AMD Ryzen 7 2700X Review: Redefining Ryzen

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Office And Productivity

Adobe Creative Cloud

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Adobe's Creative Cloud suite generally favors higher frequencies and IPC throughput, giving Intel an advantage. Still, Ryzen 7 2700X provides a nice balance of high clock rates and core count, yielding an impressive 13.8% speed-up in the overall score compared to AMD's tuned Ryzen 7 1800X.

Overclocking doesn't deliver the big gains we recorded in our gaming suite. In some of the lightly-threaded application tests (like After Effects), a stock Ryzen 7 2700X is even faster than the overclocked one. This is a result of the 2700X's 4.3 GHz Precision Boost 2 frequency, which outstrips our 4.2 GHz all-core overclock. These tests also aren't as latency-sensitive as gaming workloads, so DDR4-3466 doesn't deliver as much of a performance improvement.

Web Browser

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The Krakken suite tests JavaScript performance using several workloads, including audio, imaging, and cryptography. AMD's processors typically lag Intel's in Web browser benchmarks due to their lower per-core performance. However, a stock Ryzen 7 2700X still outpaces its overclocked predecessor.

The MotionMark benchmarks, which emphasize graphics performance (rather than JavaScript), are also sensitive to CPU clock rates. Again, the 2700X's higher stock Precision Boost 2 frequencies allow it to slip past the overclocked configuration. At the same time, we measure a 14.6% gain over the stock 1800X.

Productivity

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The application start-up metric measures load time snappiness in word processors, GIMP, and Web browsers under warm- and cold-start conditions. Other platform-level considerations affect this test as well, including the storage subsystem.

Ryzen 7 2700X is much more competitive than AMD's previous-generation CPUs. We also observe slim gains from overclocking in many of these workloads. 

Our video conferencing workload measures performance in single- and multi-user applications that utilize the Windows Media Foundation for playback and encoding. It also performs facial detection to model real-world usage. Not surprisingly then, a stock Ryzen 7 2700X leads the rest of the field at default clock rates thanks to its 8C/16T configuration and higher frequencies. 

The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries using the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized, which obviously plays to the 2700X's eight-core design.


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Paul Alcorn
Paul Alcorn
Managing Editor: News and Emerging Tech

Paul Alcorn is the Managing Editor: News and Emerging Tech for Tom's Hardware US. He also writes news and reviews on CPUs, storage, and enterprise hardware.

138 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Ninjawithagun
    Once again, Tom's provides an incorrect comparison in this review. Intel's 8700K is comparable to the 2600 or 2600X and NOT the 2700 or 2700X. Just count the number of cores and threads and one should be able to figure that out O.o

    Whine all you want. Just because you down vote me only means you don't know how to read or count :P
    Reply
  • Sakkura
    20899022 said:
    Once again, Tom's provides an incorrect comparison in this review. Intel's 8700K is comparable to the 2600 or 2600X and NOT the 2700 or 2700X. Just count the number of cores and threads and one should be able to figure that out O.o

    The 2700X costs $329, the 8700K costs $359. It is a very reasonable comparison to make.
    Reply
  • tripleX
    7820X is also there with the same number of cores and threads.
    Reply
  • tparkhuose
    well i know what im upgrading to now. thanks
    Reply
  • justin.m.beauvais
    It sure is nice to see an AMD chip up there in the thick of it with Intel's best offerings. Competition has finally officially returned. I'm impressed that AMD gained so much ground and managed to make the price more competitive than the 1800x was. It is slightly disappointing that overclocking remains less impressive than the Intel offerings, but everything else sort of makes up for that.

    I didn't feel like AMD was quite "there" yet with the 1000 Ryzens, but with the 2000 series I feel like we can finally say that they have arrived.
    Reply
  • Ninjawithagun
    20899035 said:
    20899022 said:
    Once again, Tom's provides an incorrect comparison in this review. Intel's 8700K is comparable to the 2600 or 2600X and NOT the 2700 or 2700X. Just count the number of cores and threads and one should be able to figure that out O.o

    The 2700X costs $329, the 8700K costs $359. It is a very reasonable comparison to make.

    Incorrect. It has nothing to do with price. Comparing like CPU architectures is the only logical course of action. 6 core/12 thread vs 8 core/16 thread makes no sense. Comparing the Intel 8700K 6 core/12 thread @ $347 to the AMD 2600X 6 core/12 thread @ $229.99 makes the most sense here. Once the proper math is done, AMD destroys Intel in performance vs. cost, especially when you game at any resolution higher than 1080P. The GPU becomes the bottleneck at that point, negating any IPC benefits of the Intel CPUs. I know this how? Simple. I also own a 8700K gaming PC ;-)

    Once again, whine all you want. Just because you down vote me only means you don't know how to read or count :P
    Reply
  • bfwhsm
    Now, do the tests again with meltdown/spectre applied on intel cpus, as you should.
    And you will see a VERY different story, with 2700k destroying 8700k in almost every measure).

    (check out anandtech's review to get an idea)
    Reply
  • Ninjawithagun
    20899131 said:
    Now, do the tests again with meltdown/spectre applied on intel cpus, as you should.
    And you will see a VERY different story, with 2700k destroying 8700k in almost every measure).

    (check out anandtech's review to get an idea)

    I will definitely check out that review as well. Thanks bfwhsm!
    Reply
  • tripleX
    20899131 said:
    Now, do the tests again with meltdown/spectre applied on intel cpus, as you should.
    And you will see a VERY different story, with 2700k destroying 8700k in almost every measure).

    (check out anandtech's review to get an idea)

    Maybe you should read the comments on the AnandTech article. They all point out that the test results don't match any other site's results.
    Reply
  • Sakkura
    20899157 said:
    20899131 said:
    Now, do the tests again with meltdown/spectre applied on intel cpus, as you should.
    And you will see a VERY different story, with 2700k destroying 8700k in almost every measure).

    (check out anandtech's review to get an idea)

    Maybe you should read the comments on the AnandTech article. They all point out that the test results don't match any other site's results.

    ... because of the different testing procedure that he just referred to.
    Reply