The eight-core 16-thread $299 AMD Ryzen 7 5700X comes to market as a slightly modified yet lower-cost version of its predecessor, the $335 Ryzen 7 5800X, but it offers nearly the same gaming and application performance after a bit of no-hassle tuning. The 5700X debuts as part of AMD’s newest line of seven Ryzen 5000 models that are designed to shore up the company’s rankings in CPU benchmarks and retake its position on the Best CPUs for gaming list. That’s a critical need after Intel’s Alder Lake upset the Ryzen lineup with a better blend of both pricing and performance.
The Ryzen 7 5700X leverages the same Zen 3 architecture and 7nm process as its counterparts and drops into the existing ecosystem of AM4 motherboards. Its predecessor, the 5800X, has always been an oddly-positioned chip, with its price point making it the lone Ryzen 5000 processor that didn’t make much sense for just about anyone due to competing products from both Intel and AMD. In fact, the 5800X’s positioning was so poor that we asked where the Ryzen 7 5700X was right in the title box of our original review (seen below).
It took AMD eighteen months, but it has now finally released the Ryzen 7 5700X. It’s certainly late, though. As we explained in our 5800X review back in 2020, AMD really needed the ‘missing’ Ryzen 7 5700X to plug the big pricing gap in its product stack and make it easier for its customers to jump from Ryzen 5 to Ryzen 7 instead of buying an Intel processor.
However, that was back when AMD competed with Intel’s 10th-Gen processors. The game has changed entirely since then — 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 purportedly on track for release this year. AMD also has its 5nm Ryzen 7000 ‘Raphael’ Zen 4 chips slated to arrive at the end of the year, but they’ll arrive with the new AM5 platform. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 7 5700X drops into the long-lived Socket AM4 platforms that have shepherded the Ryzen chips from their infancy with the Ryzen 7 1800X in 2017 to the current day, but that cuts off any future upgrade path for adopters.
Naturally, AMD has a different pricing strategy today than we would have seen back in 2020: The 65W Ryzen 7 5700X is $150 less than the launch price of its full-fledged 105W sibling, the Ryzen 7 5800X. That isn’t relevant to today’s pricing situation, though — the 5700X is only $35 less than the 5800X’s average pricing at retail. That isn’t much of a discount.
Here’s a quick snapshot of the 5700X’s average performance in our gaming test suite and key single- and multi-threaded applications. You’ll find much more extensive testing below, but this gives you a good general sense of how the Ryzen 7 5700X stacks up against Intel’s competing chips.
The Ryzen 7 5700X’s biggest competition comes in the form of the 41% cheaper $175 Core i5-12400 that is similar in gaming but trails it in threaded applications, while the Core i5-12600K takes a much larger lead in all facets of performance, but for 10% less cash.
In gaming, the Ryzen 7 5700X lands within 2% of its higher-priced predecessor, the 5800X, and a dead-simple one-click process (PBO) allows it to match the 5800X in threaded applications.
Given the similarities, the Ryzen 7 5700X is really just a price cut for the Ryzen 7 5800X, but it comes disguised as a new product.
The Ryzen 7 5700X is a solid upgrade choice if you already have a system built around a Ryzen 1000- or 2000-series processor and need more threaded horsepower. However, if you’re a Ryzen upgrader that’s only interested in gaming, you could save some cash with the Ryzen 5 5600, which offers comparable gaming performance at a much friendlier $199 price point. For new builds, you should look to Intel chips, like the Core i5-12400 or Core i5-12600K, and their more modern accommodations.
Let’s take a quick look at the specs, then get right to our full gaming and application test results below.
AMD Ryzen 7 5700X Specifications and Pricing
| Street / MSRP | Cores | Threads | P-Core Base/Boost | E-Core Base/Boost | L3 Cache | TDP / PBP / MTP | DDR4-3200 | |
| Ryzen 9 5900X | $400 ($549) | 12P | 24 Threads | 3.7 / 4.8 GHz | – | 32MB | 105W | DDR4-3200 |
| Ryzen 7 5800X3D | $449 | 8P | 16 Threads | 3.4 / 4.5 GHz | – | 96MB | 105W | DDR4-3200 |
| Ryzen 7 5800X | $335 ($449) | 8P | 16 Threads | 3.8 / 4.7 GHz | – | 32MB | 105W | DDR4-3200 |
| Core i7-12700K / KF | $380 (K) – $377 (KF) | 8P + 4E | 12 Cores / 20 Threads | 3.6 / 5.0 GHz | 2.7 / 3.8 GHz | 25MB | 125W / 190W | DDR4-3200 / DDR5-4800 |
| Ryzen 7 5700X | $299 | 8P | 16 Threads | 3.4 / 4.6 | – | 32MB | 65W | DDR4-3200 |
| Core i5-12600K / KF | $270 (K) – $264 (KF) | 6P+4E | 10 Cores / 16 Threads | 3.7 / 4.9 | 2.8 / 3.6 | 16MB | 125W / 150W | DDR4-3200 / DDR5-4800 |
| Ryzen 5 5600X | $230 ($299) | 6P | 12 Threads | 3.7 / 4.6 | – | 32MB | 65W | DDR4-3200 |
| Ryzen 5 5600 | $199 | 6P | 12 Threads | 3.5 / 4.4 | – | 32MB | 65W | DDR4-3200 |
| Core i5-12400 / F | $175 – $170 (F) | 6P+0E | 6 Cores /12 Threads | 4.4 / 2.5 | – | 18MB | 65W / 117W | DDR4-3200 / DDR5-4800 |
The Ryzen 7 5700X slots into the Ryzen stack with eight cores and 16 threads. At $299, the 5700X is the highest-priced 65W part from AMD, filling in the gap between the powerful 105W Ryzen 7 5800X that retails for $335 and the $225 Ryzen 5 5600X that also comes with a 65W TDP.
The Ryzen 7 5700X comes with a 3.4 GHz base, a 4.6 GHz boost clock, and the same chiplet-equipped ‘Vermeer’ design as the existing Ryzen 5000 models. As such, the 65W Ryzen 7 5700X’s eight-core 16-thread design is identical to the 105W Ryzen 7 5800X — they both even have 32MB of L3 cache.
