A Price Cut disguised as a New Chip The eight-core, 16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 5700X costs $299 and is a slightly modified, cheaper version of its predecessor, the $335 Ryzen 7 5800X. However, after a little no-hassle tuning, it offers nearly the same gaming and application performance. The 5700X is the first model in AMD’s new line of seven Ryzen 5000 processors, which the company hopes will help it rise in CPU benchmarks and reclaim its spot on the list of the Best CPUs for Gaming. After Intel’s Alder Lake upset the Ryzen lineup with a better price-performance ratio, this is a crucial need.
The Ryzen 7 5700X joins the existing ecosystem of AM4 motherboards and makes use of the same Zen 3 architecture and 7nm process as its counterparts. The Ryzen 5000 processor’s predecessor, the 5800X, has always been a strange chip because of its price, making it the only Ryzen 5000 processor that didn’t make much sense for most people because of competing products from AMD and Intel. In point of fact, the Ryzen 7 5700X’s absence and the 5800X’s poor positioning were so obvious in our initial review that we asked where the 5700X was right in the title box (see below).
The Ryzen 7 5700X was finally released by AMD after eighteen months, though it was certainly late. As we explained in our review of the 5800X in 2020, AMD absolutely required the “missing” Ryzen 7 5700X to close the substantial price gap in its product line and make it simpler for customers to switch from Ryzen 5 to Ryzen 7 rather than purchasing an Intel processor.
Amazon has the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X (AMD Ryzen 7) for 23,865, but that was when AMD was competing with Intel’s 10th-Generation processors. Intel’s disruptive 12th-Gen x86 hybrid Alder Lake chips are now well established as the overall performance and value leader at every price point, and the company’s 13th-Gen Raptor Lake chips are allegedly on track for release this year. As a result, the game has completely changed since then. AMD’s 5nm Ryzen 7000 “Raphael” Zen 4 chips are also scheduled to arrive at the end of the year; however, they will be packaged with the brand-new AM5 platform. In the meantime, the Ryzen 7 5700X enters the long-lasting Socket AM4 platforms, which have supported the Ryzen chips since their infancy in 2017 with the Ryzen 7 1800X. However, adopters are unable to upgrade in the future because of this.
Naturally, AMD’s pricing strategy now differs from what it would have been in 2020: The 65W Ryzen 7 5700X costs $150 less than its full-featured 105W brother, the Ryzen 7 5800X, but that doesn’t matter in today’s pricing situation because the 5700X only costs $35 less than the 5800X’s average retail price. That is not a significant reduction.
The Ryzen 7 5700X is really just a price cut for the Ryzen 7 5800X, but it comes off as a new product because of the similarities we’ll see throughout our benchmark suite.
If you already have a system based on a Ryzen 1000- or 2000-series processor and need more threaded horsepower, the Ryzen 7 5700X is a good upgrade option. However, the Ryzen 5 5600, which offers comparable gaming performance at a much more affordable $199 price point, could save you money if you are a Ryzen upgrader who is only interested in gaming. Consider Intel chips, such as the Core i5-12400 or Core i5-12600K, and their more cutting-edge features when building new builds.
With eight cores and 16 threads, the Ryzen 7 5700X fits into the Ryzen stack. The AMD 5700X is the most expensive 65W component, costing $299. It fills the gap between the powerful 105W Ryzen 7 5800X, which costs $335, and the $225 Ryzen 5 5600X, which also has a 65W TDP.
The Ryzen 7 5700X has the same chiplet-equipped “Vermeer” design as the previous Ryzen 5000 models and has a base clock of 3.4 GHz and a boost clock of 4.6 GHz. As a result, the eight-core, 16-thread design of the 65W Ryzen 7 5700X and the 105W Ryzen 7 5800X are identical, as are their 32MB L3 caches.
AMD merely reduced the Ryzen 7 5700X’s clock rates to accommodate its 40W lower TDP to differentiate the two. Consequently, the only differences between the two chips are their clock rates and TDP ratings. The only likely cause of this is probably artificial segmentation; The 5700X’s 100 MHz lower boost clock rate will be nearly indistinguishable in most work, but the 400 MHz difference in base clocks will be more pronounced in heavily-threaded workloads at stock settings. Given the maturity of the TSMC 7nm process, it is unlikely that AMD has many dies that could not reach the extra 100 MHz boost that would make them suitable for the 5800X. If this were the case, the company could have simply used them for the higher-p However, as we will demonstrate below, AMD’s one-click Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) auto-overclocking feature makes it extremely simple to rectify this issue. In threaded workloads, there is little to no difference between the 5700X and 5800X if you use PBO and a suitable cooler.
At the Ryzen 5000 launch, AMD defied convention and canceled one of its biggest value-adds; AMD stopped including “free” bundled coolers with its Ryzen processors, with the exception of models with a 65W TDP. Unfortunately, the 65W Ryzen 7 5700X does not come with a cooler because AMD has erroneously abandoned that policy as well.
The $299 Ryzen 7 5700X faces significant competition from Intel’s Alder Lake: The Core i5-12400, which costs $175, performs slightly better in threaded applications but is slower in games. However, the fact that it comes with a cooler increases its value to gamers. In contrast, the $270 Core i5-12600K from Intel outperforms the Ryzen 7 5700X in every way and lacks a cooler, but it costs $30 less to offset Intel’s higher motherboard costs. This means that the Ryzen 7 5700X would have been more appealing if it had a cooler included.
