As part of AMD's third-generation Ryzen 3000 CPU lineup hitting the market July 7, the $329 Ryzen 7 3700X offers revolutionary new features like support for the fourth-generation PCI Express interface and a whole new processor microarchitecture from AMD, Zen 2.
This new CPU may represent just an incremental raw-performance improvement over its second-generation equivalent, the Ryzen 7 2700X, but it does it an impressive 65-watt TDP.
Plus, the price remains the same, and the performance was already very good for the money.
What that means: If you're thinking about building a powerful Ryzen-based PC from scratch, the Ryzen 7 3700X offers AMD's most compelling, efficient alternative to Intel's Core i7 CPUs that we've seen yet.
It wins an Editors' Choice for mainstream CPUs.
At First Blush, an Incremental Improvement
A combination of a marketing update (the introduction of a "Ryzen 9" tier) and engineering advancements means that the Ryzen 7 chips are no longer AMD's mainstream flagships, as they were in the first and second generation of Ryzen chips.
The new king of the moment is the Ryzen 9 3900X, two rungs above the Ryzen 7 3700X in terms of both raw processing power and price.
(Expect a 16-core $749 Ryzen 9 3950X in September.)
While the Ryzen 9 moniker owes its existence to a bit of marketing maneuvering, there is also a technical reason behind the addition of a processor line between the Ryzen 7 and the Ryzen Threadripper lineups.
Most third-generation Ryzen CPUs (barring some new 3000-series Ryzen-branded APUs from AMD) use the Zen 2 architecture.
The initial core-count peak for the Ryzen 3000 family is the higher 12-core/24-thread arrangement currently only implemented in the Editors' Choice-winning Ryzen 9 3900X; soon after, that will be topped by the 16-core/32-thread 3950X.
But before today, the mainstream Ryzens topped out at eight cores.
Here is how the 3700X shakes out versus the other Ryzen 3000s announced so far (of which all but the 3950X launch today in parallel)...
The Ryzen 7 3700X has the same eight cores and 16 threads as its predecessor.
The main benefits the Ryzen 7 3700X derives from the Zen 2 platform, then, are a much larger L3 cache (with Ryzen 3000, AMD calls it "GameCache") and support for the faster PCI Express (PCIe) Gen 4 interface.
Both of these advances represent a boon to power users looking for future-proofing.
PCIe 4.0 means much faster potential throughput for compliant storage drives, as well as (perhaps down the road) bandwidth benefits for add-in cards like graphics cards.
Near term, gamers have greater appreciation for the generous 36MB of L3 cache, up from 16MB in the Ryzen 7 2700X.
A larger cache could mean better gaming performance, since many titles benefit from the on-chip access to faster memory.
(More on that in a bit.)
Based on these raw specs, the Ryzen 7 3700X's improvements give it a noticeable leg up on its chief rival, the Intel Core i7-9700K.
The Intel chip also has eight cores, but with its 9th Generation desktop CPUs, Intel has dropped support for multithreading outside of the Core i9, so each Core i7 chip can handle only one instruction thread per core at a time.
That is now a key difference between the latest Core i7 CPUs and all Ryzen 7s.
The 9700K's cache is smaller, too, at 12MB, and the supporting Intel platforms lack PCIe 4.0 support.
Even more important, if you're building a new PC from scratch and watching your budget as you add many components to your shopping cart, the Core i7-9700K is about $50 more expensive.
But an advantage on paper doesn't mean the Ryzen 7 3700X has an advantage in all real-world computing scenarios.
In fact, the preceding Ryzen 7 2700X has small but noticeable deficiencies compared with its main rival, the six-core/12-thread Intel Core i7-8700K.
They mainly pertain to single-core performance, which is critical for running older apps, as well as games designed to run on one or two cores.
The good news is that overall, the Ryzen 7 3700X has made gains in this area.
The corrections mostly help the Ryzen chip achieve parity with the Intel Core i7-8700K, but that Intel chip is a generation behind now in Intel's desktop stack, and represents the last hurrah (for the moment, anyway) of its multithreaded Core i7s.
Our performance test results below help illustrate this.
Entering the Ryzen Ecosystem
The result is that if you were waiting for a bit more performance from a Ryzen 7 chip before pulling the trigger on one, the Ryzen 7 3700X is the chip to buy.
It's not for people upgrading from previous Ryzen 7 chips, though, since the differences between generations are modest.