To differentiate the two, AMD merely trimmed the Ryzen 7 5700X’s clock rates to accommodate its 40W lower TDP. As a result, the TDP ratings and clock rates are the only difference between the two chips. This is likely purely the result of artificial segmentation; given the maturity of the TSMC 7nm process, it is unlikely that AMD has many dies that couldn’t reach the extra 100 MHz boost that would make them suitable for the 5800X. If so, the company could have simply used them for the higher-priced and higher-margin Ryzen 7 5800X3D.
Compared to the 5800X, 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. However, as we’ll demonstrate below, that’s extremely simple to rectify with AMD’s one-click Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) auto-overclocking feature. If you engage PBO and have a suitable cooler, there is little to no difference between the 5700X and 5800X in threaded workloads.
AMD broke with tradition at the Ryzen 5000 launch and scuttled one of its biggest value-adds; except for its 65W TDP models, AMD stopped providing ‘free’ bundled coolers with its Ryzen processors. Unfortunately, now AMD has inexplicably ditched that policy, too, so the 65W Ryzen 7 5700X also comes without a cooler.
The $299 Ryzen 7 5700X faces intense pressure from Intel’s Alder Lake from both above and below: The less-expensive $175 Core i5-12400 offers slightly faster gaming performance but trails in threaded applications. However, it comes with a cooler, magnifying the value prop for gamers. Meanwhile, Intel’s $270 Core i5-12600K beats the Ryzen 7 5700X in every facet and also doesn’t have a cooler, but it retails for $30 less to offset Intel’s higher motherboard costs. This is to say that the Ryzen 7 5700X would have certainly been more compelling if it came with a bundled cooler.
The Ryzen 7 5700X fully supports overclocking, including core clocks, memory, and the Infinity Fabric, and will drop into existing 400- and 500-series motherboards (Socket AM4). AMD’s upcoming BIOS updates will also enable support on most older 300-series platforms. You’ll need a BIOS with AGESA 1.2.0.6b (or newer) for the Ryzen 7 5700X. AMD says that Ryzen 5000 support will vary by vendor, as will the timeline for new BIOS revisions. However, we should see them all by the end of May 2022. These BIOS revisions also fix AMD’s fTPM stuttering issues.
The 5700X also doesn’t support the leading-edge connectivity options, like DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, that you’ll find with Alder Lake, but it does support up to DDR4-3200 and PCIe 4.0. AMD won’t be able to match intel’s connectivity tech until its 5nm Ryzen 7000 ‘Raphael’ Zen 4 CPUs arrive later this year.
Test Setup and Overclocking
The Ryzen 7 5700X fully supports overclocking, so you’re free to tune the processor manually via multiplier adjustments or with the auto-overclocking Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) feature. As with most Ryzen chips, we could only reach DDR4-3800 with the fabric speed at 1900 MHz. This setting allows us to run the memory in the desired low-latency ‘coupled’ (1:1 ratio) mode. You can get higher memory transfer rates by running with uncoupled memory, but that results in less performance in games.
For our “PBO” results, we engaged Precision Boost Overdrive with the ‘Auto’ setting and changed the Scalar setting to 10X. As a reminder, you can engage PBO from within Windows through the Ryzen Master software. There really isn’t much more to say about our tuning efforts — it’s simple to get the gains you see below.
We typically test Intel processors with the power limits fully removed for our standard measurements, so the Core i5-12400 and Core i5-12600K run beyond Intel’s ‘recommended’ power settings even at stock settings. However, they remain within warranty. This is the default configuration with most motherboards.
Aside from a few errant programs for Intel, the overall trends for both AMD and Intel should be similar with Windows 10 and 11. As such, we’re sticking with Windows 11 benchmarks in this article. We also stuck with DDR4 for Alder Lake testing, as overall performance trends are generally comparable between DDR4 and DDR5. We have a deeper dive into what that looks like in our initial Core i9-12900K review.
We tested the Ryzen 7 5700X in two configurations:
- Ryzen 7 5700X: Corsair H115i 280mm water cooler, default power limits, DDR4-3200 in Coupled mode
- Ryzen 7 5700X PBO: Corsair H115i 280mm water cooler, Precision Boost Overdrive = Auto, Scalar = 10X, DDR4-3800 in Coupled mode (fabric at 1800 MHz)
AMD Ryzen 7 5700X Gaming Benchmarks — The TLDR
As usual, we’re testing with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 to reduce GPU-imposed bottlenecks as much as possible, and differences between test subjects will shrink with lesser cards or higher resolutions. Because most of the titles below show little meaningful differentiation at higher resolutions, we only tested four of the seven titles at 1440p. Be aware that the limited selection of titles tested at 1440p can result in large swings in our cumulative measurements if there’s a big increase in a single title — those swings would be more muted if we had a larger selection of 1440p titles.
The above charts comprise the geometric mean of our standard gaming test suite, but we include the individual results in the charts below.
The story of the Ryzen 7 5700X and 5800X emerges very quickly when we compare the stock versus PBO (overclocked) test results. At stock settings at 1080p, the 5800X is a scant 1.9% faster than the 5700X, and that same delta applies after tuning the memory and engaging PBO. The 2% difference in gaming performance between these two chips will be imperceptible — and that’s with one of the fastest GPUs available. This class of chip will most commonly be paired with a lower-tier GPU, so the difference between the two chips will be even slimmer to non-existent in most real-world gaming use-cases. However, the 5800X costs 11% more, which obviously isn’t a great deal.
The Ryzen 7 5700X faces stout competition from the Core i5-12600K, which is 4.5% faster at stock and a whopping 15% faster after tuning, but for $30 (10%) less. You’ll need to pony up for a beefier cooler to extract that extra overclocking performance from the 12600K, but it’s obviously worth having that option available.
Even more concerning for the Ryzen 7 5700X, the $175 Core i5-12400 provides comparable gaming performance at both stock and overclocked settings, but for $125 (42%) less. Naturally, the Ryzen 7 5700X will have more heft in heavily-threaded applications, but if you’re focused specifically on gaming, it isn’t nearly as good of a value as the Core i5-12400.
In fact, the Ryzen 7 5700X faces the same issue the Ryzen 7 5800X did: The Ryzen 5 5600X is just as potent in gaming but costs far less. At stock settings, the Ryzen 5 5600X effectively ties the 5700X in average framerates. Now, the Ryzen 7 5700X does provide somewhat better 99th percentile framerates than the 5600X, but that comes with a pretty hefty $70 upcharge. Of course, you could also opt for the $199 Ryzen 5 5600, which again offers nearly the same performance as the 5600X but shaves another $30 off the list price.
