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

The 7700X3D always made sense. Ever since the 5800X3D released and showed itself as the best CPU for gaming (at the time), AMD has continued to double down on 3D V-Cache, dominating the competition from Intel in games by double-digit margins. Because of the immense success of X3D CPUs, we’ve seen several variations with lower bins. Originally we had the 7800X3D, and now we have the 7700X3D. It’s cheaper and has lower boost clocks, but it gives you the same eight Zen 4 cores and 104 MB of combined L2 and L3 cache. It’s a 7800X3D for less money.

That, at least, is the assumption. Reality is a bit different.

• AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D available exclusively at Newegg

A little less than two years after the 5800X3D released, AMD introduced the 5700X3D. Like the 7700X3D, it came with a cut to maximum boost clocks (400 MHz with the 5700X3D instead of 500 MHz here, but we’re splitting hairs), but still largely offered the gaming performance of the 5800X3D for less money. The problem here is that, although the 7700X3D could be a worthy successor to the 5700X3D, it’s too expensive.

The 5800X3D released in April 2022 for a suggested price of $450. Flash forward to January 2024, and the 5700X3D rolls out at $250. The 7800X3D launched in April 2023 for $450. The 7700X3D is arriving more than three years later in July 2026 for a suggested retail price of $330. It’s safe to call the 7700X3D a day late and a buck short, even ignoring the external pricing circumstances of the DIY market now.

That’s just a high-level analysis of launch pricing, too. Looking at prices now, the comparison is even more rough. Intel’s Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is the same price, within 5% of average gaming performance, 2X multi-threaded performance, and around 40% faster in single-core performance. AMD’s own Ryzen 7 7800X3D is, at the time of writing, available for $349, just $20 more than the 7700X3D (though I suspect that price will change). Buy a secondhand 7800X3D from Amazon, and it’s cheaper than the 7700X3D.

And, if you’re just focused on gaming performance and getting the best bang for your buck, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D is around $100 cheaper than the 7700X3D and within 2% of the average gaming performance.

The 7700X3D performs exactly how I expected it to. It’s not as fast as the 7800X3D, but if you squint hard enough, it’s close enough. It’s just too expensive. At $330, you’re almost forced to step up or down to AMD’s other Zen 4 X3D chips to get into a value sweet spot, and if you’re not solely focused on gaming, Intel offers much more powerful CPUs around the same price.

If the 7700X3D followed in the 5700X3D’s footsteps and released at $250 (even after three years of the 7800X3D on the market), it’d be a slam dunk. That’s not where we are for release, so let’s hope a price cut is waiting in the wings.

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D specifications and pricing

There’s a good chance the Ryzen 7 7700X3D is the last X3D processor we’ll see sporting AMD’s Zen 4 architecture, short of a potential Ryzen 5 7500X3D in the future. It further segments AMD’s last-gen lineup, and although there’s good pricing separation between each of the Zen 4 options, the spec differences are small.

For the Ryzen 7 7700X3D, the only spec difference it carries is a cut to clock speed compared to the Ryzen 7 7800X3D. You lose 200 MHz on the base clock and 500 MHz on the maximum boost clock. It’s a similar setup to what we saw with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and 5700X3D, just a bit more aggressive. The 5700X3D shaved 400 MHz off the base and boost clock of the 5800X3D.

Otherwise, you’re getting the same eight Zen 4 cores available in the 7800X3D, along with 104 MB of combined L2 and L3 cache (64 MB of that L3 is stacked on the CCD). It also comes with the same rated TDP of 120W, though as we’ll see throughout our benchmark results, the 7700X3D never crossed into triple-digit wattages during our testing.

The 7700X3D slots into existing 600- and 800-series motherboards, and AMD says that it will boot on existing AM5 BIOS images (though the company recommends flashing the latest firmware). We didn’t need to install a specific BIOS image or chipset drivers to boot with the 7700X3D, so if you already have an AM5 motherboard, you should be set. In addition, the 7700X3D does not come with a stock cooler, despite arriving in AMD’s larger box design that we saw in the previous generation.

