With the Ryzen 7 5700X, AMD is finally giving us an affordable eight-core CPU—this is what enthusiasts wanted since 2020. Unfortunately, AMD waited until close to the end of the lifetime of this current processor generation, so making a big splash is hard. It seems the Ryzen 7 5700X is targeted at Intel's Alder Lake lineup, which established new competitiveness for the blue team. Internally, the Ryzen 7 5700X is nearly identical to the Ryzen 7 5800X—same Zen 3 Vermeer multi-chip module design approach, same cache size, PCIe 4.0 support, same everything; the only difference is that base clock speed is 400 MHz and boost clock speed 100 MHz lower, and the TDP is 65 W, as opposed to 105 W on the 5800X.

The AMD Ryzen 7 5700G has been on the market for almost a year, but it's based on the Cezanne APU silicon, which focuses much more on integrated graphics and only offers PCI-Express 3.0 for discrete graphics cards, and the L3 cache is just half as big. Those two limitations cost quite a bit of gaming performance, which makes the Cezanne processors less desirable for gamers. They are a great option for office PCs. For gaming, Vermeer is what you want, and it powers all the Ryzen 5800 and 5900 processors.

Averaged over our whole application test suite, we find the Ryzen 7 5700X 10% faster than the Ryzen 5 5600X and 8% behind the Ryzen 7 5800X. Even the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is only 6% faster in applications because of its lower clock speed. Intel's Core i5-12600K, the strongest competitor for the 5700X, is 5% faster even though it only offers six P-cores with 12 threads, but it gets support from four additional E-cores. Intel's own "true" 8-core, the 12700K, is a whopping 20% faster, but also considerably more expensive than the 5700X. Compared to the previous Zen 2 generation, the 5700X is able to match the much higher positioned Ryzen 9 3900X—very impressive. Intel's last-generation flagship, the Core "i9"-11900K is less than 5% faster than the Ryzen "7" positioned 5700X—another win for AMD I'd say.

Thanks to the amazing power of Zen 3 paired with the large L3 cache of "Vermeer," gaming performance is great, too. At 1080p, the Ryzen 7 5700X is faster than any processor Intel has released outside of the newest Alder Lake CPUs. Compared to the Ryzen 7 5800X, the performance difference is a tiny 1.5%—nothing you'd ever notice subjectively. The Intel Core i5-12600K is 5% faster than the 5700X despite only offering a 6+4-core configuration; the true 8-core 12700K is 7.5% faster, which is still not a huge difference. As always, as you dial up the resolution, the bottleneck shifts from the CPU to the GPU, which means differences are getting smaller and smaller. At 4K, the deltas are so small that there's no real difference between all higher-end CPUs in our lineup. Actually, it might even make sense to opt for a more affordable model, like the Ryzen 5 5600 or Core i5-12400F to save money on the processor that can go towards a faster graphics card, which will net you bigger FPS gains overall.

Just like other Ryzen 5000 processors, the Ryzen 7 5700X is very energy efficient, beating every single Intel CPU in single-threaded and multi-threaded efficiency. It seems the lower clock speeds and TDP rating enabled running the new eight-core model at lower voltage, which improves energy efficiency and reduces heat output. Power supply requirements are minimal; except for gaming, we always measured less than 150 W overall system power draw. When gaming with a RTX 3080, you're looking at around 525 W, which is pretty nice considering the graphics card is responsible for around 350 W of that.

Just like on the other Zen 3 CPUs, overclocking on the Ryzen 7 5700X is easy since you can freely adjust the CPU multiplier, overclock as far as the silicon goes, try any DDR4 memory speed, and change the voltages. Manual overclocking yielded an all-core overclock of 4.5 GHz, which is 100 MHz lower than the maximum single-thread boost at out of the box settings. This makes manual (all-core) overclocking a suboptimal choice unless you run highly threaded apps all day. In those, we saw noticeable gains that come at the cost of a small performance loss in single-threaded workloads. For the 5700X, the better way to overclock is using Precision Boost Overclock (PBO). We did a full test run at "PBO Enabled, All limits removed, Overdrive Scalar x10, Max Boost Override +200 MHz, Curve Optimizer off." Activating this takes a few minutes and is guaranteed to give you a stable system. We gained 7% in applications, which is enough to close the gap to the 5800X and 5800X3D. The increase in power consumption and heat was noticeable, but still very easy to cool. If you want to go beyond that, use Curve Optimizer to further tweak things, but that's a bit more time consuming.

Priced at $265 right now, the 5700X has come down quite a bit from its $299 launch MSRP, which suggests that competition in this market segment is fierce and people weren't willing to spend $300 for the 5700X. While $265 is a good offer for an 8-core Zen 3 processor, the 5700X still feels a bit expensive because the Ryzen 7 5800X is down to only $275 right now. The extra $10 (or 3.7%) gain you 8.3% in application performance, which is definitely worth it. Gaming performance at 1080p is only 3% higher. I'd still buy the 5800X if the difference is only $10 as the higher resale value will eventually make up for it. Originally, AMD promised to include a boxed cooler with every 65 W CPU, but no cooler is included with the 65 W 5700X—that could have been a way to offset the cost and make the difference to the Ryzen 7 5800X bigger. The strongest competitor to the Ryzen 7 5700X is no doubt the Intel Alder Lake Core i5-12600K. While it technically only has six big cores and four E-cores, overall performance is really good in both gaming and apps, better than the Ryzen 7 5700X at a few dollars less. Intel's platform cost is a bit higher, but I still feel like a lot of people will end up picking the Alder Lake configuration because AMD isn't the clear winner in this matchup. Against the Core i7-12700K ($350), the Ryzen 7 5700X has a much stronger position because it's almost $100 more affordable, but the Intel CPU is quite a lot faster. An interesting option for owners of older computers is upgrading an older Ryzen 1st-generation system with the Ryzen 7 5700X to turn it into a formidable gaming machine. AMD recently released BIOS updates with support for Zen 3 for all older Socket AM4 motherboards, so all you need is a BIOS flash and you can plop the new CPU into your existing system. If I'd be looking at such an upgrade, I'd very much also consider the Ryzen 5 5600 as an upgrade option, which is only $185 and not that much slower in gaming.