AMD Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 5 2600X Review

What's Hot, What's Not & Final Thoughts

This is where you can fast forward to the final section of the review, and get a quick recap and points on the Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 5 2600X.

What's Hot

Serious Performance Bumps: Compared to Ryzen 1000-series CPUs, the new Ryzen 2000-series CPUs are real replacements, and cower over their predecessors without any issue. Performance has gone up significantly both in multi-core and single-core scenarios. Single core performance increases and the new Precision Boost 2 algorithm has greatly improved AMD's gaming performance, putting it much closer to Intel than before.

Improved Overclocking Margins: With the original Ryzen processors it was tough getting above 4.1GHz for many, I only had one or two CPUs out of more than a dozen different SKUs that could do 4.1GHz with little stability. That has changed, and most CPUs will be able to hit 4.2GHz on all cores with good stability as long as you have good cooling. Memory overclocking has increased a lot, it was too easy to hit 3600MHz, but you might want a kit tested to work with Ryzen.

Excellent Price to Performance Ratio: The original Ryzen 7 1800X was launched close to $500, and it's replacement is priced almost 30% less but offers a significant performance bump. The 2600X is also priced very competitively at $200.

Wraith Prism Cooler: We really like the RGBs in the Prism cooler. The new addressable RGBs in the ring can produce neat effects, and with the RGBs in the fan and the logo you get some interesting results. Since the lights use PWM just like the fan, you can actually see the fan blades as they turn, and as the cooler speeds up, it looks like the fan goes into reverse and then forward, which is just a trick played by our eyes due to conflicting PWM values used to pulse light. It looks really cool. Cooling performance is also quite good; the fan seems to use the same heat sink as the heat sink that came with the FX8350 processor, just with a different fan and shrouding, and direct copper heat pipe contact with the heat spreader.

What's Not

Power and Temperatures: Power consumption numbers are a bit on the high side, and temperatures did reach into the 60s with the stock cooler at stock, but you have to pay for performance some way.

Final Thoughts

If Ryzen 2nd Generation launched a year ago, Intel might have had to increase the 8700K's core count to 8 cores to keep up. Ryzen 2nd Generation performance gains come from two physical changes; the 12nm process and the optimization of transistor type placement. AMD optimized the transistors in the latency pathways, but to do so they had to expand their power budget, and that's where a lot of these higher power numbers come from. The rest of it has to do with changes to the voltage frequency curve, which allow for higher frequencies.

Those higher frequencies across almost all cores allowed AMD to implement Precision Boost 2, which is where a lot of AMD's gains come from. We can't just think of CPU performance in regards to single core performance and then all core performance, many real workloads exist in between these two, and we can see that in our results, and that is where AMD has greatly improved their processors. The new AMD Ryzen 2nd Generation CPUs are definitely shrinking the performance lead Intel had in gaming, and they still offer better productivity at the similar price points.

Product Summary Breakdown

Performance	93%
Quality	92%
Features	94%
Value	97%

Overall TweakTown Rating

94%

The Bottom Line: AMD's Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 5 2600X are much more powerful than their predecessors and bring significant value and performance improvements to AMD's arsenal.

Read what TweakTown awards and ratings mean!