AMD Ryzen 7 3700X

Building a better mainstream eight-core chip.

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AMD’s THIRD-GENERATION Ryzen CPUs boast higher clock speeds and more cores than the first and second-gen parts. In fact, Zen 2 CPUs are so good that AMD almost doesn’t need the faster offerings—its second-string 3700X is perfectly capable of running the offense, and it isn’t quite as demanding when it comes to signing bonuses and contracts. For those teams (aka PCs) with salary cap concerns that can’t quite justify chasing the 3900X, the 3700X is a versatile QB that can throw a quick short pass, scamper downfield for a modest gain, or even launch the long ball when required.

When it comes to playing football—in other words, running PC games—there’s not a huge difference between the 3700X and the 3900X. In fact, there’s hardly any difference at all. Out of 10 games tested, it’s effectively a tie, with the 3900X hanging on to a scant 0.5 percent lead in frame rates. That’s well within the margin of error, and that’s with an RTX 2080 Ti at 1080p; move up to 1440p or 4K, or downgrade to a slower GPU, and the gap would almost completely disappear.