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Updated on 07/07/2019 Official review are now out.

Updated on 24/07/2019 – Toms Hardware now has a review of the 3800X

With the announcement of the latest AMD CPUs, many people will be wondering if it is worth upgrading from earlier Ryzen chips.

They all use the AM4 socket, so theoretically with a BIOS update, you may be able to swap out the CPU. For the most part, this is true, but some older A or B series motherboards may not be compatible. It is also dependant on the manufacturer pushing out the update. If you have an X370 or X470 board you should be OK though.

The leaks indicated that the Ryzen 7 3700X would be upgraded to 12-cores and if that had been true I would be upgrading my R7 2700 immediately. Sadly this is not the case and the Ryzen 7 chips retain the same 8-core layout.

Buy the R7 3700X for £319.99 from Scan UK
Buy the R7 3800X for £379.99 from Scan UK

Ryzen 7 3700X vs Ryzen 7 3800X Review TLDR

There have only been a limited number of reviews come out for the R7 3800X so things may differ once more sample are tested.

For now, based on the current reviews, the Ryzen 7 3800X doesn’t offer enough of a performance boost over the R7 3700X to justify its £60+ price.

For most gaming tests the 3800X is so close to the 3700X it is not worth working out a percentage difference. When it does have an advantage it is limited to about 1-2% difference while costing you 18.75% more.

Currently, the Zen 2 chips don’t appear to be taking overclocks too well and this could change in the future which may allow the 3800X to differentiate itself. For now, there is no point buying it and you would be better off putting the £60 into a better cooler/GPU/RAM.

Review Roundup for Ryzen 7 3700X

The reviews are coming in now that AMD has lifted their NDA. I will update this post over the next 24 hours to cover all the reviews. The ones that I have seen so far are very positive.

Bit-Tech

Overall, though, the Ryzen 7 3700X is an impressive CPU for the cash, is a far better choice than the Core i7-9700K if you’re a casual gamer and not looking to squeeze every last fps out of your 1080p 200fps titles and blows the Intel CPU out of the water when it comes to content creation. It’s a shame overclocking headroom is limited, but depending on your system, you may find extra benefits from spending some time tweaking Precision Boost Overdrive and Automatic Overclocking.

Bit-Tech

Some of the benchmarks Bit-Tech carried out had the following results:

  • PCMark 10 Photo Editing – 5132 giving a 9.2% improvement from the 2700X
  • Cinebench R20 Single thread- 511 giving a 16.4% improvement from the 2700X
  • Cinebench R20 multi-thread- 4837 giving a 17.8% improvement from the 2700X
  • Dota 2 (DX11) – 100fps min giving a 17.6% improvement from the 2700X
  • Far Cry 5 (DX11) – 91fps min giving a 12.3% improvement from the 2700X
  • Civilization VI (DX12) AI Test – 6.63 giving a 2% improvement from the 2700X
  • 3DMark Time Spy (CPU Test) – 10104 giving a 26% improvement from the 2700X
  • Power Consumption under load – 185 at stock vs 262 of the 2700x which is a 29% reduction

OC3D

It’s fast with single-threaded performance and multi-threaded. The memory performance is excellent. It’s not too power hungry. It doesn’t get too hot. With the addition of PCI Express 4.0 it actually steals a march on the currently available Intel products and is a fantastic setup at a good price point. If you’ve already got a good AM4 X470 motherboard then you can instantly upgrade and reap the benefits too.

Those of you who have recently invested in an X470 based motherboard will be as surprised as we were that with either the Ryzen 7 3700X or Ryzen 9 3900X installed there was no real difference between the X470 or X570 in performance terms. Whether utilising the RX 5700XT GPU or the RTX 2080Ti the scores were basically the same. Perhaps even more amazingly the storage speeds instantly took advantage of the extra bandwidth the PCI Express 4.0 format delivers.

Read Review
  • AIDA64 – 100178 which is 6% higher than the 2700x sitting just a few points behind the i9-9900K
  • SiSoft Sandra – 289.1 which is 11.6% higher than the 2700x and a few points ahead of the i9-9900K
  • Blender – 28m 38s which is 12.5% faster than the 2700x and 2.6% faster than the i9-9900K
  • Cinebench R20 Single is 498 and multi is 5055 so slightly lower than higher than the Bit-Tech test. The single threaded test is 15% faster and the multi-threaded is 25% higher than the 2700x while also being slightly ahead of the i9-9900K
  • Sony Vegas – 16m 13s which is 16.8% faster than the 2700x and 3 seconds faster than the i9-9900K
  • Far Cry 5 – 128 fps which is 16% higher than the 2700x but 16% lower than the i9-9900K
  • Metro Exodus  – 95.7 which is 6.7% higher than the 2700x but 5% lower than the i9-9900K
  • Total War – 110.6 which is 6% higher than the 2700x but 9% lower than the i9-9900K
  • Division 2 – 148 which is 5.8% higher than the 2700x but 5% lower than the i9-9900K

Anandtech

What really does make the Ryzen 3700X and 3900X winners in my eyes is their overall packages and performance. They’re outstanding all-rounders, and AMD has managed to vastly improve some of the aspects it was lagging behind the most. While AMD still needs to further push total single-threaded performance in the future and continue working on improving memory performance, they’re on Intel’s tail.

Perhaps the best arguments for the 3700X and 3900X is their value as well as their power efficiency. At $329 the 3700X particularly seems exciting, and gamers will want to take note that it posts the same gaming performance as the $499 3900X. Considering that AMD is also shipping the CPU with the perfectly reasonable Wrath Spire cooler, this also adds on to the value that you get if you’re budget conscious.

The 3900X essentially has no real competition when it comes to the multi-threaded performance that it’s able to deliver. Here the chip not only bests Intel’s mainstream desktop designs, but it’s able to go toe-to-toe with the lowest rung of Intel’s more specialized HEDT platforms. Even AMD’s own Threadripper line-up is made irrelevant below 16 cores.

Read Review

Review Conclusion for R7 3700X

As we can see from the reviews, the 3700X offers significant gains over the previous generation, and reviews for the higher clocked 3800X haven’t even come out yet.

Whether it is worth upgrading from the Ryzen 7 2700x is another question, for none gaming tasks we have seen results in line with what AMD promised, which is amazing but probably not enough to upgrade from the 2700x. However, if you are on the 1700X then it could certainly be worth it.

With X570 introducing PCIe4 the cost of new motherboards jumps up significantly and make the value proposition of Zen 2 less appealing. Prices start at £164 but go up to a completely insane £704. Thankfully initial reviews show little to no performance advantage for X570, even in PCIe4 storage benchmarks, the difference isn’t significant. So if you have an X470 motherboard I would recommend just keeping that. With these being priced from £110 to £270, this is also the route I would go down for a brand new build unless you have a genuine need for PCIe4.

Intel still takes the crown for the best gaming CPU, at least until the 2800x reviews come out. In the case of Intel, it is a £474.98 vs £319.99 so only people demanding the very best gaming performance would want to go down that route.

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If you’re interested, here are the mightiest CPU options for gaming in 2019. Check it out

Visit page two for the AMD Ryzen 7 3800X round up

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