Ryzen 7 1700 vs. Ryzen 3 3300X: GPU Scaling, 8 Old Cores vs. 4 New Cores

[Julio Franco]

AMD's old-time favorite, the Ryzen 7 1700 seems to have aged rather well. Budget PC builders right now can choose between a Ryzen 3 3300X or a second hand R7 1700 for $130. The 3300X is a 4-core/8-thread CPU that enjoys all the advantages of the Zen 2 architecture, while the R7 1700 has twice as many cores, but older Zen ones. So which wins?

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/review/2057-ryzen-1700-vs-ryzen-3300x/

 

[BSim500]

"For roughly $130, you get the option to buy a new Ryzen 3 3300X. But wait, for that kind of money you can also get a second hand Ryzen 7 1700. This question had us pausing to think about the options."

For a gaming rig, I always go with higher IPC. A few games may well be written for MOAR CORES but by the time 8C/16T becomes a minimum, 1700's & 2700's will be long obsolete anyway. But with higher IPC, "a rising tide lifts all boats" and everything runs naturally faster without anything having to be specially written for extreme threading, something that's often far closer to observable reality of "minimum effort game developer optimization" than some ideological "all we have to do is wait another year and games will scale exactly like Cinebench scores" (by devs who still struggle to get basic stuff like rebindable keys and mouse acceleration right in 2020...)

Edit: And the 3300X clearly won here even with a choice of games stacked firmly in favour of the 1700. Over the past few years I've been suffering more and more from "franchise fatigue" of the same overly recycled AAA IP, and playing a far wider, more interesting and varied mix of AAA/A/Indie games, at which point the average scores spread over 500x very different games widens even further in favour of the 3300X.

 

[Shadowboxer]

Ryzen 1xxx is absolute garbage. They got their **** sorted eventually and with the 3xxx series managed to finally pull ahead of Intel. but I have a lot of pity for anyone who invested in those early Ryzen CPUs. Especially the $500 monstrosity that was the 1800X. I’m pretty certain you can get decommissioned server parts for a few dollars each that perform not that differently to the 1xxx parts.

 

[picka]

Ryzen 1xxx is absolute garbage. They got their **** sorted eventually and with the 3xxx series managed to finally pull ahead of Intel. but I have a lot of pity for anyone who invested in those early Ryzen CPUs. Especially the $500 monstrosity that was the 1800X. I’m pretty certain you can get decommissioned server parts for a few dollars each that perform not that differently to the 1xxx parts.

The 1xxx was a godsend for anyone that needed more cores, it was a true game changer. It put 16 threads in the hands of average consumers whereas Intel was charging an obscene amount for the same thing. They might not have been the fastest at gaming, but to call them garbage is insane. The Threadripper series single handedly made Intel irrelevant in that sector.

Edit: Not to mention, you can go from a R5 1600 to an R9 3950x even on $80 mobo such as the excellent ASRock B350m Pro4, how's that for progress. Compare it to Intel and weep.

 

[trieste1s]

Are you guys Hardware Unboxed too? You're using the same data and similar presentation style as per the same video on the 2 CPUs.

Edit: Ah, did a simple search and confirmed it to be true. So glad to have found the 2 sides of the same coin independent of each other; it means I can sniff out the good stuff (always tons of self-doubt here lol)

Personally I prefer reading to video!

 

[Jerry in WA]

I'm not sure going with a new quad core is a good idea for gaming anymore, no matter how fast. For most games, it will be fantastic, but more and more games are being written with 6 and 8 cores in mind. Especially with the new consoles coming. Lag spikes in AAA games will likely become an issue (they already are now).

Want a cheap AMD gamer? Grab a 3600/x. Potential lag spike problem solved.

That's just my take. I love these kinds of articles.