The Ryzen 7 5700X isn’t a good investment for a new gaming build, and if you’re solely interested in gaming, the Ryzen 7 5700X also isn’t the best bang-for-the-buck upgrade for a previous-gen Ryzen system.
| Tom’s Hardware – 5800X3D Baseline | 1080p Game Benchmarks – fps %age |
| Ryzen 7 5800X3D | 100% |
| Core i9-12700K DDR4 | 88.6% |
| Ryzen 9 5900X | 82.6% |
| Core i5-12600K | 80.1% |
| Ryzen 7 5800X | 78.1% |
| Core i5-12400 | 77.1% |
| Ryzen 7 5700X | 76.7% |
| Ryzen 5 5600X | 76.1% |
It is noteworthy that we might see larger performance deltas when new, more powerful GPUs arrive later this year. Moving over to 1440p brings a GPU bottleneck into the equation, so the performance deltas between the chips shrink tremendously. However, those results provide a good perspective if you game at higher resolutions and don’t plan to upgrade your GPU before buying your next CPU.
The competition between Intel and AMD is much closer now, so it’s best to make an informed decision based on the types of titles you play frequently. Be sure to check out the individual tests below.
Overall, the Ryzen 7 5800X and 5700X are very similar in most games, especially after overclocking. The results below show a consistent theme of the Ryzen 7 5800X beating the 5700X slightly when both chips are at stock settings, but an imperceptible difference after overclocking both chips.
3DMark, VRMark, Chess Engines on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
Synthetic benchmarks don’t tend to translate well to real-world gaming, but they do show us the raw amount of compute power exposed to game engines. It’s too bad most games don’t fully exploit it.
Aside from VRMark, which is exceptionally sensitive to clock frequency, this series of tests is very indicative of the general trends we’ll see below: The stock 5700X trails the stock 5800X, but simple overclocking makes these chips nearly identical.
Far Cry 6 on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
Far Cry 6 is sensitive to memory latency and clock rates, giving the 5800X a decent lead. The Precision Boost Overdrive feature allows Ryzen processors to operate at higher multi-core boost speeds, but it doesn’t allow them to exceed their maximum boost clock rate. As such, the 5800X is 1.8% faster in this frequency-sensitive game after we engage PBO on both chips, but we’ll see plenty of other titles below where the chips are identical.
F1 2021 on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
The Ryzen 7 5800X holds the lead over the stock 5700X at stock settings, but the 5700X is 0.4 fps faster (a tie) after we engage PBO and tune the memory on both chips.
Hitman 3 on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
Intel collaborated with the IO Interactive team to optimize Hitman 3’s Glacier 2 game engine for Alder Lake’s x86 hybrid architecture, a fact Intel heavily promoted during its launch. This obviously gives the Core i5-12600K and its four efficiency cores (e-cores) an advantage in this benchmark. Meanwhile, the Core i5-12400, which doesn’t have e-cores, lands down near the Ryzen 7 5700X.
Horizon Zero Dawn on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
Here we can see the challenge posed to the Ryzen 7 5700X from within AMD’s own stable — the Ryzen 5 5600X is extremely competitive in this title with the 5700X, but it is significantly less expensive.
Red Dead Redemption 2 on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
Red Dead Redemption 2 finds the Ryzen 7 5700X again tying the 5800X after tuning, but the Ryzen 5 5600X is actually slightly faster than the stock Ryzen 7 5700X.
Watch Dogs Legion on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
AMD Ryzen 7 5700X Application Benchmarks — The TLDR
We can boil down productivity application performance into two broad categories: single- and multi-threaded. These slides show the geometric mean of performance in several of our most important tests in each category, but be sure to look at the expanded results below.
The Ryzen 7 5800X is 4.4% faster in our cumulative measurement of single-threaded work, which is within expectations given its slightly higher boost clock rate. The Ryzen 5 5600X also offers nearly the same performance as the 5700X. As expected, engaging PBO doesn’t change much in this metric, as it doesn’t boost the peak clock rates. Rather, PBO improves performance in multi-core workloads, as we see in the threaded tests.
The Ryzen processors simply can’t keep pace with the Alder Lake chips in single-threaded work: The Core i5-12400 is 9.7% faster than the Ryzen 7 5700X in single-threaded work, while the Core i5-12600K is a whopping 21% faster at stock settings, and 26% faster after overclocking.
The multi-threaded results reveal that the Ryzen 7 5800X is 12% faster than the stock Ryzen 7 5700X, but engaging PBO shrinks the delta between the chips to less than one percent. But, again, the 5700X and 5800X are remarkably similar after tuning.
In threaded work, the Ryzen 7 5700X is 11.5% faster than the Core i5-12400 at stock settings and 19% faster after tuning, showing that its only real advantage over the 12400 resides in multi-threaded applications. The Core i5-12600K puts its e-cores to good use, though, carving out a 21% lead at stock settings and an 18.7% lead after tuning. That’s impressive given its lower price point, not to mention that it beats the 5700X by convincing margins in single-threaded work and gaming, too.
| Tom’s Hardware – Application Benchmarks | Single-Threaded | Multi-Threaded |
| Core i7-12700K DDR4 | 100% | 100% |
| Core i5-12600K DDR4 | 98.6% | 77.9% |
| Core i5-12400 DDR4 | 89.3% | 57.5% |
| Ryzen 9 5900X | 86.2% | 96.6% |
| Ryzen 7 5800X | 85% | 72% |
| Ryzen 7 5700X / PBO | 81.4% / – | 64.1% / 71.5% |
| Ryzen 5 5600X | 81% | 56.7% |
| Ryzen 7 5800X3D | 79.4% | 71.3% |
Rendering Benchmarks on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
The same general trends we saw in the cumulative multi-threaded performance measurements are clearly at play in this series of tests. After overclocking, the Ryzen 7 5700X is essentially the same processor as the Ryzen 7 5800X, but the Core i5-12600K still takes the lead across the board. The Core i5-12400 can’t match the more generously endowed chips but is surprisingly performant given its price, particularly in single-threaded tasks.
