REVIEWS
Paul Alcorn is feeling more powerful than ever with AMD inside!
A MD’s X3D line of processors has taken the gaming world by storm, delivering leading gaming performance at every price point they compete in, and the £220 Ryzen 7 5700X3D steps in to lower the pricing bar for entry. That’s a win for enthusiasts upgrading existing AM4 systems and even for those looking to build a budget gaming rig. The Ryzen 7 5700X3D offers the highest gaming performance in its price bracket, even unseating Intel’s more expensive £310 Core i5-14600K.
As with AMD’s other X3D chips for AM4 motherboards, the Ryzen 7 5700X3D is based on the previous-gen Zen 3 architecture, so it isn’t quite as performant in productivity applications and won’t rank as high in our CPU benchmark hierarchy – you’ll be better off with the Ryzen 5 7600X if you’re interested in a better all-rounder. However, the Ryzen 7 5700X3D drops into affordable AM4 motherboards.
The Ryzen 7 5700X3D is basically a down-clocked Ryzen 7 5800X3D, losing 400MHz off its base and boost frequencies. All other details remain unchanged, including the voluminous 96MB of game-boosting L3 cache. And, in effect, it offers two more cores than the 5600X3D for the same price.
Life in the fast lane
The Ryzen landscape is divided into two lanes: you can choose between newer Zen 4 chips that drop into AM5 motherboards and use DDR5 memory, or a Zen 3 chip that drops into older AM4 motherboards and uses DDR4 memory.
AMD has continued developing its Zen 3 chips, and says it will continue to support AM4 for the foreseeable future as a value-centric platform for the lower end of the market. And that has certainly come to fruition – AM4, which debuted back in 2017, is in its eighth year of service, the longest-supported modern socket that still receives new processor additions.
It comes without a cooler, so you have to factor that into your build pricing. However, the chip is fairly easy to cool with value-centric coolers – it beats the 181W Core i5-14600K in gaming, but at a much lower peak power draw. The Ryzen 7 5700X3D also doesn’t have integrated graphics – you also need a discrete graphics card for gaming.
The Ryzen 7 5700X3D is optimised for gaming, but the 3D V-Cache tech results in lower clock speeds that hamstring performance in productivity apps. The chip also leverages the previous-gen Zen 3 architecture, so app performance is