It's likely that most people eyeing this chip will therefore be new to the Ryzen ecosystem, so here's what you can expect.
First and most important, the Ryzen 7 3700X will work in many late-model AM4 socket motherboards.
You'll only need to buy a cutting-edge X570 board if you want the future-proofing benefits of PCIe 4.0.
(See our guide to all of the X570 motherboards we saw at Computex 2019.) Otherwise, many of the dozens of AM4-compatible X470 and X370 motherboards will work, along with certain other AMD chipsets under AM4.
(Check out this piece, from sister site ExtremeTech, for the complexities around which older AMD AM4 chipsets and boards will be compatible with the Ryzen 3000 series CPUs; if you have a supported board, a BIOS upgrade will almost certainly be involved.) No AMD motherboard supports the Thunderbolt 3 interface, though, so if you need this connectivity for peripherals, you'll either need to stick with an Intel CPU or investigate add-in cards.
Second, you don't necessarily need to buy a separate CPU cooler, since the Ryzen 7 3700X comes with its own Wraith Prism cooling fan, complete with RGB lighting.
We used this stock cooler in our testbed and found it to be perfectly capable.
Plus, it looks great.
If you need a lot of headroom for overclocking, you may want a fancier liquid cooler, but PC builders on a budget won't need one and can enjoy some savings here.
Speaking of overclocking, all Ryzen chips are unlocked and ready to overclock.
Even better, AMD has taken a lot of the guesswork out of overclocking with its Precision Boost Overdrive feature, which automatically boosts temperature, power consumption from the CPU, and the VRM (your motherboard's ability to supply power to the CPU) to determine how high the core frequency can climb before hitting a predefined limit.
You can activate PBO in the Ryzen Master settings app without even having to enter the BIOS.
Of course, remember that overclocking, even with PBO, will void the Ryzen 7 3700X's three-year warranty.
If you don't overclock, you'll be running somewhere between the base clock speed of 3.6GHz and the boost clock speed of 4.4GHz.
Though its base clock speed is the same, the Intel Core i7-9700K has a slightly higher maximum boost speed of 4.9GHz.
Clock speeds don't increase between CPU generations as much as they did a decade or so ago, but the difference between the speeds of the Ryzen 7 3700X and the first-generation Ryzen 7 1700X (released in 2017) is nevertheless impressive.
Also an eight-core, 16-thread chip, the Ryzen 7 1700X has a base clock speed of 3.4GHz and a boost clock of just 3.8GHz.
As with all Ryzen chips except for the Vega-graphics-equipped G series, you'll need to buy a separate graphics card for video output.
This is a significant drawback for general-use computing, since most Intel chips include basic integrated graphics processors (IGPs) built into the CPU.
(The main exception is the company's high-end Core X-Series, which is entirely graphics-free, as well as certain recent SKUs of its higher-end Core chips, ending in "F," such as the Core i9-9900KF.
These have their graphics cores disabled.) On the other hand, this doesn't matter much for gamers, who absolutely should budget enough for at least a midrange graphics card like the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1600 series.
And many serious content creators will want a graphics card, too, for GPU-accelerated applications.
For these target markets, the lack of an IGP won't be an issue.
For a deeper look at the earlier Zen architectures, check out our reviews of the Ryzen 7 1700 and Ryzen 7 2700X.
Meanwhile, sister site ExtremeTech explains a few of the main performance improvements made in the Zen 2 architecture.
Note that you will need the latest May 2019 update to Windows 10 to take full advantage of them.
In addition to the Ryzen 7 3700X, there are currently four more third-generation Ryzen chips slated to go on sale at the same time: the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X, the eight-core Ryzen 7 3800X, and the six-core Ryzen 5 3600X and Ryzen 5 3600.
Here is how they all break out...
As mentioned earlier, a 16-core Ryzen 9 will arrive in September.
Note that the other eight-core Ryzen 3000 chip, the Ryzen 7 3800X, is distinguished from the 3700X primarily by TDP; the 3800X and higher Ryzen 3000 chips are 105-watt parts, while the 3700X is a 65 watter.
(One of the new Ryzen 5s below it is also a 65-watt chip, and the other a 95-watt.)
And 65 watts is remarkably low, considering what this CPU is capable of.
Let's get into that now.
Performance Testing
Our testbed configuration for the Ryzen 7 3700X is built around an MSI MEG X570 Godlike X570 motherboard, which features its own built-in fan over the chipset to keep things extra cool.