Encoding Benchmarks on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
It’s easy to spot the lightly-threaded encoders in this lineup — the Intel chips lead the chart for each of them.
Web Browsing, Office and Productivity on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
The ubiquitous web browser is one of the most frequently used applications. These tests tend to be lightly threaded, so a snappy response time is critical.
Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Lightroom on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
We’ve integrated the UL Benchmarks Procyon tests into our suite to replace the aging PCMark 10. This new benchmark runs complex Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Lightroom workflows with the actual software, making for a great real-world test suite.
Compilation, Compression, AVX Benchmarks on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
This grab bag of various tests finds the Ryzen 7 5700X exhibiting much the same performance trend as we’ve seen throughout this round of testing — after tuning, it is essentially the same as the Ryzen 7 5800X. That would be a bit more encouraging if, outside of decompression/compression and cryptography, the Core i5-12600K didn’t outperform both Ryzen 7 models in the majority of these workloads.
A Price Cut in Disguise
The Ryzen 7 5700X is the chip that enthusiasts longed for back in 2020, but today it simply serves as a price cut for the 5800X that comes disguised as a new product. Intel’s Alder Lake lineup caught AMD flat-footed as its waits for its 5nm Ryzen 7000 ‘Raphael’ Zen 4 CPUs, so the company’s recent refresh serves as a way to lower the pricing on its Ryzen 5000 family without publicly ceding ground with official price cuts. The Ryzen 7 5700X, like the rest of AMD’s recent additions, arrives too late to market to make any real meaningful impact, particularly in comparison to the faster, less expensive Alder Lake alternatives.
Below, we have the geometric mean of our gaming test suite at 1080p and 1440p and a cumulative measure of performance in single- and multi-threaded applications. Remember that we conducted the gaming tests with an RTX 3090, so performance deltas will shrink with lesser cards and higher resolution and fidelity settings. We might see bigger performance deltas when new, more powerful GPUs arrive later this year.
The $299 Ryzen 7 5700X doesn’t do much to separate itself from the pack in gaming — even the $199 Ryzen 5 5600 is competitive here, but at a much lower price point. After a bit of tuning, the Ryzen 7 5700X is the equivalent of the 5800X, but that doesn’t matter much given that the 5800X’s positioning never made sense anyway.
The faster and more affordable Alder Lake alternatives outweigh the 5700X in either performance or value, and sometimes both. For example, at stock settings, the Intel Core i5-12600K is 4.5% faster than the 5700X in 1080p gaming and 15% faster after overclocking, but for $30 (10%) less. On the other hand, if you’re only interested in gaming and looking for an even better value, the $175 Core i5-12400 offers comparable gaming performance to the Ryzen 7 5700X at both stock and overclocked settings, but for $125 (42%) less.
The Ryzen 7 5700X isn’t competitive with Intel’s chips in single-threaded applications, and it doesn’t offer a meaningful advance over the other Ryzen 5000 chips. The 5700X does pull ahead of the Core i5-12400 in threaded workloads, but it commands a significant premium for that advantage. In contrast, the Core i5-12600K’s e-cores contribute to a 21% lead over the Ryzen 7 5700X in our suite’s most demanding threaded workloads, underlining the fact that 12600K is the faster chip in all facets. Surprisingly, the Core i5-12600K is still $30 less than the Ryzen 7 5700X.
That lower chip pricing helps offset some of the upcharge associated with Alder Lake motherboards; they are more expensive than AMD’s Socket AM4 ecosystem. However, Alder Lake’s access to more modern connectivity options, including the PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 interfaces, provides a more forward-looking platform. Intel’s Socket 1700 will also host at least one (and perhaps two) more generations of chips, while AMD’s AM4 is headed for retirement and doesn’t offer the latest connectivity options.
Despite AMD’s previous assurances that it would provide a cooler with all 65W and below Zen 3 chips, the company chose to skip the bundled cooler with the Ryzen 7 5700X, adding additional cost if you’re building out a new system. For gaming-only builds, that completely eliminates the Ryzen 7 5700X from the competition with the Core i5-12400 that comes with a cooler and a much more amenable price tag.
The Ryzen 5000 chips can now drop into existing socket AM4 motherboards dating back to the 300-series that debuted in 2017, making them an attractive drop-in upgrade for some Ryzen owners. That upgrade path is even more important given the recent shortages and price hikes we’ve seen, and it might keep some Ryzen owners from jumping ship to Intel while they wait for affordable Zen 4 processors. Let’s hope they don’t have to wait 18 months after the initial launch.
If you’re looking to upgrade an existing gaming-focused Ryzen build, the Ryzen 5 5600 or 5600X offers comparable gaming performance to the Ryzen 5 5700X. These chips are a much better value, but they aren’t as fast in threaded workloads. As such, the Ryzen 7 5700X only makes sense if you’re upgrading an older Ryzen build and need more performance in threaded workloads.
The Ryzen 7 5700X isn’t a good investment for new builds — you should look to the Intel Core i5-12400 or Core i5-12600K instead — and it is hard to recommend for gaming-focus rigs, even for Ryzen upgraders. Like the Ryzen 7 5800X before it, the 5700X is only appealing to Ryzen upgraders that want more performance in heavily-threaded workloads but can’t or don’t need to step up to the Ryzen 9 5900X. If you need to upgrade an older Ryzen system and are interested in gaming specifically, you should stick to the Ryzen 5 5600/X or step up to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which is currently the fastest CPU for gaming available.
| Intel Socket 1700 DDR4 (Z690) | Core i7-12700K, Core i5-12600K, Core i5-12400 |
| MSI Z690A WiFi DDR4 | |
| 2x 8GB Trident Z Royal DDR4-3600 – Stock: DDR4-3200 14-14-14-36 / OC: DDR4-3800 – All Gear 1 | |
| AMD Socket AM4 (X570) | AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, Ryzen 7 5800X, Ryzen 7 5700X, Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 5 5600 |
| ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero | |
| 2x 8GB Trident Z Royal DDR4-3600 – Stock: DDR4-3200 14-14-14-36 | OC/PBO: DDR4-3800 | |
| All Systems | Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3090 Eagle – Gaming and ProViz applications |
| Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE – Application tests | |
| 2TB Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus – Silverstone ST1100-TI – Corsair H115i AIO – Arctic MX-4 TIM – Open Benchtable – Windows 11 Pro |
The eight-core 16-thread $299 AMD Ryzen 7 5700X comes to market as a slightly modified yet lower-cost version of its predecessor, the $335 Ryzen 7 5800X, but it offers nearly the same gaming and application performance after a bit of no-hassle tuning. The 5700X debuts as part of AMD’s newest line of seven Ryzen 5000 models that are designed to shore up the company’s rankings in CPU benchmarks and retake its position on the Best CPUs for gaming list. That’s a critical need after Intel’s Alder Lake upset the Ryzen lineup with a better blend of both pricing and performance.
