Introduction
We covered AMD’s Ryzen 3000 CPU series when it launched early last month. If you aren’t familiar with our coverage of the series, you should start with our coverage of the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X as your primer. The only CPU we tested specifically was AMD’s flagship Ryzen 9 3900X CPU. Today, we are looking at the Ryzen 7 3700X. There were always plans to review more of AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series from the start, so we apologize for the late coverage.
Unfortunately, reviewing these CPU’s has been problematic due to the various teething issues with the X570 platform and the boost clock issues with these CPU’s, this proved to be much more difficult than one would have expected. This is the reason for the delay in coverage. We wanted to gather as much information as possible, rather than just running benchmarks and saying a CPU was or wasn’t a good buy. Like many things, it isn’t quite that simple.
For enthusiasts, the Ryzen 7 3700X may represent the best overall value in the product stack. It runs cooler than alternatives and the more expensive 3800X, demands little power and provides 8c/16t for productivity and gaming. Generally speaking, games can’t leverage processors with more than eight threads. As a result, the Ryzen 9 3900X and 3950X CPUs aren’t much help in the gaming department. Certainly, if all your doing is playing games these processors do not have much to offer outside of potentially higher single-core boost clocks.
AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series CPU’s have been generally well-received by reviewers and enthusiasts. AMD’s Zen 2 architecture provides excellent performance in both gaming and general productivity. With the massive range of socket AM4 motherboards available, there are platform options available for a wide range of budgets. CPU pricing keeps the Ryzen 3000 series very competitive with Intel’s offerings, generally providing more CPU cores and threads for the same or less money.