I currently have a Ryzen 5 7600, but its six cores are starting to feel limiting in some newer games. I'm considering upgrading to either the eight-core Ryzen 7 7700 or the 7700X, but there's about a $50 difference between them. Since the performance gap is usually only a few percent, I'm wondering whether the regular 7700 is the better value, especially with PBO potentially narrowing the gap. Would the 7700X be worth paying extra for? Also, should I consider a 12-core processor if I mainly play single-player and non-competitive games?
3 Answers
Between those two, I’d get the regular 7700. The 7700X generally isn’t worth an extra $50 for a small gaming performance increase, particularly if you enable PBO. The 7600 is still perfectly adequate for most games, so neither upgrade is likely to feel dramatic. If you want a clearly larger improvement, saving for an X3D processor would make more sense.
For gaming, an X3D model would generally be a better upgrade than either the 7700 or 7700X. Some strategy, simulation, and newer Unreal Engine games can benefit from eight cores, but that doesn’t automatically make a 12-core CPU worthwhile. Unless you regularly run heavy applications alongside games, extra cores are unlikely to improve your experience much.
That makes sense, although a few newer games list eight cores as a recommendation. I was mainly concerned about titles such as Control Resonant and other Unreal Engine 5 games, but it still sounds like waiting for a stronger X3D upgrade is the better move.
If you’re choosing only between these two, buy the 7700 and keep the $50. The 7700X uses more power and runs hotter for a relatively small gain, and the difference can be reduced with tuning. Since you already have a 7600, I’d honestly consider waiting and saving for a 7800X3D or another comparable X3D chip instead of making a small intermediate upgrade.
Most games still don’t use many cores effectively, and even when they do, the extra cores often provide only a modest benefit. A higher-cache X3D chip is usually more useful for gaming than simply moving from six to eight cores.