Outside of the step up to the 7800X3D, there’s a step down to the 7600X3D, which trades two cores (and consequently 2 MB of L2 cache) for a bump to a 4.7 GHz boost clock. As we’ll get to in our gaming benchmarks, there’s something about the range of 4.5 to 4.8 GHz where these Zen 4 X3D chips hit their stride, and the 7700X3D just barely hits that range without PBO assistance.

The 7700X3D arrives at a recommended retail price of $330, putting it in hotly contested waters. Intel has its newer 270K Plus around that same price, while the last-gen Core i7-14700K lands closer to the $380 mark. Down a step, the 250K Plus is more than $100 cheaper at $220, while the Core i5-14600K is available for around $250.

For AMD, you can step up to the 7800X3D for a $50 premium (at current prices) or down $90-$100 and get the 7600X3D. Of this tight grouping of Zen 4 X3D chips, none of them are bad options purely for gaming. Deciding between them is tricky. We’ve seen the 7800X3D on sale for as low as $348, which is a negligible price difference compared to the 7700X3D. And even at list price, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D is significantly cheaper, yet comes within just two points of the average gaming performance of the 7700X3D.

It’s impossible to give a concrete conclusion about which is the best because even a minor sale of $20 or $30 off tips the scales. The 7700X3D isn’t a bad processor, but there are a lot of situations where it’s not the optimal choice, mainly due to its proximity in price to the 7800X3D. Given the 7700X3D’s performance, it would ideally be priced around $260 to $280.

You’ll spend much more if you want to get one of AMD’s latest X3D chips with the Zen 5 architecture, which represent somewhere around a 15% to 20% improvement in average gaming performance. The 9800X3D is the cheapest Zen 5 X3D processor right now, and you can expect to spend about $450 to $480 on one. AMD suggested to Tom’s Hardware that it’s looking into a cheaper Ryzen 5 9600X3D for a future release, but that’s not available at the moment.

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The Ryzen 7 7700X3D puts to bed any notion that clock speed is irrelevant in a modern gaming PC. The chip is sandwiched between two other X3D chips: the coveted Ryzen 7 7800X3D and the less-considered Ryzen 5 7600X3D. The 7700X3D shares its DNA with the 7800X3D, both sporting eight Zen 4 cores and 104 MB of combined L2/L3 cache. The 7700X3D just shaves 200 MHz off the base clock and 500 MHz off the boost clock.

As usual, we tested a suite of modern games at 1080p with a mixture of High and Ultra settings, and without upscaling or frame generation enabled. We use the RTX 5090 on our CPU test bench to remove any GPU bottlenecks and isolate CPU performance as much as possible.

Given that we have eight cores to play with, I expected the 7700X3D’s gaming performance to land closer to the 7800X3D, not the 7600X3D. That’s not the case. The 7800X3D is 4% faster than the 7700X3D on average in games, while the 7700X3D is just 2% faster than the 7600X3D. You don’t give up much performance with the 7700X3D compared to the 7800X3D, but on the other hand, you don’t gain much performance compared to the 7600X3D, despite a $90 to $100 difference in price.

The Ryzen 7 9800X3D remains the fastest gaming CPU on the market, outside of the better-binned Ryzen 7 9850X3D, and it’s 19% ahead of the 7700X3D. Looking backwards a generation, the re-released Ryzen 7 5800X3D at $350 is in a tough spot. The 7700X3D is nearly 20% faster despite arriving on the market for $20 less. The impact of memory shortages has created some bizarre value comparisons, especially for CPUs.

Breaking out of the X3D bubble, Intel’s latest Core Ultra 7 270K Plus remains potent competition. The 7700X3D is ahead by 5%, and slightly less compared to the Core i7-14700K, which isn’t as wide of a margin as we’re used to seeing with new X3D chips. Particularly when bringing application performance into the mix, which we’ll get to next, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus justifies a single-digit drop in gaming performance for how much it gains elsewhere; that’s assuming, of course, that you aren’t going for a pure gaming rig.