The Ryzen 7 5700X leverages the same Zen 3 architecture and 7nm process as its counterparts and drops into the existing ecosystem of AM4 motherboards. Its predecessor, the 5800X, has always been an oddly-positioned chip, with its price point making it the lone Ryzen 5000 processor that didn’t make much sense for just about anyone due to competing products from both Intel and AMD. In fact, the 5800X’s positioning was so poor that we asked where the Ryzen 7 5700X was right in the title box of our original review (seen below).
It took AMD eighteen months, but it has now finally released the Ryzen 7 5700X. It’s certainly late, though. As we explained in our 5800X review back in 2020, AMD really needed the ‘missing’ Ryzen 7 5700X to plug the big pricing gap in its product stack and make it easier for its customers to jump from Ryzen 5 to Ryzen 7 instead of buying an Intel processor.
However, that was back when AMD competed with Intel’s 10th-Gen processors. The game has changed entirely since then — 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 purportedly on track for release this year. AMD also has its 5nm Ryzen 7000 ‘Raphael’ Zen 4 chips slated to arrive at the end of the year, but they’ll arrive with the new AM5 platform. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 7 5700X drops into the long-lived Socket AM4 platforms that have shepherded the Ryzen chips from their infancy with the Ryzen 7 1800X in 2017 to the current day, but that cuts off any future upgrade path for adopters.
Naturally, AMD has a different pricing strategy today than we would have seen back in 2020: The 65W Ryzen 7 5700X is $150 less than the launch price of its full-fledged 105W sibling, the Ryzen 7 5800X. That isn’t relevant to today’s pricing situation, though — the 5700X is only $35 less than the 5800X’s average pricing at retail. That isn’t much of a discount.
Here’s a quick snapshot of the 5700X’s average performance in our gaming test suite and key single- and multi-threaded applications. You’ll find much more extensive testing below, but this gives you a good general sense of how the Ryzen 7 5700X stacks up against Intel’s competing chips.
The Ryzen 7 5700X’s biggest competition comes in the form of the 41% cheaper $175 Core i5-12400 that is similar in gaming but trails it in threaded applications, while the Core i5-12600K takes a much larger lead in all facets of performance, but for 10% less cash.
In gaming, the Ryzen 7 5700X lands within 2% of its higher-priced predecessor, the 5800X, and a dead-simple one-click process (PBO) allows it to match the 5800X in threaded applications.
Given the similarities, the Ryzen 7 5700X is really just a price cut for the Ryzen 7 5800X, but it comes disguised as a new product.
The Ryzen 7 5700X is a solid upgrade choice if you already have a system built around a Ryzen 1000- or 2000-series processor and need more threaded horsepower. However, if you’re a Ryzen upgrader that’s only interested in gaming, you could save some cash with the Ryzen 5 5600, which offers comparable gaming performance at a much friendlier $199 price point. For new builds, you should look to Intel chips, like the Core i5-12400 or Core i5-12600K, and their more modern accommodations.
Let’s take a quick look at the specs, then get right to our full gaming and application test results below.
AMD Ryzen 7 5700X Specifications and Pricing
| Street / MSRP | Cores | Threads | P-Core Base/Boost | E-Core Base/Boost | L3 Cache | TDP / PBP / MTP | DDR4-3200 | |
| Ryzen 9 5900X | $400 ($549) | 12P | 24 Threads | 3.7 / 4.8 GHz | – | 32MB | 105W | DDR4-3200 |
| Ryzen 7 5800X3D | $449 | 8P | 16 Threads | 3.4 / 4.5 GHz | – | 96MB | 105W | DDR4-3200 |
| Ryzen 7 5800X | $335 ($449) | 8P | 16 Threads | 3.8 / 4.7 GHz | – | 32MB | 105W | DDR4-3200 |
| Core i7-12700K / KF | $380 (K) – $377 (KF) | 8P + 4E | 12 Cores / 20 Threads | 3.6 / 5.0 GHz | 2.7 / 3.8 GHz | 25MB | 125W / 190W | DDR4-3200 / DDR5-4800 |
| Ryzen 7 5700X | $299 | 8P | 16 Threads | 3.4 / 4.6 | – | 32MB | 65W | DDR4-3200 |
| Core i5-12600K / KF | $270 (K) – $264 (KF) | 6P+4E | 10 Cores / 16 Threads | 3.7 / 4.9 | 2.8 / 3.6 | 16MB | 125W / 150W | DDR4-3200 / DDR5-4800 |
| Ryzen 5 5600X | $230 ($299) | 6P | 12 Threads | 3.7 / 4.6 | – | 32MB | 65W | DDR4-3200 |
| Ryzen 5 5600 | $199 | 6P | 12 Threads | 3.5 / 4.4 | – | 32MB | 65W | DDR4-3200 |
| Core i5-12400 / F | $175 – $170 (F) | 6P+0E | 6 Cores /12 Threads | 4.4 / 2.5 | – | 18MB | 65W / 117W | DDR4-3200 / DDR5-4800 |
The Ryzen 7 5700X slots into the Ryzen stack with eight cores and 16 threads. At $299, the 5700X is the highest-priced 65W part from AMD, filling in the gap between the powerful 105W Ryzen 7 5800X that retails for $335 and the $225 Ryzen 5 5600X that also comes with a 65W TDP.
The Ryzen 7 5700X comes with a 3.4 GHz base, a 4.6 GHz boost clock, and the same chiplet-equipped ‘Vermeer’ design as the existing Ryzen 5000 models. As such, the 65W Ryzen 7 5700X’s eight-core 16-thread design is identical to the 105W Ryzen 7 5800X — they both even have 32MB of L3 cache.