 

[winjer]

Last year, I upgraded from an 1700 to a 3600X and decided to do a few tests with both CPUs to compare. I didn't test with the same games, but I got a smaller diference than that seen on this test.
The diference is that I was running my 1700 overclocked to 3.8 GHz, and had my memory at 3400 Mhz with tight timings.
The 3600X was running stock, with PBO. But also memory was at 3800Mhz with IF at 1900Mhz.
My GPU is an RTX 2070 Super.

My results:

This leads me to believe that the 1700 with OC and memory tunning, could outperform the 3300X in today's games. And be more future proof, than the 3300X.

Of course that, for people that run these CPU's stock, the 300X is the best choice. But for people that know how to overclock, the 1700 should be the best choice.

 

[Shadowboxer]

The 1xxx was a godsend for anyone that needed more cores, it was a true game changer. It put 16 threads in the hands of average consumers whereas Intel was charging an obscene amount for the same thing. They might not have been the fastest at gaming, but to call them garbage is insane. The Threadripper series single handedly made Intel irrelevant in that sector.

Edit: Not to mention, you can go from a R5 1600 to an R9 3950x even on $80 mobo such as the excellent ASRock B350m Pro4, how's that for progress. Compare it to Intel and weep.

Well, I agree but I wouldn’t say “game changer” as for games it wasn’t. But yes the productivity on it was at the time. I’m sure all the workers who buy their own machines rejoiced.

I guess I’m just more of a traditional PC gaming enthusiast who likes MHz, liquid cooling, case windows and RGB. To us the 1700 and entire 1xxx series launch was a bit of a non event.

 

[georgejepsen]

Well, I agree but I wouldn’t say “game changer” as for games it wasn’t. But yes the productivity on it was at the time. I’m sure all the workers who buy their own machines rejoiced.

I guess I’m just more of a traditional PC gaming enthusiast who likes MHz, liquid cooling, case windows and RGB. To us the 1700 and entire 1xxx series launch was a bit of a non event.

Especially when dirt cheap Xeons with 6+ cores still exists and has the same gaming performance as gen 1 ryzen with decent modern day productivity capabilities.

 

[Lionvibez]

Great review thanks for the write up.

 

[HardReset]

Last year, I upgraded from an 1700 to a 3600X and decided to do a few tests with both CPUs to compare. I didn't test with the same games, but I got a smaller diference than that seen on this test.
The diference is that I was running my 1700 overclocked to 3.8 GHz, and had my memory at 3400 Mhz with tight timings.
The 3600X was running stock, with PBO. But also memory was at 3800Mhz with IF at 1900Mhz.
My GPU is an RTX 2070 Super.

My results:

This leads me to believe that the 1700 with OC and memory tunning, could outperform the 3300X in today's games. And be more future proof, than the 3300X.

Of course that, for people that run these CPU's stock, the 300X is the best choice. But for people that know how to overclock, the 1700 should be the best choice.

1700 has very bad turbo clocks. IIRC max turbo for 1 core is 3.7 GHz, for 2 cores 3.3 GHz and for 3+ cores 3.2 GHz. Might be little better but very bad anyway. So overclocking surely helps.

Especially when dirt cheap Xeons with 6+ cores still exists and has the same gaming performance as gen 1 ryzen with decent modern day productivity capabilities.

I don't recall those "dirt cheap" 6+ core Xeons existed at least on large scale when Ryzen was launched. And right now Ryzen 1xxx CPU's are dirt cheap too.

 

[Jyrkz]

If ur on budget gamer 3300x all the way ?

 

[Shadowboxer]

I don't recall those "dirt cheap" 6+ core Xeons existed at least on large scale when Ryzen was launched. And right now Ryzen 1xxx CPU's are dirt cheap too.

They have always existed. Whenever a large corporation decommissions some servers all the parts usually end up on eBay or whatever for pennies. There’s a YouTuber who makes videos with them all the time

For productivity you can get so much performance with this sort of stuff. But the motherboards are harder to get hold of and often don’t have much in the way of features and often they won’t even fit into an ATX case.

If you just needed an 8 core rig for some productive task or something and are happy to make the effort to build the rig yourself, source components etc then they offer fantastic value.

