AMD Ryzen 7 2700 Review: The Non-X Factor

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Office & Productivity

Adobe Creative Cloud

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The Ryzen 7 2700 lagged behind AMD's 2700X flagship at stock settings in our Creative Cloud suite, particularly during the benchmark's lightly-threaded tests. Overclocking helped achieve near-parity, though.

Intel's processors benefited from increased overclocking headroom and the ability to get more done per clock cycle, easily outpacing the rest of our CPUs.

Web Browser

The Krakken suite tests JavaScript performance using several workloads, including audio, imaging, and cryptography.

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AMD's processors typically lag Intel's in Web browser benchmarks due to their lower per-core performance. So it comes as little surprise that a stock Ryzen 7 2700 suffered in these metrics due to its low frequency range. Of course, overclocking helped rectify this.

Productivity

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.

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AMD's Ryzen 7 2700 performed admirably right out of the box. While overclocking yielded a big boost, the 2700 still fell behind the pricier Ryzen 7 2700X.

Our video conferencing suite 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. This workload benefits from parallelism, so the 8C/16T Ryzen models naturally enjoyed the largest advantage from their architecture. Although an overclocked Ryzen 7 2700 slipped past AMD's 2700X, its lead fell within the margin of error. 

The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries using the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized, so Ryzen 7 2700X took an expected lead.


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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.

39 Comments Comment from the forums
  • rantoc
    @1440p or 4k the gaming difference wont be noticeable as the gpu starts to become the bottleneck. Game with an 2700x on an 3440x1440 100hz display (1080ti) and couldn't be happier as it also have the benefits of chewing through threaded workloads like a champ and that at a good price. So good mid-high res gaming with very good threaded performance, hard to beat really.
    Reply
  • philipemaciel
    I am going to buy the 2700.

    The 65W TDP is low enough for passive cooling. That it is cheaper than the 2700X is just the icing on the cake.

    For *my* needs, it is perfect. I am more than happy to lose a little performance and have the TDP drop 40W.
    Reply
  • mitch074
    I think @philipemaciel hit it right on the head: the 2700 is a much better choice if you're looking for a powerful CPU that sips power (65W is damn impressive, and that's before taking into account the possibilities offered by undervolting), as this puts it in a spot both the 2700X and the 2600X can't touch. For pure gaming, the 2600X is a much more sensible choice, and if you need absolute power without the need to tinker with it, the 2700X is perfect (an 8-core CPU that overclocks itself, it's a dream come true).
    Now though, it would have been better if AMD had sold those without a cooler for $20 less - the price gap with 2700X would have made it much more enticing, and overclockers could have pushed the hell out of it with watercooling etc.
    Reply
  • redgarl
    You rated that 6/10? Are you mad? Also, the stock cooler is not sufficient for Overclocking? Do you realize that this is the case for all marketed CPUs?

    OMG, YOU GUYS ARE GENIUSES!
    Reply
  • theyeti87
    20974031 said:
    I am going to buy the 2700.

    The 65W TDP is low enough for passive cooling. That it is cheaper than the 2700X is just the icing on the cake.

    For *my* needs, it is perfect. I am more than happy to lose a little performance and have the TDP drop 40W.

    Your reasoning is the same logic I used in selecting my 1700 non-X. I am attracted to efficient power.
    Reply
  • Combat_Medic
    "...our 4.0V Vcore, 1.2V SoC"

    That's a LOT of vcore right there!
    Reply
  • PaulAlcorn
    20974322 said:
    "...our 4.0V Vcore, 1.2V SoC"

    That's a LOT of vcore right there!

    Thanks, good eye! fixed. (1.4V)
    Reply
  • LORD_ORION
    I would expect the 2700 to have longevity.

    NeoHome economics 101: Buy quality parts that/and don't push the hardware limits.
    Main System(5-7 years) becomes Utility System(5+ years)
    Repeat

    Unless of course you burn out the mainsystem in 3-4 years *factory overclocks tend to do this too). ;)
    Reply
  • Garrek99
    The point of this processor is power efficiency not performance.
    Where are the performance per Watt or Temp charts?
    Reply
  • ElectrO_90
    You do realise, the whole point is to sell the 2700 for $30 so they can sell the main 2700x, because people don't mind spending 10% more, unless they are really restricted for power/heat.
    Reply