This eight-core Zen 4 cant quite top its “Alder Lake” counterpart
Four “Zen 4”-based CPUs hit the street this week, and the top one, AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X, is an incredibly powerful processor. But it’s, to an extent, a niche chip at $699. Unless you are doing a lot of heavily threaded, compute-intensive tasks, there’s just no need to own such a beast. AMD’s Ryzen 7 7700X is quite a different story, though. This processor is priced significantly lower ($399) and performs respectably close to the Ryzen 9 7950X given the large price difference. If you’re looking for a high-performance processor that still leaves some cash in the bank to buy a proper GPU afterwards, then this might be the one for you. That said, it’s hard to ignore Intel’s Core i7-12700K at around the same price, and the just-announced, forthcoming Core i7-13700K, with its support for 24 threads for just $10 more.The Ryzen 7 7700X: A Scaled-Down 7950X
The Ryzen 7 7700X features many similarities to AMD’s flagship Ryzen 9 7950X. Both processors are built on a TSMC 5nm manufacturing process, and they both utilize AMD’s Zen 4 architecture. Both of these processors are also built on chiplets, which makes scaling the design up or down relatively easy. All Zen 4 CPU dies contain eight CPU cores, and the Ryzen 9 7950X simply contains two of these dies to add up to a total of 16 cores. The Ryzen 7 7700X has just one, giving it a total of eight cores.
The eight CPU cores all support SMT technology that enables them to operate two threads each for a total of 16 active threads. The CPU die also contains 32MB of L3 cache with an additional 8MB of L2 cache that’s divvied up into 512K chunks between the CPU cores. AMD pulled back on the power draw a bit with the Ryzen 7 7700X, setting it at a 105-watt thermal design power (TDP) rating compared with the Ryzen 9 7950X’s 170-watt TDP. As this chip has many fewer cores, however, that likely doesn’t mean much in terms of how the chip operates. Clock speeds are set slightly lower on the 7700X (see chart below).
If you’re interested in reading more about the Zen 4 architecture, check out our review of the Ryzen 9 7950X flagship, but we will provide a few basic details here as well. On average, Zen 4 is rated to have 13% better IPC throughput than Zen 3 and 29% better overall performance. This is achieved in part due to the improved IPC performance, higher clock speeds, and to a lesser degree from platform changes and the adoption of DDR5 memory.
AMD also equipped the Ryzen 7 7700X with a light-hitting integrated graphics processor (IGP) based on the RDNA 2 graphics architecture. This IGP has two compute units with a total of 128 stream processors, eight TMUs, and three ROPs. The core is crafted on TSMC’s 6nm process and it can hit speeds as high as 2.2GHz.
Like the 7950X, AMD does not include a CPU cooler in the box with the 7700X. Also, in a new stroke with the Zen 4 chips, the new AM5 socket and platform flip the script and transfer the CPU pins to the motherboard. As you can see above, the contacts are on the CPU, LGA style, like on all of Intel’s chips of recent years. With the Ryzen 7000 series, this is new for AMD’s mainstream chips. Our AM5 Test Setup
We tested out the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X on an Asrock X670E Taichi motherboard with a 2x16GB G.Skill DDR5 memory kit operating at 5,200MHz. We opted to use a Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL240 Flux 240mm water cooler. The system was powered by a SilverStone DA850 power supply, and installed on a Praxis WetBench open-air testbench.
An Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition graphics card was used for all tests except those specifically run to evaluate the Radeon integrated graphics processor.
The Intel processors that were tested against the Ryzen 7 7700X were all tested in a near-identical open-air testbench with an identical cooler, the same power supply, and the same RAM. The only notable difference was the RAM was set at 4,800MHz for the Intel systems as that is their official max supported RAM speed that doesn’t count as, technically, memory overclocking.