With Raptor Lake Refresh and Alder Lake chips, we tested with DDR5 memory (you can read more about our testing procedure later in this review). We tested DDR4 memory recently on these chips in our Ryzen 7 5800X3D re-review. That data is excluded here to keep the charts readable, but you shouldn’t expect miracles with DDR4. Based on our results, Raptor Lake Refresh chips with DDR4 are in the low single digits behind the Ryzen 7 5800X3D.

Outside of frame rate, you can see that the Ryzen 7 7700X3D landed squarely on 4.5 GHz in our gaming tests. Interestingly, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D locked in the same average as the 7600X3D at 4.7 GHz, despite the former boosting up to 5 GHz. The Ryzen 7 7700X3D also arrived at the lowest average power consumption, despite carrying a 120W TDP, clocking in just 0.1 W behind the 7600X3D.

The power consumption figures are interesting. The 7700X3D carries the same TDP as 7800X3D, but real-world power consumption is closer to the 7600X3D, which has a 65W TDP. And that lowered power consumption helps temperatures, with the 7700X3D clocking a cozy 55-degree Celsius average.

There’s headroom here in temperatures and power consumption for AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) to close the gap with the 7800X3D (but, then again, that chip has access to PBO, as well). We manually disable PBO in our testing, as it can push the chip outside of AMD’s default specifications, and in turn, void your warranty. If the warranty isn’t a concern for you, however, the 7700X3D should take nicely to a PBO bump.

007 First Light Benchmarks

007 First Light is the newest game in our test suite, and despite IO Interactive’s Glacier engine taking particularly well to X3D CPUs in Hitman 3, we see a shift toward Intel here. The 270K Plus is 7.6% faster than the 7700X3D, and that’s without optimization for Intel’s new iBOT feature. We can also see slightly weaker 1% lows on the 7700X3D compared to the other Zen 4 X3D chips, though nothing that completely changes the perceived smoothness.

Baldur’s Gate 3 Benchmarks

Baldur’s Gate 3, on the other hand, sees a nice boost with 3D V-Cache, as evidenced by the fact that the 5800X3D nearly matches the much newer 9700X (though with worse 1% low performance). The 7700X3D is in lockstep with the 7600X3D, and just shy of 6% behind the 7800X3D. Compared to the 270K Plus, the 7700X3D handily earns a victory with a 16.7% lead in average performance.

Looking at clock speeds, you can see Baldur’s Gate 3 gets much more out of these chips than First Light, all without an increase in power consumption. That leads to some exceptional efficiency results, with the 7700X3D offering two and a half frames for every watt consumed.

Crimson Desert Benchmarks AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D

Crimson Desert is another recent addition to our test suite, and it shows remarkable CPU scaling in our benchmark of the dense city streets in the Hernand town center. Breaking from our other results, the 7700X3D is 6.9% ahead of the 7600X3D here, and just 1.3% behind the 7800X3D. The efficiency here is second to none at nearly three frames per watt. The 7700X3D is offering 7800X3D-like performance at 7600X3D-like power, which is the best-case scenario for this CPU.

Counter-Strike 2 Benchmarks

Counter-Strike 2 offers a closer look at the importance of 1% low performance, with our averages exceeding 600 FPS across most of the test pool. The 7700X3D is just 1.1% faster than the Core i7-14700K on average, but we can see a 24.7% jump in 1% low performance. That’s a common theme among all the X3D chips we tested in this game. That smoothness is important here. With such high average frame rates, swinging 100 FPS (or more) in either direction isn’t uncommon.

Cyberpunk 2077 Benchmarks

Cyberpunk 2077 shows a much tighter contest in average performance. Here, the 7700X3D is in lockstep with the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and 14700K. Interestingly, the 7600X3D is a little faster here, though by less than a frame compared to the 7700X3D. Flipping over to our clock speed geomean, we can see what’s going on. Most of the chips in our test pool pushed up toward their maximum boost clock in this game, leaving the tame boost clock of the 7700X3D behind.

We’re looking at very tame power usage here, with an average of just 67 watts, and plenty of thermal headroom. PBO would help the 7700X3D push out a small lead over the Intel competition.

