Product on Review: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
Manufacturer: AMD
Street Price: GBP £319.99 / USD $329.99
2017 saw a processor launch that really threw the cat amongst the pigeons. The Ryzen CPUs were here and they wanted a word with Intel. Now, two years on, we’ve already had a range refresh that boosted clockspeeds with a small process shrink with a spattering of optimisations but now we receive a total re-think of the architecture and how things will move forwards. This is the Zen 2 launch, which we’ll be looking at today in the form of the Ryzen 7 3700X. Things have been polished considerably, on paper at least.
The eye-catching performance figures of the flagship models on launch day may well be tempting but the more performance-orientated amongst us have traditionally looked further down the pecking order for better value, or “bang for your buck” as it has been known. That’s where the likes of the Ryzen 7 3700X will find itself, at least in theory.
The 3700X finds itself just below the 3800X, the top-tier 8-core, 16-thread model, though that position definitely isn’t a bad thing. Chiefly amongst the positives is the 65W TDP, enabling users to run more conservative cooling solutions or achieve lower dB ratings for a given performance level. The 3700X rocks a 4.4GHz max boost clock and manages to maintain 3.6GHz across all 8-cores as a worst-case scenario.
If you’ve read this far, you may be sat there thinking this sounds very similar to the 1700X and 2700X; while it does share the same naming scheme, the internal construction has changed vastly. AMD have moved away from a monolithic design and swapped over to a ‘chiplet’ architecture, this allows AMD to manufacture the CCDs on the new 7nm process, where performance scales well, and the cIODs on the older, well-established 12nm process where systems like the memory controller and PCI-E interface won’t benefit much, if at all, from a shrink in die size.
The Ryzen 7 3700X is shoe-horned into the same AM4 package as subsequent generations of Ryzen CPU and will be compatible with all AM4 motherboards, though with some features disabled; perhaps the most important of which is the PCI-E 4.0 support.
We cover the Zen 2 architecture in-depth on the subsequent pages, so without further ado, lets bring you the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X.
AMD on Zen 2:
Cloud computing, enterprise productivity, immersive visual experiences, gaming and streaming all demand increasing computing performance with optimal energy efficiency. From the very beginning, AMD engineers designed the new “Zen 2” core to meet those demands with more core throughput, larger caches, and powerful multi-threading capabilities.