To differentiate the two, AMD merely trimmed the Ryzen 7 5700X’s clock rates to accommodate its 40W lower TDP. As a result, the TDP ratings and clock rates are the only difference between the two chips. This is likely purely the result of artificial segmentation; given the maturity of the TSMC 7nm process, it is unlikely that AMD has many dies that couldn’t reach the extra 100 MHz boost that would make them suitable for the 5800X. If so, the company could have simply used them for the higher-priced and higher-margin Ryzen 7 5800X3D.
Compared to the 5800X, 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. However, as we’ll demonstrate below, that’s extremely simple to rectify with AMD’s one-click Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) auto-overclocking feature. If you engage PBO and have a suitable cooler, there is little to no difference between the 5700X and 5800X in threaded workloads.
AMD broke with tradition at the Ryzen 5000 launch and scuttled one of its biggest value-adds; except for its 65W TDP models, AMD stopped providing ‘free’ bundled coolers with its Ryzen processors. Unfortunately, now AMD has inexplicably ditched that policy, too, so the 65W Ryzen 7 5700X also comes without a cooler.
The $299 Ryzen 7 5700X faces intense pressure from Intel’s Alder Lake from both above and below: The less-expensive $175 Core i5-12400 offers slightly faster gaming performance but trails in threaded applications. However, it comes with a cooler, magnifying the value prop for gamers. Meanwhile, Intel’s $270 Core i5-12600K beats the Ryzen 7 5700X in every facet and also doesn’t have a cooler, but it retails for $30 less to offset Intel’s higher motherboard costs. This is to say that the Ryzen 7 5700X would have certainly been more compelling if it came with a bundled cooler.
The Ryzen 7 5700X fully supports overclocking, including core clocks, memory, and the Infinity Fabric, and will drop into existing 400- and 500-series motherboards (Socket AM4). AMD’s upcoming BIOS updates will also enable support on most older 300-series platforms. You’ll need a BIOS with AGESA 1.2.0.6b (or newer) for the Ryzen 7 5700X. AMD says that Ryzen 5000 support will vary by vendor, as will the timeline for new BIOS revisions. However, we should see them all by the end of May 2022. These BIOS revisions also fix AMD’s fTPM stuttering issues.
The 5700X also doesn’t support the leading-edge connectivity options, like DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, that you’ll find with Alder Lake, but it does support up to DDR4-3200 and PCIe 4.0. AMD won’t be able to match intel’s connectivity tech until its 5nm Ryzen 7000 ‘Raphael’ Zen 4 CPUs arrive later this year.
Test Setup and Overclocking
The Ryzen 7 5700X fully supports overclocking, so you’re free to tune the processor manually via multiplier adjustments or with the auto-overclocking Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) feature. As with most Ryzen chips, we could only reach DDR4-3800 with the fabric speed at 1900 MHz. This setting allows us to run the memory in the desired low-latency ‘coupled’ (1:1 ratio) mode. You can get higher memory transfer rates by running with uncoupled memory, but that results in less performance in games.
For our “PBO” results, we engaged Precision Boost Overdrive with the ‘Auto’ setting and changed the Scalar setting to 10X. As a reminder, you can engage PBO from within Windows through the Ryzen Master software. There really isn’t much more to say about our tuning efforts — it’s simple to get the gains you see below.
We typically test Intel processors with the power limits fully removed for our standard measurements, so the Core i5-12400 and Core i5-12600K run beyond Intel’s ‘recommended’ power settings even at stock settings. However, they remain within warranty. This is the default configuration with most motherboards.
Aside from a few errant programs for Intel, the overall trends for both AMD and Intel should be similar with Windows 10 and 11. As such, we’re sticking with Windows 11 benchmarks in this article. We also stuck with DDR4 for Alder Lake testing, as overall performance trends are generally comparable between DDR4 and DDR5. We have a deeper dive into what that looks like in our initial Core i9-12900K review.
We tested the Ryzen 7 5700X in two configurations:
- Ryzen 7 5700X: Corsair H115i 280mm water cooler, default power limits, DDR4-3200 in Coupled mode
- Ryzen 7 5700X PBO: Corsair H115i 280mm water cooler, Precision Boost Overdrive = Auto, Scalar = 10X, DDR4-3800 in Coupled mode (fabric at 1800 MHz)
AMD Ryzen 7 5700X Gaming Benchmarks — The TLDR
As usual, we’re testing with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 to reduce GPU-imposed bottlenecks as much as possible, and differences between test subjects will shrink with lesser cards or higher resolutions. Because most of the titles below show little meaningful differentiation at higher resolutions, we only tested four of the seven titles at 1440p. Be aware that the limited selection of titles tested at 1440p can result in large swings in our cumulative measurements if there’s a big increase in a single title — those swings would be more muted if we had a larger selection of 1440p titles.
The above charts comprise the geometric mean of our standard gaming test suite, but we include the individual results in the charts below.
The story of the Ryzen 7 5700X and 5800X emerges very quickly when we compare the stock versus PBO (overclocked) test results. At stock settings at 1080p, the 5800X is a scant 1.9% faster than the 5700X, and that same delta applies after tuning the memory and engaging PBO. The 2% difference in gaming performance between these two chips will be imperceptible — and that’s with one of the fastest GPUs available. This class of chip will most commonly be paired with a lower-tier GPU, so the difference between the two chips will be even slimmer to non-existent in most real-world gaming use-cases. However, the 5800X costs 11% more, which obviously isn’t a great deal.
The Ryzen 7 5700X faces stout competition from the Core i5-12600K, which is 4.5% faster at stock and a whopping 15% faster after tuning, but for $30 (10%) less. You’ll need to pony up for a beefier cooler to extract that extra overclocking performance from the 12600K, but it’s obviously worth having that option available.
Even more concerning for the Ryzen 7 5700X, the $175 Core i5-12400 provides comparable gaming performance at both stock and overclocked settings, but for $125 (42%) less. Naturally, the Ryzen 7 5700X will have more heft in heavily-threaded applications, but if you’re focused specifically on gaming, it isn’t nearly as good of a value as the Core i5-12400.
In fact, the Ryzen 7 5700X faces the same issue the Ryzen 7 5800X did: The Ryzen 5 5600X is just as potent in gaming but costs far less. At stock settings, the Ryzen 5 5600X effectively ties the 5700X in average framerates. Now, the Ryzen 7 5700X does provide somewhat better 99th percentile framerates than the 5600X, but that comes with a pretty hefty $70 upcharge. Of course, you could also opt for the $199 Ryzen 5 5600, which again offers nearly the same performance as the 5600X but shaves another $30 off the list price.
