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AMD Ryzen 7 3700X review: the Digital Foundry verdict

Intel is faster for gaming, but does AMD provide the better overall product?

Richard Leadbetter avatar
Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry
Updated on
54 comments

Ryzen has proven to be a disruptive force, making six and eight core processors a standard in the mainstream PC space while redefining the high-end desktop market. It's shaken up value and features not just in terms of physical CPUs but also in the surrounding chipset and mainboard ecosystem too. However, as impressive as it is, it has always had a performance deficit against Intel in gaming - something the second generation of chips couldn't address. The Ryzen 7 2700X scores in this piece would effectively mirror what a first-gen Ryzen 7 would achieve fully overclocked, and in our carefully selected test suite, it's not just 1080p gaming that is off the pace - 1440p had a tangible deficit too. The third generation Ryzen doesn't fully address the gap in performance but the progress made by AMD is very impressive.

In the latest Core i7 vs Ryzen 7 face-off, the 3700X is doing things that I've not seen in prior benchmark head-to-heads. First of all, Intel used to win in all of my gaming tests, often by dramatic margins - but there are results even at 1080p where Ryzen closes the gap to a few points, and even some benchmarks or specific in-game workloads where Ryzen pulls ahead. Secondly, older Ryzens could be prone to arbitrary reduced performance or stutters that simply didn't happen on the Intel side. All instances of stutter I recorded on second-gen Ryzen are either gone completely or significantly reduced. Intel is still faster and/or smoother in most tests, but the boost delivered by the 3700X is certainly enough to make the processor well worth consideration - and that's before we factor in aspects external to game performance.

First of all, Ryzen's general capabilities for rendering, productivity and other non-gaming tasks have improved. The architecture has always been impressive for jobs like h.264 video encoding, but now it's faster against the Core i7, even though it has around a 300MHz deficit in core frequency. On top of that, the improvement seen in HEVC encoding (around 45 per cent better than second-gen Ryzen) suggests that AMD's work in improving AVX instruction performance as also paid off - in our 4K encoding test, Ryzen 7 beating Core i7 is unprecedented.

And then there's the overall package itself. The Ryzen 7 3700X is more power efficient than the Core i7 9700K and it doesn't require extreme cooling to offer optimal performance. In fact, the supplied Wraith Prism cooler is effectively overkill for the thermal output of the chip, and will contain the extra heat generated by overclocking (though this is limited somewhat as you won't get more than a couple of hundred megahertz extra out of the chip). In contrast, the Core i7 9700K doesn't ship with a cooler - but its overclocking headroom is a bit more significant, though not game-changingly so.

Cover image for YouTube videoRyzen 7 3700X vs Core i7 9700K: Can AMD Challenge Intel in Gaming?
The gaming crown stays with Intel, but weighing up its raw speed advantages against all of the extra costs vs an AMD system is challenging.Watch on YouTube

Fast memory of at least 3000MHz is recommended, and it's swiftly becoming a standard in the marketplace, and we're lucky in that AMD allows for overclockable memory to run on both high-end and mid-range motherboards, while at the same time, the use of the AM4 socket means that the 3700X should run just fine in the vast majority of existing boards out there. On top of that, the inclusion of PCI Express 4.0 support on boards using the X570 chipset means that future graphics cards and - more importantly - faster storage are now viable on a mainstream platform. PCIe 4.0 won't have a dramatic impact on gaming, but the fact that Intel's mid-range boards don't allow users to run their RAM at speeds beyond the chip specification is something that really has to change. If we can find a game that loses seven per cent of performance on an i7 9700K dropping from 3600MHz to 3000MHz, what would that drop be on a non-Z board where we're limited to 2666MHz memory bandwidth?

And finally, we need to talk about price. The Ryzen 7 3700X is £320/$330 up against the £379/$409 Core i7 9700K. Prices on the Intel chip are dropping in the US, but in the UK the price deficit as things stand pays goes a long way towards buying a 2x8GB 3200MHz DDR4 memory kit - and remember, all the cooling you'll need is already in the box and you won't have to pay over the odds for motherboard to run that memory at full frequency. Intel is faster in games (sometimes appreciably so, often not by that much) and it can overclock to 5.0GHz - the question is whether those advantages are worth what is - in real terms, system-wide - a big price premium.

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X analysis

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