Doom: The Dark Ages Benchmarks

Doom: The Dark Ages is the only game in our suite using the Vulkan API, and it features always-on ray tracing. However, we still see CPU scaling even with such a GPU-focused pipeline. The 270K Plus squeezes out a marginal lead over the 7700X3D, but AMD’s chip is a bit more consistent in 1% low performance. The 250K Plus is especially impressive here, offering average performance on the level of $300+ CPUs for just $220.

As we can see from our clock speed results, the CPUs we tested ran comfortably below maximum boost clocks, suggesting the game is heavily threaded. As a result, the 7700X3D claims a clean 5% lead over the 7600X3D, nearly matching the 7800X3D.

F1 2024 Benchmarks

F1 2024 is an interesting benchmark because it provides yet another example of the 7600X3D outclassing the 7700X3D. The performance is close enough to call it identical, but I ran five passes on this game on both the 7600X3D and 7700X3D, and came away with the same results. Regardless, F1 2024 shows a massive advantage toward X3D chips, with even the lowly Ryzen 7 5800X3D beating every non-X3D chip in our test pool.

Far Cry 6 Benchmarks

Far Cry 6 mirrors what we saw in Doom, with the 7700X3D, 7600X3D, and 270K Plus all arriving around the same average frame rate. We don’t see an upper ceiling like in Doom, however, allowing the 7800X3D to claim a lead of 6.9%, and the 9800X3D shooting ahead to a 30% lead.

The power use for the 7700X3D here is especially low, falling behind the 7600X3D by about 6%. There’s probably some small, untapped optimization here that would help the 7700X3D close the gap with the 7800X3D.

Final Fantasy XIV Benchmarks

Final Fantasy XIV is another title that loves 3D V-Cache, and even among X3D CPUs, the game shows big jumps for newer architectures. The 7700X3D is 21% ahead of the 270K Plus here, but all of the Zen 4 X3D chips are tightly grouped between 175 and 180 FPS. In a blind shootout, it’d be impossible to tell between them.

Once again, the efficiency of the 7700X3D is remarkable at over three frames per watt consumed. The chip drew just 55.7 watts on average during our test, 32% lower than the 270K Plus and in line with the 7600X3D.

Flight Simulator 2024 Benchmarks

The Ryzen 7 7700X3D slips in the rankings in Flight Simulator 24, clocking in a frame behind the 250K Plus and 4.6% behind the 270K Plus. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D enjoys a comfortable lead, but there’s very little difference between AMD’s Zen 4 X3D offerings. They remain the most efficient of the bunch, however, with average power consumption below 60W.

Hogwarts Legacy Benchmarks

The 7700X3D once again trails Intel in Hogwarts Legacy, with the 270K Plus offering a 9% bump in average performance. The 7700X3D is a marginal 1.5% faster than the 7600X3D in this game, and it trails the 7800X3D by 3.8%. The 9800X3D, meanwhile, is a staggering 29% faster than the 7700X3D.

Marvel Rivals Benchmarks

The Unreal Engine 5-based Marvel Rivals remains the most popular hero shooter on Steam, but despite its technical backbone, the game shows clear CPU scaling at 1080p. As expected, the 7700X3D is marginally faster than the 7600X3D, and 5.1% behind the 7800X3D. Similar to Hogwarts Legacy, Intel holds an advantage with Arrow Lake refresh, though at significantly higher power draw and worse efficiency as a result.

Minecraft RTX Benchmarks

Minecraft is easily the most difficult benchmark for Intel. We’ve seen consistently low performance out of Arrow Lake CPUs in this test. Note that our Minecraft test uses a render chunk distance of 96, specifically stressing the CPU and memory chain to it.

Spider-Man 2 Benchmarks

Spider-Man 2 shows the 270K Plus once again besting the 7700X3D, this time by 4.9%. The 7800X3D also offers around a 5% jump. We can again see clock speed acting as a big influence in this test, but that extra clock speed comes at the cost of increased power draw, with the 270K Plus nearly doubling the average wattage of the 7700X3D in this test.