The Ryzen 7 5700X isn’t a good investment for a new gaming build, and if you’re solely interested in gaming, the Ryzen 7 5700X also isn’t the best bang-for-the-buck upgrade for a previous-gen Ryzen system.
| Tom’s Hardware – 5800X3D Baseline | 1080p Game Benchmarks – fps %age |
| Ryzen 7 5800X3D | 100% |
| Core i9-12700K DDR4 | 88.6% |
| Ryzen 9 5900X | 82.6% |
| Core i5-12600K | 80.1% |
| Ryzen 7 5800X | 78.1% |
| Core i5-12400 | 77.1% |
| Ryzen 7 5700X | 76.7% |
| Ryzen 5 5600X | 76.1% |
It is noteworthy that we might see larger performance deltas when new, more powerful GPUs arrive later this year. Moving over to 1440p brings a GPU bottleneck into the equation, so the performance deltas between the chips shrink tremendously. However, those results provide a good perspective if you game at higher resolutions and don’t plan to upgrade your GPU before buying your next CPU.
The competition between Intel and AMD is much closer now, so it’s best to make an informed decision based on the types of titles you play frequently. Be sure to check out the individual tests below.
Overall, the Ryzen 7 5800X and 5700X are very similar in most games, especially after overclocking. The results below show a consistent theme of the Ryzen 7 5800X beating the 5700X slightly when both chips are at stock settings, but an imperceptible difference after overclocking both chips.
3DMark, VRMark, Chess Engines on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
Synthetic benchmarks don’t tend to translate well to real-world gaming, but they do show us the raw amount of compute power exposed to game engines. It’s too bad most games don’t fully exploit it.
Aside from VRMark, which is exceptionally sensitive to clock frequency, this series of tests is very indicative of the general trends we’ll see below: The stock 5700X trails the stock 5800X, but simple overclocking makes these chips nearly identical.
Far Cry 6 on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
Far Cry 6 is sensitive to memory latency and clock rates, giving the 5800X a decent lead. The Precision Boost Overdrive feature allows Ryzen processors to operate at higher multi-core boost speeds, but it doesn’t allow them to exceed their maximum boost clock rate. As such, the 5800X is 1.8% faster in this frequency-sensitive game after we engage PBO on both chips, but we’ll see plenty of other titles below where the chips are identical.
F1 2021 on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
The Ryzen 7 5800X holds the lead over the stock 5700X at stock settings, but the 5700X is 0.4 fps faster (a tie) after we engage PBO and tune the memory on both chips.
Hitman 3 on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
Intel collaborated with the IO Interactive team to optimize Hitman 3’s Glacier 2 game engine for Alder Lake’s x86 hybrid architecture, a fact Intel heavily promoted during its launch. This obviously gives the Core i5-12600K and its four efficiency cores (e-cores) an advantage in this benchmark. Meanwhile, the Core i5-12400, which doesn’t have e-cores, lands down near the Ryzen 7 5700X.
Horizon Zero Dawn on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
Here we can see the challenge posed to the Ryzen 7 5700X from within AMD’s own stable — the Ryzen 5 5600X is extremely competitive in this title with the 5700X, but it is significantly less expensive.
Red Dead Redemption 2 on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
Red Dead Redemption 2 finds the Ryzen 7 5700X again tying the 5800X after tuning, but the Ryzen 5 5600X is actually slightly faster than the stock Ryzen 7 5700X.
Watch Dogs Legion on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
AMD Ryzen 7 5700X Application Benchmarks — The TLDR
We can boil down productivity application performance into two broad categories: single- and multi-threaded. These slides show the geometric mean of performance in several of our most important tests in each category, but be sure to look at the expanded results below.
The Ryzen 7 5800X is 4.4% faster in our cumulative measurement of single-threaded work, which is within expectations given its slightly higher boost clock rate. The Ryzen 5 5600X also offers nearly the same performance as the 5700X. As expected, engaging PBO doesn’t change much in this metric, as it doesn’t boost the peak clock rates. Rather, PBO improves performance in multi-core workloads, as we see in the threaded tests.
The Ryzen processors simply can’t keep pace with the Alder Lake chips in single-threaded work: The Core i5-12400 is 9.7% faster than the Ryzen 7 5700X in single-threaded work, while the Core i5-12600K is a whopping 21% faster at stock settings, and 26% faster after overclocking.
The multi-threaded results reveal that the Ryzen 7 5800X is 12% faster than the stock Ryzen 7 5700X, but engaging PBO shrinks the delta between the chips to less than one percent. But, again, the 5700X and 5800X are remarkably similar after tuning.
In threaded work, the Ryzen 7 5700X is 11.5% faster than the Core i5-12400 at stock settings and 19% faster after tuning, showing that its only real advantage over the 12400 resides in multi-threaded applications. The Core i5-12600K puts its e-cores to good use, though, carving out a 21% lead at stock settings and an 18.7% lead after tuning. That’s impressive given its lower price point, not to mention that it beats the 5700X by convincing margins in single-threaded work and gaming, too.
| Tom’s Hardware – Application Benchmarks | Single-Threaded | Multi-Threaded |
| Core i7-12700K DDR4 | 100% | 100% |
| Core i5-12600K DDR4 | 98.6% | 77.9% |
| Core i5-12400 DDR4 | 89.3% | 57.5% |
| Ryzen 9 5900X | 86.2% | 96.6% |
| Ryzen 7 5800X | 85% | 72% |
| Ryzen 7 5700X / PBO | 81.4% / – | 64.1% / 71.5% |
| Ryzen 5 5600X | 81% | 56.7% |
| Ryzen 7 5800X3D | 79.4% | 71.3% |
Rendering Benchmarks on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
The same general trends we saw in the cumulative multi-threaded performance measurements are clearly at play in this series of tests. After overclocking, the Ryzen 7 5700X is essentially the same processor as the Ryzen 7 5800X, but the Core i5-12600K still takes the lead across the board. The Core i5-12400 can’t match the more generously endowed chips but is surprisingly performant given its price, particularly in single-threaded tasks.
