AMD Ryzen 7 7700 Review
PROS
- Decent performance for the price
- Relatively low power consumption
- Capable stock cooler in the box
CONS
- Outpaced by recent Intel competitors due to core count
- Priced slightly too high
- Weak integrated graphics
AMD RYZEN 7 7700 SPECS
Core Count: 8
Thread Count: 16
Base Clock Frequency: 3.8 GHz
ALL SPECS
AMD's Ryzen 7 7700 ($329) processor is a fine CPU with a decent stock cooler and fast-enough performance, but can it compete with Intel's latest "Raptor Lake" 13th Generation chips? At launch, AMD’s Ryzen 7000-series processors were exceptional and exciting. For a hot minute, the Ryzen 9 7950X was the world’s fastest consumer processor, and the gains over the previous generation were impressive. This all made the new Ryzen 7000-series chips revolutionary at launch.
But the market changed quickly when Intel's Raptor Lake processors arrived. Their better performance and lower prices have undermined, to an extent, the appeal of AMD's Ryzen 7000-series chips. While the AMD Ryzen 7 7700 is quite the capable performer, thanks to the new redlines that Intel has drawn, it's not as fast as we would expect for the price, and can't quite keep up with its 13th Gen pricing counterpart: an overclock able Core i5 stocked with more cores, thanks to Intel's addition of Efficient cores (E-cores). Still, its inclusion of a good stock cooler (which the rival Core i5-13600K lacks) makes it a viable pick in its price range, if you want to go with the AMD AM5 platform.
The Design: Zen 4, Priced Closer to the Floor
Like all AMD Ryzen 7000-series processors, the AMD Ryzen 7 7700 utilizes the Zen 4 microarchitecture. We covered this architecture in more detail in our review of the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, and we recommend you check out that review if you are interested in learning more about Zen 4.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
In brief, Zen 4 is AMD’s latest high-performance microarchitecture. It continues to use chiplets, just like previous iterations of the Zen architecture, but it shows improved performance per clock. It also helps that Zen 4 processors can run at higher clock speeds, which, coupled with the increase in IPC, results in an average of a 29% performance increase over "Zen 3"-based Ryzen 5000-series processors. All Ryzen 7000-series processors are built on TSMC’s 5nm manufacturing process.
