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.

Unboxing and Photography

The Ryzen 7 5700X comes in a compact paperboard box featuring the same brushed metal look we saw on other Ryzen 5000 processors. A small cutout on the side shows the actual processor inside the package. Note that the Ryzen 7 5700X is not boxed with a cooler.


The processor looks like any conventional AMD CPU with a large IHS dominating the top and a 1,331-pin micro-PGA as the bottom. The whole processor die is made in Taiwan at TSMC.


The Ryzen 7 5700X uses the same Socket AM4 as other Ryzens, so there's a huge selection of compatible coolers.

Test Setup

• All applications, games, and processors are tested with the drivers and hardware listed below—no performance results were recycled between test systems.
• All games and applications are tested using the same version.
• All games are set to their highest quality setting unless indicated otherwise.

Super Pi

SuperPi is one of the most popular benchmarks with overclockers and tweakers. It has been used in world-record competitions since forever. It is a purely single-threaded CPU test that calculates Pi to a large number of digits—32 million for our testing. Released in 1995, it only supports x86 floating-point instructions and thus makes for a good test for single-threaded legacy application performance.

wPrime

While SuperPi focuses on calculating Pi, wPrime tackles another mathematical problem: finding prime numbers. It uses Newton's Method for that. One of the design goals for wPrime was to engineer it so that it can make the best use of all cores and threads available on a processor.

On Alder Lake, wPrime runs on the E-cores due to an issue with the scheduler/Thread Director. That's why the scores are so low.

Rendering — Cinebench

Cinebench is one of the most popular modern CPU benchmarks because it is built around the renderer of Maxon's Cinema 4D software. Both AMD and Intel have been showing this performance test at various public events, making it almost an industry standard. Using Cinebench R23, we test both single-threaded and multi-threaded performance.