Starfield Benchmarks

Starfield is one of the few examples where we can see a clear benefit of the 7700X3D over the 7600X3D, with the former posting a 6% lead. The 270K Plus is slightly ahead of the 7700X3D, with a 3.6% lead, while the 7800X3D pushes further with a 6.7% jump in average performance.

The Last of Us Part One Benchmarks

Rounding out our game suite is The Last of Us Part One, where both the 270K Plus and 7800X3D are around 6% faster than the 7700X3D. AMD’s latest CPU is 5% faster than the base Ryzen 7 7700X, and 4% faster than the 7600X3D. You can see AMD’s non-X3D chips running into a performance wall, with the 7700X and 9700X posting virtually identical results.

This is one of the few games where the 7700X3D consumed more power than the 7600X3D, though only with a 5% bump to average wattage. Still, that’s enough for the 7600X3D to steal the top slot in efficiency away from the 7700X3D, which sits at the top of the efficiency rankings in most other titles.

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AMD’s X3D chips are built first and foremost for gaming, with only niche (and expensive) chips like the recent Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 pulling double duty in gaming and productivity applications. The hindered clock speed of the 7700X3D means it struggles even moreso than the 7800X3D in lightly- and heavily-threaded applications, which is already an area of weakness.

In our multithreaded geomean, the 7800X3D is 6.9% ahead of the 7700X3D while the base Ryzen 7 7700X is 12.8% ahead. AMD’s latest non-X3D eight-core, the Ryzen 7 9700X, is around 13% ahead with its default 65W TDP and a massive 28% ahead in its 105W TDP mode. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D pushes things even further with a 37% lead.

Short of the Ryzen 5 7600X3D, which the 7700X3D leads by a clean 25%, AMD’s latest X3D chip is at the bottom of the pile for multithreaded performance, at least among our DDR5 offerings. The comparison isn’t great among AMD’s offerings, but it’s far worse among Intel’s.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is 130% ahead, more than a 2X increase. We’re comparing radically different architectures and core counts, but the 270K Plus is leaps and bounds faster than the 7700X3D in multithreaded applications, and within 5% in games. Even the $220 Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is 70% ahead in our multithreaded geomean. The 7700X3D wins for gaming, even if its lead is small. But if you even just dabble in apps like Handbrake, Blender, and DaVinci Resolve, you’re giving up a lot of performance at this price with the 7700X3D.

The margins are always tighter in our single-threaded geomean, but the limited clock speed of the Ryzen 7 7700X3D means it ends up below every other DDR5 option in our test pool. The 7800X3D is 10% ahead, while the 9800X3D pushes ahead with a 25% lead. The base Ryzen 7 7700X also leads by a clean 20% margin.

In Intel’s camp, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is 42% ahead, while the 250K Plus is 33% faster. The Core i7-14700K and Ryzen 7 9700X are in lockstep, both beating out the 7700X3D by around 29%.

Single-threaded performance is especially limited on the 7700X3D, not only due to lower maximum boost clocks, but also the SRAM stacked on top of the CCD. It acts as an insulating layer between the CCD and IHS, giving you minimal headroom for large clock speed boosts on a single core, even with manual overclocking and robust cooling.

Rendering Benchmarks

In demanding rendering workloads like Cinebench, Blender, and POV-Ray, the 7700X3D struggles. The 4.5 GHz boost clock limits single-core performance, while the underlying Zen 4 architecture can’t scale up to AMD’s modern eight-core offerings. And, bringing Intel into the mix, strong single-core performance and Intel’s hybrid architecture with large core arrays allow Team Blue to sit near the top of the chart in most of our testing.

In Cinebench 2024, the 270K Plus was 135% faster than the 7700X3D in a multi-core render. The base 7700X, meanwhile, is 10% faster and the 9700X with its 105W TDP is 21% faster. Single-core performance shows big gaps, as well. The 7600X3D is faster than the 7700X3D with its higher boost clocks, while the 270K Plus offers around a 39% boost in performance.

