Final Thoughts
You could say the Ryzen 7 3700X is a follow up or successor to last year’s flagship the Ryzen 7 2700X. Although you also have the Ryzen 7 3800X, which runs faster, but lets focus on the Ryzen 7 3700X. It is an 8-core, 16-thread processor that has a base clock of 3.6 GHz and boosts up to 4.4 GHz. If you look at both the single-core and multi-core performance compared to the Ryzen 7 2700X it is vastly improved. To give you some numbers in Cinebench R20 Multi-Core it is 21.09% better, how about single-core? It is 16.01% better. In the X265 benchmark it encodes 23% faster. So you have some nice overall performance.
With its $329 price-tag the Ryzen 7 3700X slots in to compete with Intel’s Core i7-9700K. Unfortunately we did not have one of those on-hand to test. We did however test the Core i9-9900K, which performed slightly better in most of our tests. But you have to remember that is a $488 part. The Core i7-9700K is an 8-core, 8-thread part so we can assume that the Ryzen 7 3700X would beat it in multi-core tests and possibly even single-core. The amount of performance that you are getting for $329 is quite impressive, especially considering AMD launched the Ryzen 7 2700X last year for $329.
We do have to mention gaming performance, as many of you are going to be building your system specifically for gaming. Both the Core i9-9900K and Core i7-8700K did beat the Ryzen 7 3700X in most of our gaming tests, but not by all that much. In real-world scenarios you really are not going to notice the 3-8 FPS difference.
Overclocking Ryzen processors has not changed all that much and is quite easy. We did all of our overclocking in our motherboard’s BIOS, but you can also overclock using the Ryzen Master software in Windows. All we had to do was change 3 settings to achieve our overclock of 4.4 GHz across all 8 cores. I also expect overclocking and stability to improve as the X570 platform matures. We’ve already seen 2 BIOS updates to our specific motherboard since it came in about a week ago.
Another thing that definitely has to be said is the amount of X570 motherboard available today at launch. Every major brand has boards ranging from entry-level to the high-end ready and available today. Also these boards have one thing that Z390 boards do not, PCI-Express 4.0. You’ll see storage devices take advantage of this first, but if you are building a brand new system today the X570 ecosystem makes so much more sense than Z390. And keep in mind we won’t see anything new from Intel till next year.
If you are looking to build a new system and you are budgeting around $300-$400 on a processor the Ryzen 7 3700X is a solid choice, and it makes a lot more sense than the Core i7-9700K. Now if you are on 2nd generation Ryzen I don’t really see a need to upgrade, and remember you can slot your 2nd gen chip into a new swanky X570 board if you want to.
Right now the Ryzen 7 3700X is selling at our favorite online retailer for $329. Overall ThinkComputers gives the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X a 9 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award!
Pros:
– Great performance over the previous generation
– Very close performance to the Intel Core i9-9900K
– AMD Gamecache
– Wraith Prism RGB CPU cooler included
– Same price as the Ryzen 7 2700X launched for last year
– X570 motherboard ecosystem and PCIe 4.0
– Lots of performance in a 65W package
Cons:
– Does not beat Intel at gaming
