Introduction

We have with us for review the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X eight-core processor. Based on the "Zen 3" architecture and popular AMD Socket AM4, the Ryzen 7 5700X is part of the company's Spring/Summer desktop processor product-stack refresh to a series that's been around for almost a year and a half now. Much like the Ryzen 7 5800X. the Ryzen 7 5700X is an 8-core/16-thread processor, but with slightly lower clock speeds and a more affordable price, of course.

The Ryzen 7 5700X succeeds popular SKUs from AMD, such as the Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 7 3700X. The Ryzen 7 3700X in particular outsold the Ryzen 7 3800X thanks to its $50–70 lower price. This is probably why AMD didn't debut the Ryzen 5000 series with the Ryzen 7 5700X and instead released the $400 Ryzen 7 5800X, which had near free reign until the Summer of 2021, when AMD refreshed the lineup with the $360 Ryzen 7 5700G 8-core/16-thread APU marketed as a Ryzen 7 3700X-successor. Strangely, the company designated that role to the Ryzen 7 5700X in 2022.



The Ryzen 7 5700X is vastly different from the Ryzen 7 5700G even though both are 8-core "Zen 3" chips. The Ryzen 7 5700G is based on the 7 nm "Cezanne" monolithic silicon, which has that impressive Radeon Vega 8 iGPU, but only 16 MB of L3 cache shared among the CPU cores. The Ryzen 7 5700X, on the other hand, is based on the "Vermeer" multi-chip module, with a standard "Zen 3" chiplet that has 32 MB of L3 cache. What's more, "Vermeer" features PCI-Express Gen 4, while "Cezanne" only features Gen 3—quite relevant when pairing the processor with a discrete graphics card.

As we mentioned earlier, the Ryzen 7 5700X is practically identical to the Ryzen 7 5800X except for the slightly lower clock speeds. The Ryzen 7 5800X features 3.80 GHz clock speeds that boost up to 4.70 GHz, whereas the new Ryzen 7 5700X comes with 3.40 GHz clocks and 4.60 GHz boost. These 100–200 MHz clock speeds aren't the only difference as the Ryzen 7 5700X has a TDP rating of 65 W, whereas the Ryzen 7 5800X TDP is 105 W. On paper, the added power limits should give the Ryzen 7 5800X the ability to sustain boost frequencies better and offer higher overclocking headroom.

AMD launched the Ryzen 7 5700X at a list price of $299, but it's currently available for $265, which isn't that much cheaper than the Ryzen 7 5800X that's heavily discounted to $275 at the moment. Since Alder Lake released, retailers are aggressively pricing Ryzen 5000-series processors, which means price differences are quite small on some days. In this review, we tell you if it's worth saving that money.