AMD Ryzen 7 7700X review: great performance but low price

Shortly after our review of the Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 9 7950X was posted late last month, AMD sent us a box containing two other members of the Ryzen 7000 starter family: the $400 Ryzen 7 7700X and the $550 Ryzen 9 7900X.

In the absence of a six-core family member in the $200 range, AMD’s eight-core, 16-thread processors are usually a sweet spot in the lineup – great gaming performance with no frills and enough cores to handle fairly heavy professional workloads like photos and video. editing and rendering videos without feeling slowed down.

That’s still true for the 7700X, which easily outpaces the six-core 7600X and costs $50 less than the first 8-core member of the Ryzen 5000 family a couple of years ago. Now he has two problems. First, like other Zen 4 processors, it requires a significant investment beyond the $400 you’ll spend on the processor itself in the form of an expensive new motherboard and DDR5 RAM, which is still a bit more expensive than DDR4. Secondly, its stock power settings aren’t ideal – with a little tweaking, the processor can run a little slower and use less power while still delivering similar results. Here’s what we found.

In power settings

In our review of the Ryzen 7600X and 7950X, we spent some time explaining the importance of CPU power settings and how they work differently (and are advertised differently) on Intel and AMD platforms. Long story short: A CPU that is allowed to consume more power will generally do work faster, but it will also run hotter. And especially as you climb the performance/power curve, the performance improvements are usually out of proportion to the amount of extra power being used. Especially for tasks that can use all the CPU cores at the same time, this can have a big impact on power efficiency.

AMD also has an “Eco Mode”feature that it has included in its Ryzen Master performance tuning software and is pushing AM5 motherboard manufacturers to include as an option in their BIOSes. Eco Mode automates the process of reducing chip heat dissipation to the next minimum TDP level: 170W chips can be reduced to 105W, and 105W chips can be reduced to 65W. (To compare AMD’s TDP levels with Intel’s base power figures, multiply any given TDP by about 1.35 and you’ll get the actual maximum continuous power draw in watts.)

Like the Ryzen 5 7600X, the 7700X has a default TDP of 105W. We tested it at this power level to get an idea of ​​how AMD intends to handle the chip, and also in Eco mode settings to see how its behavior changes. (in fact, the 7600X performed almost identically in standard and economy modes, although we suspected that the 7700X’s two extra cores would actually need the extra power to achieve maximum performance). When we set it to 170W TDP, some of our benchmarks became too volatile to run, so we didn’t test how the CPU might respond to increased power.