On paper, AMD’s Ryzen 7 7700X seems ordinary, but it offers a generational leap in performance.
AT FIRST GLANCE, the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X is the safest option of AMD’s new Zen 4 lineup. It’s an 8-core CPU with 16 threads, coming in at just under $400 and, specs-wise, nothing out of the ordinary. Compared with the other chips in the lineup, such as the Ryzen 9 7950X, which has the highest thread count of any chip out there and is cheaper and speedier than its predecessor, and the Ryzen 5 7600X, which is the highest-clocked mainstream CPU around at just under $299, the Ryzen 7 7700X begins to look like it may be a bit of a gap filler.
But a gap filler it most certainly isn’t. Earlier in the year, AMD made a huge deal when it crammed a ludicrous amount of L3 cache into the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, making that chip the fastest AMD gaming CPU ever. However, fast forward to the present day, and (spoiler!) the Ryzen 7 7700X outperforms it in the majority of games. So there is certainly more to this chip than meets the eye.
Essentially, the Ryzen 7 7700X replaces the Ryzen 7 5800X in the AMD hierarchy. As mentioned above, this chip packs in eight all-new Zen 4 cores, and 16 threads, while offering an all-core frequency of 5.15GHz straight out of the box. That’s some healthy stats right there—we even measured it running at 5.55GHz under single-core loads. This is last-gen overclocking performance from a stock Zen 4 chip. It contains the same 105W TDP as the Ryzen 7 5800X and 5800X3D, but its 5nm compute and 6nm I/O dies deliver efficiency improvements.