AMD’s return to the CPU market with the Ryzen processors has proven to be a great success among gamers and professionals alike, thanks to the performance these chips offered for its price as opposed to its Intel counterparts. While we wouldn’t just say that they have overthrown the blue team, AMD is back for round two with the release of the second-generation Ryzen processors. Today, we take a look at what the new AMD Ryzen 7 2700 and the Ryzen 7 2700X has to offer.
While the original Zen CPUs are made upon the 14nm fab process, the 2nd generation Ryzen chips are based on a lower 12nm FinFET fabrication that offers up to 15% performance improvements for game titles, along with improvements for AMD’s special CPU features which are now branded as Precision Boost 2 and Extended Frequency Range 2 (XFR 2). For those who aren’t aware, the Precision Boost and the XFR kick in when there is the presence of a good cooling solution, allowing the processor for higher multi-core performance with higher frequencies at cooler temperatures, and all these are automated without the need for any user input.
The Net Neural Prediction is like an artificial intelligence that learns the way you use your most commonly used applications and sets more efficient paths for faster performance the next time you use the app or a game, along with the Smart Prefetch that anticipates the data needed for faster responsiveness. All these are a part of the AMD Sense MI technology that helps the CPU adapt to your working behaviour for better performance.
As far as improvements go, we are seeing quite a difference in clocks speeds for both the Ryzen 7 2700 and 2700X as compared to the previous models. To be specific, the base 8-core Ryzen 2700 has a clock speed of 3.2GHz and can max out to 4.1 GHz on turbo, and while that’s the case, the good old Ryzen 1700 runs at 3GHz as base speeds and can go up till 3.7 GHz.
This is a decent incremental jump for now. And when it comes to the faster 2700X, we are looking at a base speed of 3.7 GHz and is designed to raise higher to 4.3 GHz. If you haven’t noticed, those numbers are even faster than the Ryzen 1800X with a base clock of 3.6 GHz and max clock speeds of 4GHz. On the contrary, the 1700X is slightly slower with 3.4GHz base and has a max clock speed of 3.8 GHz. It’s interesting that AMD has still yet to announce the Ryzen 2800X and we can only imagine the speeds that it will come out of the box.
While the TDP of the 2700X has slightly risen to 105W as compared to the 95W of the 1800X/1700X chips, AMD managed to keep the TDP of the R2700 the same as the 65W Ryzen 1700. Last but not least, AMD has also improved the RAM speed compatibility from 2667 MHz to 2993 MHz DDR4. Of course, there are gamers who managed to use DDR4 RAM speeds higher than that for the first-generation Ryzen processors. The importance of faster RAM speeds has proven to offer better performance with Ryzen processors, thanks to the benefits of Infinity Fabric.
Speaking of which, we were able to easily tune the DDR4 RAM speed to 3400 MHz while testing the new Ryzen 2700 and the Ryzen 2700X. The RAM modules are a pair of 8GB GSkill Sniper X DDR4 RAM that’s certified for Ryzen processors, along with the MSI X470 Gaming M7 AC motherboard (both given to us by AMD). As for the cooler, the Ryzen 2700X came bundled with the new Wraith Prism RGB and the Ryzen 2700 with the Wraith Spire with RGB LED. To keep the testing fair, I used the Wraith Prism cooler for both the processors so the cooling efficiency remains the same. The GPU used here is the MSI Gaming X RX 570 4GB card.
And before you may ask as to why we couldn’t try a better GPU, it’s simply the fact that we couldn’t arrange a higher-end model at the time of testing. Other components used here is a Crucial 2TB MX300 SSD and the PSU used here is a 1000W Seasonic Prime Ultra Titanium. And since we are using a mid-range GPU, we resorted to testing the usual GPU benchmark tools such as FireStrike, TimeSpy, VR Mark, Superposition and Unigine Heaven/ Valley tests. Unigine and Superposition were tested at medium presets. The CPU tests include CineBench R15, Geekbench 4, x265, Sony Vegas render, Blender, and Luxmark. I also managed to do some overclocking to 4.2GHz on the 2700X and 4GHz on the Ryzen 2700. However, I was only able to test the OC performance for CineBench R15 benchmark.
As you can see from the scores above, the Ryzen 2700X benefits more from its auto-boosted clock speeds for non-OC tests for both single and multi-core tests. However, the gap between the 2700 and the 2700X gets closer when you overclock both the chips. That said, the single-core performance on Geekbench 4 is almost the same but the 2700X has an edge when it comes to multi-core performance.
We tested the hotel complex scene on the Luxmark 3.1 benchmark with only CPU cores used here and the scores aren’t that far from each other. However, the x265 test at 1080p proved that the 2700X does a better performance. I do want to mention that we did run the Ryzen 2700 at 4GHz OC for all cores and got almost the same fps results of the 2700X at base speeds. We also tried to render a 1080p video on Sony Vegas and saw that the 2700X can finish the render almost a minute earlier than the Ryzen 7 2700. Regardless, both are an improvement over last year’s Ryzen processors.
And now comes the gaming benchmarks. From our scores for FireStrike and TimeSpy, we can say that both the Ryzen 7 2700 and the Ryzen 7 2700X performs almost the same with the latter having a slight edge. While the same goes for VR Mark test rounds, Unigine Heaven and Superposition tests, we did notice that the Ryzen 2700 did slightly better on the Unigine Valley benchmark.
It’s unfortunate that we didn’t have the Ryzen 7 1700 and the Ryzen 7 1700X to test the exact scores and compare to see which is better. Truth to be told, we had some scores of the previous generation and can confirm that Ryzen 2700/2700X can do slightly better. But, is it a major improvement for those who already own a Ryzen 1700/1700X? Unless you wanted to try out faster RAM speeds, we would say to stick to the current generation Ryzen chips that you already own. So, unless you are happy with a small percentage of improvement or haven’t already bought a Ryzen setup, then investing in one of these for your gaming and professional work is a good start.
Pricing: Ryzen 7 2700X ($329), Ryzen 7 2700 ($299)