There are even bigger gaps elsewhere. In POV-Ray, the 270K Plus is nearly three times as fast as the 7700X3D in the multi-core test. In Blender, the 7700X is 11% faster than the 7700X3D, and the 9700X 24% faster, in the Monster scene. And in V-Ray 6, even the $220 Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is 66% faster than the 7700X3D.

In heavily-threaded workloads, the 7700X3D and 7800X3D offer very similar performance, with a slight edge to the latter. We only see a big divergence between them in single-threaded workloads.

Encoding Benchmarks

Alongside rendering, our encoding benchmarks factor heavily into our geomean. We can also see a repeat here of what we saw in our rendering benchmarks, particularly among heavily-threaded video encoders like Handbrake. Across codecs, the 270K Plus is usually twice as fast (and sometimes more), while the non-X3D 9700X offers around a 30% boost depending on the codec. Compared to the 7800X3D, the 7700X3D is 7% slower with x265 and AV1.

In single-threaded audio encoding via LAME, the 7800X3D was nearly 9% faster than the 7700X3D, and that gap grows to nearly 10% in our extended LAME results.

Surprisingly, there’s a decent gap between the 7700X3D and 7800X3D in our image encoding/decoding benchmarks. In our multi-threaded JPEG-XL decode, the 7800X3D is 7% faster, while the 9700X is 26% faster. Similar margins appear in the encode.

Creator App Benchmarks

Creator applications like the Adobe suite and DaVinci Resolve are some of the most important for the 7700X3D; if you’re building a PC for gaming, the most likely non-gaming workload is some sort of video or photo editing application. These applications feature a ton of workloads spanning heavily-threaded and lightly-threaded tasks, so the margins between chips are much tighter.

Starting with Photoshop, AMD holds a strong position in this application across all of its CPUs, 7700X3D included. It matches the 14700K and closes in on the performance of the 270K Plus. The scales turn toward Intel in Premiere Pro, with the 270K Plus outperforming the 7700X3D by 9.5%. However, the 7800X3D is only a meager 1.9% ahead. We can see a similar situation in DaVinci Resolve.

Rounding out our tests is After Effects, where the 7800X3D is around 5% faster than the 7700X3D, and the 270K Plus is more than 30% faster.

Web and Office Benchmarks

General-purpose web and office workloads are usually lightly-threaded, so the 7700X3D struggles in these benchmarks. However, all of the CPUs in our test pool are more than capable of running these workloads, so although the 7700X3D often ends up near the bottom of the pile, the performance difference in real-world use isn’t as big as the numbers would suggest.

In web-based workloads measured via WebXPRT, you can see the 7700X3D only manages to outclass AMD’s DDR4 options in our test pool, even falling short of the Core i7-12700K. Those single-core speeds really put a damper on performance here, though the extra two cores on the 7700X3D allowed it to achieve 15% better application start-up time than the 7600X3D in PCMark 10.

Microsoft Word and Outlook show similar performance differences, but the 7700X3D gains back some places in Excel and PowerPoint. A strong performance in Excel is important, but PowerPoint is tricky. As you can see from our results, the 7700X3D actually outperformed the 7800X3D; that’s just a consequence of PowerPoint not being a demanding application to run in most situations.

Chess Engines, Compilation, Compression, AVX, and Other Benchmarks

Rounding out our application tests are a series of highly specific workloads. We have a mixture of practical workloads like LLVM code compilation and compression/decompression with various algorithms, as well as some tests like various chess engines that drill down on IPC and applications like Optcarrot, which is an NES emulator looking at Ruby application performance.

Depending on what you plan to do with your PC, many of these workloads might not be applicable to you. Because of that, they aren’t included in our geomean, as some CPUs scale especially well in these niche workloads in a way that isn’t representative of overall performance.

SPEC Workstation 4 Benchmarks

Similarly, we run SPECWorkstation 4. We already run a subset of the tests included in SPEC in our own benchmark suite, but our full SPEC results give you numbers for the particular benchmark configuration used in the suite, as well as some additional scientific and security results.

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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.

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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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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