death-knell for HEDT platforms. I still love the idea of extreme performance, and the 56-core and 64-core server chips are cool, but I certainly don’t need them in my home PC. Frankly, with chips like the Ryzen 9 3900X, I don’t need any of the HEDT processors from Intel or AMD. When you can get a great 8- and 12-core chips for much less, why bother with a more expensive motherboard, memory, CPU, and PSU?

Ryzen 7 3700X is a great CPU overall, and it’s arguably the sensible choice for most users. Why blow a ton of cash on your CPU and then have to cut back on your graphics card, storage, motherboard, and/or memory? Bang for the buck is always better if you step down a notch or two from the top-of-the-line parts. Raw performance is nice, but the balanced approach is often better. There’s nothing wrong with backing off a bit and getting a slightly less potent part at a far more reasonable price. Anyone looking at building an AMD based PC will find a lot to like with the Ryzen 7 3700X. It’s basically as fast as the more expensive third gen Ryzen parts when it comes to gaming, and certainly fast enough for most other tasks. It’s also about 10 percent faster than the previous generation Ryzen 7 2700X in gaming performance, and 15 percent faster overall. And it might improve even a bit more if AMD and its partners ever get the firmware and turbo stuff sorted out.

• Efficient and fast

• PCIe Gen4 and 7nm

• Relatively affordable

• Slightly slower in games

• Limited overclocking potential

• Is the firmware done yet?