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It’s surprising we didn’t see the 7700X3D sooner. AMD has told us that the 7700X3D (and the re-released 5800X3D) are both targeted releases to ease the burden of high DDR5 prices, but just like with the 5800X3D, it feels like AMD could’ve done more to ease that burden. The 7800X3D has already approached the MSRP of the 7700X3D with sales, and the 7600X3D has clearly come out on top as the value-focused option among AMD’s Zen 4 X3D CPUs.
It’s a tough pricing situation regardless, a consequence of continuing to bin and release various versions of largely similar silicon. Still, the 7700X3D has a pricing window. That window just doesn’t exist at $330. At $300, it would be more competitive with the rest of the market, and at $280, it’d be a difficult CPU to contend with. At $250 like we saw the 5700X3D, it’d be a no-brainer. $330 is the maximum price where you might be able to justify the 7700X3D, and that’d only be if you completely ignore CPUs going on sale and wipe out Arrow Lake Refresh from your memory.
The two CPUs that remain the most potent competition are Intel’s 270K Plus and the 7600X3D, not the 7800X3D. On sale, the 7800X3D is the better buy, full stop, but if the 7700X3D is targeting gamers that want to stretch their dollar the furthest, the 7600X3D offers a lot more value.
You can see that clearly in our gaming geomean. The 7600X3D is just 2% slower than the 7700X3D on average, and even in extreme situations, the performance gap between them never approaches double digits. The 7800X3D and 7700X3D offer a similar value at list price, which is about half a frame per dollar. Meanwhile, the 7600X3D offers three-quarters of a frame per dollar.
The value isn’t bad with the 7700X3D, make no mistake. It’s in line with the 270K Plus and 7800X3D, but it shouldn’t be. It’s a value-focused alternative to the 7800X3D, but it doesn’t provide much additional value. At around $280, it’d shoot up in the value rankings and become much easier to justify.
On the other end of the spectrum is Intel’s 270K Plus. It’s 5% slower in average gaming performance than the 7700X3D, but it makes up for that small gap with more than twice the multithreaded performance of the 7700X3D. Even if you only commonly use one non-gaming application, the performance uplift of the 270K Plus is large enough to justify a small hit to gaming performance.
With most 3D V-Cache CPUs, the drop-in application performance is easy to justify, even if the boost in gaming performance can’t keep pace. You buy an X3D chip primarily for playing games, not compiling code, running Fourier Transforms, or building a web server. Here, however, the margins in gaming are some of the smallest we’ve seen between X3D and non-X3D CPUs, while the margins in applications are some of the largest.
There’s three paths away from the 7700X3D right now. The 270K Plus offers a much more well-rounded CPU around the same price. The 7600X3D delivers the gaming value that the 7700X3D is sorely lacking, and the 7800X3D is only slightly faster in games, but it’s also only slightly more expensive. Hopefully we’ll see the 7700X3D drop to between $250 and $280. At that price, it’s a CPU worth considering. At its current price, it’s hard not to go with another option.
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