Encoding Benchmarks on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
It’s easy to spot the lightly-threaded encoders in this lineup — the Intel chips lead the chart for each of them.
Web Browsing, Office and Productivity on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
The ubiquitous web browser is one of the most frequently used applications. These tests tend to be lightly threaded, so a snappy response time is critical.
Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Lightroom on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
We’ve integrated the UL Benchmarks Procyon tests into our suite to replace the aging PCMark 10. This new benchmark runs complex Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Lightroom workflows with the actual software, making for a great real-world test suite.
Compilation, Compression, AVX Benchmarks on AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
This grab bag of various tests finds the Ryzen 7 5700X exhibiting much the same performance trend as we’ve seen throughout this round of testing — after tuning, it is essentially the same as the Ryzen 7 5800X. That would be a bit more encouraging if, outside of decompression/compression and cryptography, the Core i5-12600K didn’t outperform both Ryzen 7 models in the majority of these workloads.
A Price Cut in Disguise
The Ryzen 7 5700X is the chip that enthusiasts longed for back in 2020, but today it simply serves as a price cut for the 5800X that comes disguised as a new product. Intel’s Alder Lake lineup caught AMD flat-footed as its waits for its 5nm Ryzen 7000 ‘Raphael’ Zen 4 CPUs, so the company’s recent refresh serves as a way to lower the pricing on its Ryzen 5000 family without publicly ceding ground with official price cuts. The Ryzen 7 5700X, like the rest of AMD’s recent additions, arrives too late to market to make any real meaningful impact, particularly in comparison to the faster, less expensive Alder Lake alternatives.
Below, we have the geometric mean of our gaming test suite at 1080p and 1440p and a cumulative measure of performance in single- and multi-threaded applications. Remember that we conducted the gaming tests with an RTX 3090, so performance deltas will shrink with lesser cards and higher resolution and fidelity settings. We might see bigger performance deltas when new, more powerful GPUs arrive later this year.
The $299 Ryzen 7 5700X doesn’t do much to separate itself from the pack in gaming — even the $199 Ryzen 5 5600 is competitive here, but at a much lower price point. After a bit of tuning, the Ryzen 7 5700X is the equivalent of the 5800X, but that doesn’t matter much given that the 5800X’s positioning never made sense anyway.
The faster and more affordable Alder Lake alternatives outweigh the 5700X in either performance or value, and sometimes both. For example, at stock settings, the Intel Core i5-12600K is 4.5% faster than the 5700X in 1080p gaming and 15% faster after overclocking, but for $30 (10%) less. On the other hand, if you’re only interested in gaming and looking for an even better value, the $175 Core i5-12400 offers comparable gaming performance to the Ryzen 7 5700X at both stock and overclocked settings, but for $125 (42%) less.
The Ryzen 7 5700X isn’t competitive with Intel’s chips in single-threaded applications, and it doesn’t offer a meaningful advance over the other Ryzen 5000 chips. The 5700X does pull ahead of the Core i5-12400 in threaded workloads, but it commands a significant premium for that advantage. In contrast, the Core i5-12600K’s e-cores contribute to a 21% lead over the Ryzen 7 5700X in our suite’s most demanding threaded workloads, underlining the fact that 12600K is the faster chip in all facets. Surprisingly, the Core i5-12600K is still $30 less than the Ryzen 7 5700X.
That lower chip pricing helps offset some of the upcharge associated with Alder Lake motherboards; they are more expensive than AMD’s Socket AM4 ecosystem. However, Alder Lake’s access to more modern connectivity options, including the PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 interfaces, provides a more forward-looking platform. Intel’s Socket 1700 will also host at least one (and perhaps two) more generations of chips, while AMD’s AM4 is headed for retirement and doesn’t offer the latest connectivity options.
Despite AMD’s previous assurances that it would provide a cooler with all 65W and below Zen 3 chips, the company chose to skip the bundled cooler with the Ryzen 7 5700X, adding additional cost if you’re building out a new system. For gaming-only builds, that completely eliminates the Ryzen 7 5700X from the competition with the Core i5-12400 that comes with a cooler and a much more amenable price tag.
The Ryzen 5000 chips can now drop into existing socket AM4 motherboards dating back to the 300-series that debuted in 2017, making them an attractive drop-in upgrade for some Ryzen owners. That upgrade path is even more important given the recent shortages and price hikes we’ve seen, and it might keep some Ryzen owners from jumping ship to Intel while they wait for affordable Zen 4 processors. Let’s hope they don’t have to wait 18 months after the initial launch.
If you’re looking to upgrade an existing gaming-focused Ryzen build, the Ryzen 5 5600 or 5600X offers comparable gaming performance to the Ryzen 5 5700X. These chips are a much better value, but they aren’t as fast in threaded workloads. As such, the Ryzen 7 5700X only makes sense if you’re upgrading an older Ryzen build and need more performance in threaded workloads.
The Ryzen 7 5700X isn’t a good investment for new builds — you should look to the Intel Core i5-12400 or Core i5-12600K instead — and it is hard to recommend for gaming-focus rigs, even for Ryzen upgraders. Like the Ryzen 7 5800X before it, the 5700X is only appealing to Ryzen upgraders that want more performance in heavily-threaded workloads but can’t or don’t need to step up to the Ryzen 9 5900X. If you need to upgrade an older Ryzen system and are interested in gaming specifically, you should stick to the Ryzen 5 5600/X or step up to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which is currently the fastest CPU for gaming available.
| Intel Socket 1700 DDR4 (Z690) | Core i7-12700K, Core i5-12600K, Core i5-12400 |
| MSI Z690A WiFi DDR4 | |
| 2x 8GB Trident Z Royal DDR4-3600 – Stock: DDR4-3200 14-14-14-36 / OC: DDR4-3800 – All Gear 1 | |
| AMD Socket AM4 (X570) | AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, Ryzen 7 5800X, Ryzen 7 5700X, Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 5 5600 |
| ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero | |
| 2x 8GB Trident Z Royal DDR4-3600 – Stock: DDR4-3200 14-14-14-36 | OC/PBO: DDR4-3800 | |
| All Systems | Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3090 Eagle – Gaming and ProViz applications |
| Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE – Application tests | |
| 2TB Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus – Silverstone ST1100-TI – Corsair H115i AIO – Arctic MX-4 TIM – Open Benchtable – Windows 11 Pro |