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AMD’s X3D chips are built first and foremost for gaming, with only niche (and expensive) chips like the recent Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 pulling double duty in gaming and productivity applications. The hindered clock speed of the 7700X3D means it struggles even moreso than the 7800X3D in lightly- and heavily-threaded applications, which is already an area of weakness.
In our multithreaded geomean, the 7800X3D is 6.9% ahead of the 7700X3D while the base Ryzen 7 7700X is 12.8% ahead. AMD’s latest non-X3D eight-core, the Ryzen 7 9700X, is around 13% ahead with its default 65W TDP and a massive 28% ahead in its 105W TDP mode. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D pushes things even further with a 37% lead.
Short of the Ryzen 5 7600X3D, which the 7700X3D leads by a clean 25%, AMD’s latest X3D chip is at the bottom of the pile for multithreaded performance, at least among our DDR5 offerings. The comparison isn’t great among AMD’s offerings, but it's far worse among Intel’s.
The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is 130% ahead, more than a 2X increase. We’re comparing radically different architectures and core counts, but the 270K Plus is leaps and bounds faster than the 7700X3D in multithreaded applications, and within 5% in games. Even the $220 Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is 70% ahead in our multithreaded geomean. The 7700X3D wins for gaming, even if its lead is small. But if you even just dabble in apps like Handbrake, Blender, and DaVinci Resolve, you’re giving up a lot of performance at this price with the 7700X3D.
The margins are always tighter in our single-threaded geomean, but the limited clock speed of the Ryzen 7 7700X3D means it ends up below every other DDR5 option in our test pool. The 7800X3D is 10% ahead, while the 9800X3D pushes ahead with a 25% lead. The base Ryzen 7 7700X also leads by a clean 20% margin.
In Intel’s camp, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is 42% ahead, while the 250K Plus is 33% faster. The Core i7-14700K and Ryzen 7 9700X are in lockstep, both beating out the 7700X3D by around 29%.
Single-threaded performance is especially limited on the 7700X3D, not only due to lower maximum boost clocks, but also the SRAM stacked on top of the CCD. It acts as an insulating layer between the CCD and IHS, giving you minimal headroom for large clock speed boosts on a single core, even with manual overclocking and robust cooling.
Rendering Benchmarks
In demanding rendering workloads like Cinebench, Blender, and POV-Ray, the 7700X3D struggles. The 4.5 GHz boost clock limits single-core performance, while the underlying Zen 4 architecture can’t scale up to AMD’s modern eight-core offerings. And, bringing Intel into the mix, strong single-core performance and Intel’s hybrid architecture with large core arrays allow Team Blue to sit near the top of the chart in most of our testing.
In Cinebench 2024, the 270K Plus was 135% faster than the 7700X3D in a multi-core render. The base 7700X, meanwhile, is 10% faster and the 9700X with its 105W TDP is 21% faster. Single-core performance shows big gaps, as well. The 7600X3D is faster than the 7700X3D with its higher boost clocks, while the 270K Plus offers around a 39% boost in performance.
There are even bigger gaps elsewhere. In POV-Ray, the 270K Plus is nearly three times as fast as the 7700X3D in the multi-core test. In Blender, the 7700X is 11% faster than the 7700X3D, and the 9700X 24% faster, in the Monster scene. And in V-Ray 6, even the $220 Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is 66% faster than the 7700X3D.
In heavily-threaded workloads, the 7700X3D and 7800X3D offer very similar performance, with a slight edge to the latter. We only see a big divergence between them in single-threaded workloads.
Encoding Benchmarks
Alongside rendering, our encoding benchmarks factor heavily into our geomean. We can also see a repeat here of what we saw in our rendering benchmarks, particularly among heavily-threaded video encoders like Handbrake. Across codecs, the 270K Plus is usually twice as fast (and sometimes more), while the non-X3D 9700X offers around a 30% boost depending on the codec. Compared to the 7800X3D, the 7700X3D is 7% slower with x265 and AV1.
In single-threaded audio encoding via LAME, the 7800X3D was nearly 9% faster than the 7700X3D, and that gap grows to nearly 10% in our extended LAME results.
Surprisingly, there’s a decent gap between the 7700X3D and 7800X3D in our image encoding/decoding benchmarks. In our multi-threaded JPEG-XL decode, the 7800X3D is 7% faster, while the 9700X is 26% faster. Similar margins appear in the encode.
Creator App Benchmarks
Creator applications like the Adobe suite and DaVinci Resolve are some of the most important for the 7700X3D; if you’re building a PC for gaming, the most likely non-gaming workload is some sort of video or photo editing application. These applications feature a ton of workloads spanning heavily-threaded and lightly-threaded tasks, so the margins between chips are much tighter.
Starting with Photoshop, AMD holds a strong position in this application across all of its CPUs, 7700X3D included. It matches the 14700K and closes in on the performance of the 270K Plus. The scales turn toward Intel in Premiere Pro, with the 270K Plus outperforming the 7700X3D by 9.5%. However, the 7800X3D is only a meager 1.9% ahead. We can see a similar situation in DaVinci Resolve.
Rounding out our tests is After Effects, where the 7800X3D is around 5% faster than the 7700X3D, and the 270K Plus is more than 30% faster.
Web and Office Benchmarks
General-purpose web and office workloads are usually lightly-threaded, so the 7700X3D struggles in these benchmarks. However, all of the CPUs in our test pool are more than capable of running these workloads, so although the 7700X3D often ends up near the bottom of the pile, the performance difference in real-world use isn't as big as the numbers would suggest.
In web-based workloads measured via WebXPRT, you can see the 7700X3D only manages to outclass AMD’s DDR4 options in our test pool, even falling short of the Core i7-12700K. Those single-core speeds really put a damper on performance here, though the extra two cores on the 7700X3D allowed it to achieve 15% better application start-up time than the 7600X3D in PCMark 10.
Microsoft Word and Outlook show similar performance differences, but the 7700X3D gains back some places in Excel and PowerPoint. A strong performance in Excel is important, but PowerPoint is tricky. As you can see from our results, the 7700X3D actually outperformed the 7800X3D; that’s just a consequence of PowerPoint not being a demanding application to run in most situations.
Chess Engines, Compilation, Compression, AVX, and Other Benchmarks
Rounding out our application tests are a series of highly specific workloads. We have a mixture of practical workloads like LLVM code compilation and compression/decompression with various algorithms, as well as some tests like various chess engines that drill down on IPC and applications like Optcarrot, which is an NES emulator looking at Ruby application performance.
Depending on what you plan to do with your PC, many of these workloads might not be applicable to you. Because of that, they aren’t included in our geomean, as some CPUs scale especially well in these niche workloads in a way that isn’t representative of overall performance.
SPEC Workstation 4 Benchmarks
Similarly, we run SPECWorkstation 4. We already run a subset of the tests included in SPEC in our own benchmark suite, but our full SPEC results give you numbers for the particular benchmark configuration used in the suite, as well as some additional scientific and security results.
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