A chipset-specific fan is relatively uncommon even on high-end gaming motherboards, but a common trait on the X570 boards we have seen.
Also in our configuration: 16GB of G.Skill DDR4-3600 memory, a Corsair MP600 PCI Gen 4 SSD boot drive, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition graphics card to handle video output.
For all tests, we ran the memory at its maximum 3,600MHz speed.
Part of the innovation around X570 is support for higher memory speeds, assuming you have compliant memory; in this case, the MSI board served up an XMP profile for the RAM at that speed, with no fuss; all we had to do was click on it.
We test CPUs using a variety of synthetic benchmarks that offer proprietary scores, as well as real-world tests using consumer apps like Apple's iTunes and 3D games like Far Cry 5.
Cinebench R15
One of the best predictors of a CPU's performance is the Cinebench R15 benchmark, which offers a good overview of performance on many different types of demanding apps.
It's a CPU-centric test that gauges both the single-core performance and the multicore performance of a processor.
The resulting scores are proprietary numbers that represent the CPU's capabilities while rendering a complex 3D image.
Notice how both the Single Core and All Cores performance of the Ryzen 7 3700X are slightly improved over the Ryzen 7 2700X.
In the case of the All Cores test, both chips outperform the Core i7-8700K, which isn't surprising since that chip is limited to 12 threads instead of 16.
But the key difference is that with a single-core Cinebench score of 200, the Ryzen 7 3700X is roughly on par with the Core i7-8700K, while its predecessor was a fair bit slower, with a score of 172.
We haven't tested the Core i7-9700K yet, hence its absence in the charts, but we expect its performance to be slightly better than the Core i7-8700K that it replaces for single-core scenarios, but to fall behind on multicore due to its lack of thread-doubling support.
POV-Ray
The POV-Ray benchmark is a synthetic, highly threaded rendering test that offers a second opinion on the Cinebench results.
On this test, predictably, the Ryzen 7 3700X achieved better all-cores performance than the Core i7-8700K did, and it was not stupendously far behind on the single-core trial.
Although many modern complex apps are designed to run on multiple cores, single-core performance is nevertheless still important.
Many older games, especially those built on DirectX 9, use just one or two cores.
And manufacturing variabilities mean that there are slight variations in each core's maximum performance, so better performance from each core "lifts all sails," as an AMD spokesperson puts it.
iTunes
For a real-world look at single-core performance, we use an older version of Apple's iTunes to encode a series of music tracks.
This is decidedly legacy software—Apple has already announced iTunes' extinction—and it's single-threaded, which means that having more threads doesn't help the Ryzen 7 3700X speed through any faster.
As with Cinebench, the results show that the Ryzen 7 3700X has better single-core performance than its predecessor, though here not quite as good as the Core i7-8700K.
Handbrake & Blender
The Ryzen 7 3700X is at the low end of prosumer CPUs, if you are looking to handle complex content-creation workflows, and it's more than capable in a pinch.
For example, it was only about a minute slower to encode a 12-minute 4K video to 1080p using the Handbrake app than the Ryzen Threadripper 2950X, a monster 16-core CPU that generally sells for well more than twice the price of the 3700X.
It was also significantly faster on this test than the Core i7-8700K (chalk that up to eight cores and 16 threads, versus six and 12), and nearly as fast as the much more expensive ($499, at this writing) Core i9-9900K.
It's the same story when it comes to Blender, a popular open-source 3D rendering application for crafting 3D visual effects, animations, and models.
Our test file consists of a cartoonish flying-squirrel render that takes less than a minute to complete with most modern processors.
This test, as run with our test file, is mostly useful for highlighting the vast differences between low-end and high-end chips, and the similarities between chips within these two categories.
Nearly every chip in the chart below completed the test in about 20 seconds, from the Core i5-8400 to the Threadripper 2950X, except for the budget-desktop-class Ryzen 5 2400G, which took 34 seconds.
7-Zip
The Ryzen 7 3700X can make short work of compressing files into a zip folder, too...
Its score on the 7-Zip compression benchmark is roughly the same as that of the Core i9-9900K and noticeably better than the Core i7-8700K, though not quite as impressive as its Ryzen 9 and Threadripper siblings.
Automatic Overclocking
As mentioned earlier, the Ryzen Master utility makes it easy to overclock the Ryzen 7 3700X with just a few clicks.
Using the auto-overclocking feature and setting everything to the maximum limits, I was able to achieve an All Cores Cinebench R15 score of...
