AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D review

If you have an AMD AM4 machine, there's pretty much only one CPU that's worth considering if you want the best for gaming—the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Except when AMD launched the Ryzen 7 5700X3D back in January of this year, you were suddenly given a tricky choice: do you go all out and get the brilliant but pricey 5800X3D or do you save yourself a fair bit of cash and get the slower 5700X3D. Well, that's precisely the conundrum we're going to solve in this review.

The Ryzen 7 5700X3D is almost exactly the same processor as the 5800X3D, the only difference being that it has lower base and boost clocks. You're still getting eight Zen 3 cores, 16 threads, a TDP of 105 W, and a massive 96 MB of L3 cache. Where the 5800X3D has a base clock of 3.4 GHz and a boost of 4.5 GHz, the 5700X3D knocks those down to 3.0 and 4.1 GHz respectively.

That basically means the 5700X3D is somewhere between 9% and 12% slower than the 5800X3D, and pretty much any CPU-focused benchmark will show this.

However, I was far more interested in examining whether the 5700X3D is a nice upgrade for any PC gamer with a four or six-core AM4 Ryzen PC, after chatting to AMD about the longevity of that socket a few months ago. Depending on what retailer you head over to, there can be as much as a $200 difference between the 5700X3D and 5800X3D, and that's a lot of money which can be spent on getting a better GPU, for example.

So to that end, I've taken a four-core Zen 2-powered Ryzen 3 4100, a six-core Ryzen 5 5600X, and a Ryzen 7 5700X3D, and put them all through a veritable mountain of tests and benchmarks to see how suitable the 5700X3D is as an upgrade. You might think the results are a foregone conclusion but, as it turns out, it's not quite as clear cut as you might think.

Enough jibber-jabber, let's see the test results! First up is the usual gamut of CPU-focused benchmarks that will typically run for any new processor. I'm only showing figures for the three Ryzens, as CPU testing is normally done by