3700x vs 3800x

[Drago MkII]

Is there any reason to go for a 3700x rather than a 3800x if the price difference is only £10?

Only thing I can see is the TDP is lower which I assume means it's more power efficient and needs less cooling but would that actually be worth it?

[DanceswithUnix]

On a lot of motherboards you can go into the BIOS with a 3800X and turn the power level down, which kind of takes some risk out of that purchase. You can't so easily turn up a 3700X, not that I think you have to.

But assuming you can't do that, I think it mainly depends on how well you can get rid of the extra heat. My 3700X has been awesome, but if that is the price difference I would probably get the 3800X. I ended up with an aftermarket cooler anyway, in a reasonably big ATX case with decent airflow that used to happily take an FX8350 so any Ryzen is fine in that sort of circumstance. If it was going into one of the SFF pcs I have in the house, I would get the 3700X.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

IIRC,the Ryzen 7 3700X has a cooler included,and the Ryzen 7 3800X does not AFAIK. So that is an added cost for the latter. Also if you don't want the cooler,they go for decent money on Ebay.However,the Ryzen 7 3800X is probably higher clocking silicon,so with sufficient cooling and power delivery will probably clock higher.

[DanceswithUnix]

IIRC,the Ryzen 7 3700X has a cooler included,and the Ryzen 7 3800X does not AFAIK.

That's just the 3800XT that doesn't come with a cooler. The 3800X should come with a Wraith Prism, the same vaguely acceptable one as the 3700X.

[ik9000]

for just £10 go 3800x - no brainer tbh. Just check you're not overpaying obviously. If you can go 5000 series though eg 5700x that would be better than 3800x for most scenarios.

[Drago MkII]

There is no 5700x yet is there? Didn't think there had even been anything said about one. Read somewhere about a 5800 non x but fold were saying it was going to be just OEM for prebuilts.

3800x I can get for £270 from currys, the 3700x is £260, cant see either at a better price anywhere else.

[ik9000]

5600x 5700x 5800x 5900x 5950x all out and trickling through but you'll want to use the discord channels to help you beat the bots

[Drago MkII]

Digging around for the 5700x it seems it is currently still just rumor. All I find is articles with rumored specs like this one https://www.cpu-rumors.com/tag/amd-ryzen-7-5700x/

And then this reddit thread from a couple months ago with folk discussing whether it will ever get released. https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comment...ryzen_7_5700x/

At any rate I managed to get Currys to price match a fairly brief Amazon price drop on the 3800x to £260. With the 7% voucher codes from work made it £242.50 so pretty pleased with that.

[PCgamer]

I have 3800x and there is zero difference in performance to 3700x I see on reviews, get the one you can buy cheaper

[ik9000]

you may be right on the 5700x all the others are out though. With the performance uplift I'd try and get one of those if it were me.

[ik9000]

I have 3800x and there is zero difference in performance to 3700x I see on reviews, get the one you can buy cheaper

Our own forum testing says similarly, but the benefit of 3800x, if only £10 difference, is that as a higher binned and clocked part it will boost further before throttling PROVIDED that the cooling solution is good enough to let it. I see in my own benching on my 3900x PBO taking it to the limit and holding it there, and then blips where it pulls off to balance the temps. With a 3700x you have that lower threshold, but it will mean it will hold it there with a lesser cooler.

[DanceswithUnix]

With a 3700x you have that lower threshold, but it will mean it will hold it there with a lesser cooler.

My 3700X will do my daily compile jobs with all cores pegged at a steady 4.0GHz without any overclocking. The Wraith Prism was at least 100MHz slower than that and louder, so I would suggest even with the 3700X getting an aftermarket cooler even if it is a cheap one like mine.

This chip is supposed to have a "base clock" of 3.6GHz, but I never seem to see it using that value so it seems fairly meaningless to me.

[Drago MkII]

The £242.50 price I got made the 3800x £20 cheaper than the best I could get the 3700x for so made it not even a choice anymore really. I had seen someone complaining about the 3800x, saying it was randomly boosting to 4.5Ghz when just moving a mouse across the screen and causing the fans on an arctic freezer 34 eSports duo to go crazy for short periods. They were saying it was part of intended behaviour. Perhaps a little worrying when that's the cooler I was planning on getting.

[ik9000]

The £242.50 price I got made the 3800x £20 cheaper than the best I could get the 3700x for so made it not even a choice anymore really. I had seen someone complaining about the 3800x, saying it was randomly boosting to 4.5Ghz when just moving a mouse across the screen and causing the fans on an arctic freezer 34 eSports duo to go crazy for short periods. They were saying it was part of intended behaviour. Perhaps a little worrying when that's the cooler I was planning on getting.

this is PBO and bad fan set-up combo. Having played extensively with mine I recommend:

1) adjust your fan profile in BIOS UEFI to something sensible. Have it start at a reasonable threshold and hold there for longer before it cranks itself based on CPU temp.
2) adjusting the fan profile latency in BIOS/UEFI to have a longer lag before it starts
3) capping fan speed either by an offset controller like the noctua NH-FC1 or BIOS (to drop the PWM signal by a defined offset)

I found by capping my fan speed to a sensible noise level I loose 2-3% performance. I can live with that. And by placing the noctua dial outside the case (via a couple of daisy chained fan cable extensions) I can crank the fan back to 100% if I need every last drop out of it). I'm using Noctua NH-U14s with two Akasa Viper-R fans. More air flow for a given noise dBA, and flat out while way louder they just plain shift way more air. It's not that the Noctua fans were loud, it's just they weren't nearly as powerful for the same audible impact.

[ik9000]

My 3700X will do my daily compile jobs with all cores pegged at a steady 4.0GHz without any overclocking. The Wraith Prism was at least 100MHz slower than that and louder, so I would suggest even with the 3700X getting an aftermarket cooler even if it is a cheap one like mine.

This chip is supposed to have a "base clock" of 3.6GHz, but I never seem to see it using that value so it seems fairly meaningless to me.

that's interesting I've not seen my 3900x go above the rated 4.6GHz boost, but I haven't paid much attention to the multicore value. I will have a look this evening.

[DanceswithUnix]

this is PBO and bad fan set-up combo.

Did you find PBO gave a noticeable speed increase? The standard Precision Boost seems pretty good at extracting speed out of my chip, from reading around the PBO option seemed like it just made the chip hotter without any real performance benefit. That and PBO counting as an overclock on what is mainly a work machine and must be rock solid rather put me off.

that's interesting I've not seen my 3900x go above the rated 4.6GHz boost, but I haven't paid much attention to the multicore value. I will have a look this evening.

My day job does a lot of cross compiles using GCC under Linux. I can max 16 threads no problem for the main compile before it switches to a link phase and chugs a single thread for a while.

Watching the frequencies on the cores, I get an initial kick just over 4.0GHz and then it drops to about 3.95 before the fans ramp up and it goes back up again almost to 4.0. So it feels like I'm still thermally limited and a bit more fan speed would keep the cpu going a bit faster, but this is nice and quiet and quite quick enough to get the work done.