AMD's third-generation Ryzen processors are just a few weeks away from release now, and anticipation is heating up for the new chip line which many expect to be the best performing CPUs AMD has ever released, perhaps even dominating Intel in gaming and productivity tasks for the first time in over a decade. But how do you decide which chip is for you? If you like overclocking, AMD has suggested the 3700X could be the best of the bunch.
With eight-cores, 16-threads, a base clock of 3.6GHz, and a boost clock of 4.4GHz, the 3700X is a ramped up, boosted, and bolstered 2700X with all of the Ryzen 3000 improvements to IPC and efficiency. It's only a 65w part, which might mean its automated overclocking is more limited compared to the 105w, 6-core 3600X and the 105w 8-core 3800X, but AMD believes that when you get into manual overclocking, the results are stellar.
"I think the top of the stack, you’re going to be fairly limited initially," AMD's Travis Kirsch told PCGamesN. "You know, with our boost algorithms, we eke out just about everything you can get. So maybe a couple hundred megahertz. With the 65W parts you’ll get a lot more because their specs are run with a lower power. So you can overclock the thing, get all the power of it, and, obviously, you get more headroom out of it."
Kirsch did say that he hadn't had the final silicon long enough to really evaluate if the 3700X was the best of the bunch, but that early results were incredibly positive and with enough cooling and power headroom, gamers may be able to get a lot out of their eight-core chip.
All Ryzen 3000 CPUs will be fully unlocked for manual overclocking and also feature a soldered internal TIM, so there shouldn't be any thermal bottlenecks in the chip design itself.
