AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D review: A slower 7800X3D, but not necessarily a cheaper one

The 7700X3D is one of the most efficient gaming CPUs on the market, even offering more performance per watt than the 7800X3D. It’s highly optimised for that workload. Outside of games, power consumption remains very low, often below 80W even in all-out heavily-threaded tasks. Performance also slips, however, leading to worse efficiency.

Starting with raw power consumption, the 7700X3D averaged just 74W during a multithreaded Cinebench 2024 run, matching the 7600X3D. Again, the 120W rated TDP here is interesting, as the 7700X3D isn’t pushing past what the 7600X3D demands. In Blender and Handbrake, we can see the two chips in lockstep, as well.

The 7700X3D justifies its higher TDP a bit more in Linpack, where it drew 74W to the 7600X3D’s 65W. It’s worth highlighting our single-threaded y-cruncher pass, as well. In this test, the 7700X3D drew less power than the 7600X3D.

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Outside of heavy workloads, we also measure idle and active idle (YouTube playback) power, and the 7700X3D does surprisingly well in these tests. As you can see from our two Zen 3 chips, AMD’s idle power consumption increased massively with a switch to a DDR5 platform with Zen 4. The 7700X3D pulls that idle power consumption back significantly, even compared to the 7600X3D and 7700X3D.

Turning to efficiency, you can see that the 7700X3D remains one of the most efficient options out of our test pool, though the margins are much thinner. In games, the X3D stack blows everything else away, but in Handbrake, we can see the 9700X offering similar efficiency. More interesting is the 270K Plus. The 7700X3D is 33% more efficient in our Handbrake x256 encode, but the two CPUs are in completely different performance classes.

When there’s such a wide disparity in application performance, these efficiency numbers can look a bit skewed. Cinebench provides a good example of that. The 7700X3D was nearly 40% more efficient than the 270K Plus, but the 270K Plus is around two and a half times as fast in this test. The 270K Plus and 9800X3D offer identical efficiency metrics, on the other hand.

A clearer way to visualize that is with a scatterplot. You can see in our Blender scatterplot, for example, a tight grouping of AMD’s processors around the bottom left of the chart, noting great efficiency but weaker performance. There are a few CPUs that hit an efficiency sweet spot, most notably the 9800X3D and 250K Plus.

Test Setup

We use a frozen test image and nearly identical test benches across the platforms in our pool. You can see the exact configuration we used for testing below. All of our tests are run on the same stack, including the OS build, chipset drivers, GPU drivers, and application versions. Particularly in game testing, where new updates are released constantly, we retest every chip in our test pool to validate our results, opting for the latest data for each CPU.

Our AMD and Intel test images never mix, so there aren’t remnants of AMD drivers on an Intel platform or vice versa. Across both vendors, we enable EXPO/XMP, turn off Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), and enable ReBAR. We also don’t enable any motherboard-specific optimizations, such as Gigabyte’s X3D Turbo Mode, as that adds an uncontrolled variable to our testing (and can sometimes even hurt performance).

On that thread, we also explicitly disable any performance profiles or optimizations that push the processor outside of warrantied operating specifications. That means running with Intel’s default performance profile (enforced power limits) and disabling PBO. Both push the processor out of the warrantied specifications.

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