AMD Ryzen 7 7700X review: Performance that’s great but a price that isn’t - Ars Technica

2 years ago 50
 Performance that’s large  but a terms  that isn’t

Shortly aft our reappraisal of the Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 9 7950X were published precocious past month, AMD sent america a container containing the different 2 members of the Ryzen 7000 motorboat family: the $400 Ryzen 7 7700X, and the $550 Ryzen 9 7900X.

Absent a six-core subordinate of the household successful the $200 range, AMD's eight-core, 16-thread processors usually correspond a saccharine spot successful the lineup—great gaming show without being overkill and capable cores to grip reasonably dense nonrecreational workloads similar photograph and video editing and rendering without feeling slow.

That's inactive existent of the 7700X, which handily outspeeds the six-core 7600X and costs $50 little than the archetypal 8-core subordinate of the Ryzen 5000 household did a mates of years ago. Right now, it has 2 problems. The archetypal is that, similar the different Zen 4 CPUs, it requires a important concern beyond the $400 that you'll walk connected the CPU itself successful the signifier of a pricey caller motherboard and DDR5 RAM that's inactive rather a spot much costly than DDR4. The 2nd is that its out-of-the-box powerfulness settings aren't ideal—with a small tuning, the processor tin tally a small cooler and devour little powerfulness portion delivering akin results. Here's what we found.

On powerfulness settings

In our reappraisal of the Ryzen 7600X and 7950X, we spent immoderate clip explaining the value of processor powerfulness settings and however they enactment otherwise (and are advertised differently) successful Intel's and AMD's platforms. In short: a CPU that is allowed to devour much powerfulness volition mostly get enactment done faster, but it volition besides tally hotter. And particularly arsenic you spell up the performance/power curve, the show improvements usually aren't proportionate to the magnitude of other powerfulness used. Especially for tasks that tin usage each of your CPU cores astatine once, this tin person a large interaction connected powerfulness efficiency.

65 W TDP (AM5) 105 W TDP (AM5) 170 W TDP (AM5)
PPT (W) 88 142 230
TDC (A) 75 110 160
EDC (A) 150 170 225

AMD besides has an "Eco mode" diagnostic that it has included successful its Ryzen Master performance-tuning software, and which it is pushing makers of AM5 motherboards to see arsenic an enactment successful their BIOSes. Eco mode automates the process of dropping chips down to their next-lowest TDP level—170 W chips tin beryllium dropped down to 105 W, and 105 W chips tin beryllium dropped down to 65 W. (To comparison AMD's TDP levels to Intel's basal powerfulness figures, multiply immoderate fixed TDP worth by astir 1.35 and you'll get its existent maximum sustained powerfulness depletion level successful watts.)

Like the Ryzen 5 7600X, the 7700X has a default TDP level of 105 W. We tested it astatine this powerfulness level to get a consciousness of however AMD intends the spot to perform, and besides astatine the Eco mode settings to spot however its behaviour changes (the 7600X really performed astir identically successful its banal and Eco modes, though we suspected that the 7700X's 2 further cores would really request the other powerfulness to scope highest performance). When we acceptable it to the 170 W TDP level, immoderate of our tests became excessively unstable to run, truthful we didn't trial however the CPU mightiness respond if fixed much power.

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