Introduction

AMD's Ryzen 7 2700 is the "affordable" eight-core option from AMD in its second-generation Ryzen processor family. It succeeds the Ryzen 7 1700, which was the most successful Ryzen 7 SKU from a commercial standpoint due to its price and the fact that it includes a cooler. The first-generation Ryzen 7 series had one SKU too many, with the Ryzen 7 1700 occupying a $329 (at launch) price point, the 1700X at $399, and the top-dog 1800X at $499. The company condensed the lineup for its second generation to just two SKUs, the Ryzen 7 2700X at the performance-end and the Ryzen 7 2700 (non-X) at the "efficiency" end.

The Ryzen 7 2700 we review today is based on AMD's new 12 nm "Pinnacle Ridge" silicon, which, for all intents and purposes, is AMD's answer to Intel's 8th generation Core "Coffee Lake" processor family. This silicon implements the company's "Zen+" architecture, which is an incremental update to "Zen" rather than a major architectural revision. The 12 nanometer process allows AMD to lower voltages, and use it to crank up clock speeds. It also presents the company with an opportunity to improve the on-die "SenseMI" logic with updates to Precision Boost and XFR that more efficiently increase clock speeds of the processor in response to multi-threaded workloads.



There is a huge TDP gap between the Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 7 2700. While the 2700X is rated at 105 W, the 2700 has its TDP rated at "just" 65 W despite their clock speeds not being all that far apart. The nominal clock of this chip is 3.20 GHz, which is 200 MHz faster than the 1700, and 500 MHz slower on paper than the 3.70 GHz of the 2700X. The boost frequencies aren't that far apart - 4.10 GHz of the 2700 as compared to the 4.30 GHz of the 2700X. What this processor lacks is XFR 2.0 in the form the 2700X has. Some of that feature remains, but it only adds a marginal amount of clock speed over the boost frequency, if your cooling is up to the job.



Interestingly, the clock speeds of the AMD Ryzen 7 2700 are lower than those of the performance-segment Ryzen 5 2600X with two fewer cores - 3.60 GHz nominal, with 4.20 GHz boost and full-fledged XFR 2.0 - which means less-parallelized software, such as games, could benefit from the higher clock speeds of the 2600X right off the bat. This leads us to wonder what the target market of the 2700 may be given its $299 price, which makes it $30 cheaper than the 2700X and $70 pricier than the 2600X. Perhaps, it's creative professionals looking for a well-priced machine capable of running multi-threaded productivity software, or (and this is a big OR) PC enthusiasts who want to take advantage of its unlocked multiplier to push it to the performance levels of the 2700X or beyond, while saving $30.

In this review, we are taking a close look at the $299 Ryzen 7 2700, at both its natural clock speeds and with it manually overclocked to 4.00 GHz. This 8-core/16-thread chip has nearly half the TDP rating of the 2700X because of reduced nominal clock speeds of 3.20 GHz and a boost of 4.10 GHz. It features 512 KB of dedicated L2 cache per core and 16 MB of shared L3 cache. The processor box includes AMD's 95 W-capable Wraith Spire cooling solution.

This review uses our updated test suite for processors in 2018, which includes the latest BIOS updates with microcode fixes for recent security issues, Windows 10 Fall Creators Update with all updates, and new software tests and games, which are all using the latest versions, too.