AMD's Ryzen 7 2700 CPU: The Ultimate Multi-Core Value?

  • By Ari Altman
  • Published June 4, 2018
  • Updated June 5, 2018

Pros

Excellent multi-threaded performance; good cooler included; very efficient; lots of overclocking headroom

Cons

Overpriced versus the 2700X, which is much faster, includes a better cooler, and costs just $30 more

Star Rating

Introduction

Ryzen

Back when the Ryzen 2000 series launched, we published a full review of the top-seeded chips in the lineup, the Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 7 2700X, and came away very impressed. But there are two other members of the family, the Ryzen 5 2600 and Ryzen 7 2700, which may hold even more value than their X-class brethren. In this review, we'll be taking a close look at the Ryzen 7 2700, in part because its predecessor, the Ryzen 7 1700, proved itself to be a wolf in sheep's clothing and a true favorite of overclockers. Will the 2700 offer the same punch-per-dollar? We're about to find out!

And by the way, there were a couple of other elements of Ryzen performance that we didn't get to explore in depth in our first review that we thought might hold interest to our readers, namely four-stick RAM compatibility and AMD's StoreMI drive acceleration solution. We'll be touching on both of those this time around.

Special thanks to AMD for providing TBG with a sample of the Ryzen 7 2700 processor and the MSI Gaming M7 AC motherboard featured in this review.

Test Setup

    Here's a list of the components we used, along with a photo showing the system sans video card to give you a good look at the motherboard:

    System

    For our initial Ryzen 2000-series launch article, we ran benchmarks on the following CPUs/motherboards, and they'll make a reappearance in this article:

    For our testing, we're using two CPU benchmark tests (CPU-z and Cinebench), one game benchmark test (3DMark Time Spy), and three real-world games: Rise of the Tomb Raider, DOOM, and Rocket League. All game benchmarks were run at a 2560x1440 resolution, which is becoming the new norm for high-performance gaming, and is not a serious challenge for the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 video card we used, meaning the pressure was on the CPU subsystem. You might see CPU game benchmarks run at 1920x1080 or lower resolutions (like the absurd 800x600), but we feel it's a whole lot more informative to run hardware the way it was meant to be run.

    The Ryzen 2000-Series in a Nutshell

    AMD launched four new processors in April 2018, one of these being the Ryzen 7 2700 being tested here. It is the lower-power version of the 2700X we tested at launch, coming in at just 65W TDP:

    Lineup

    We'll return to power use shortly, but first, we are going to focus on a few unique aspects of the platform that we didn't have time to explore in our launch day review.

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