 

[SethNW]

Yeah, gaming wise I would generally be in favor of 3300X here. 1700 was capable chip, but 1st gen Ryzen just wasn't that good at gaming. Like 1600 was probably best mix of performance and future proofing it could do, but anything above was and still is primarily work chip. And while yes, 3300X has fewer cores and threads, it can make up a lot of ground with IPC improvements, single CCX design,... I do think shortcomings there will also negatively effect 1700 in long run. And games will never perfectly scale with cores. They are getting better, no denying there, but it is realtime workload dependant on what is going on and not everything can be split. And if you want truly future proof it, 3600 isn't that much more in price and comes close enough to where 1700 can't even age better. And while yes, you can tune memory and stuff for 1700 to make it perform better, but then you also have to ne fair and give 3300X equal tuning treatment. And of course, graphic card wise, if you are choosing between 3300X or 1700, you aren't getting RTX2080Ti, if you had that money you might as well go Intel for gaming only and take those few percent above Ryzen. Far more realistically you are spending 300USD on graphic card, maybe bit above. And at that point you will be GPU bound anyway. And where it matters, like eSport titles 3300X will be better anyway.

 

[veLa]

The 3300X is a real beast for a little quad-core chip. That much we know. I really don't think that anyone should be surprised at how far Ryzen has come in 3 years.

I will say this, I would have liked to see how they perform clock for clock. Besides the obvious generational IPC gains, the 3300X has the advantage of an 800MHz higher base clock speed. Obviously it depends on the silicon lottery, but I think that if you could have gotten the 1700 up to the same clock speed, the performance gap between the chips would have diminished to an extent. Not entirely of course, but certainly measurably.

I understand that this article was written from the perspective of GPU scaling, but if you did some productivity benchmarks, say video editing for example, don't you think the 1700 would have shown its teeth a little more?

Ryzen 1xxx is absolute garbage. They got their **** sorted eventually and with the 3xxx series managed to finally pull ahead of Intel. but I have a lot of pity for anyone who invested in those early Ryzen CPUs. Especially the $500 monstrosity that was the 1800X. I’m pretty certain you can get decommissioned server parts for a few dollars each that perform not that differently to the 1xxx parts.

This is a really bad take. I'll just say that the Ryzen 1000 series was the necessary first step in bringing AMD back into the limelight. They performed admirably, and none of the 1700's scores in these benchmarks were necessarily low performing. Frankly, it's a 3 year old chip that's still holding its own. Any individual that invested in a 1700/1700X/1800X with an B350/X370 motherboard had a great platform that was easily upgradeable to Ryzen 2000 and 3000 series processors.

 

[Shadowboxer]

This is a really bad take. I'll just say that the Ryzen 1000 was the necessary first step in bringing AMD back into the limelight. They performed admirably, and none of the 1700's scores in these benchmarks were necessarily low performing. Frankly, it's a 3 year old chip that's still holding its own. Any individual that invested in a 1700/1700X/1800X with an B350/X370 motherboard had a great platform that was easily upgradeable to Ryzen 2000 and 3000 series processors.

Yeah, fair enough, they weren’t bad parts. It’s just that they weren’t exactly gaming enthusiasts dreams. But to me it wasn’t until the 3xxx series launched that a Ryzen really begun to shine. They just need to offer better gaming performance than Intel to get my buy. I’m looking for something but put off by the small gains in gaming I would get over my existing 6 year old 4790K. Neither Intel or AMD offer enough extra currently for how much it would cost me to upgrade. The 1xxx parts are slower than my current older Intel stuff at gaming so was difficult to get too excited by it.

 

[Lounds]

I would have been more interesting to see the 1700 at 3.9/4Ghz at stock it's boost is only to 3.7Ghz and I'm not sure if that's an all core boost.

 

[kiwigraeme]

I think most of you are missing the obvious point $120 vs $330 if we only had Intel - we would be in a very sad place , There was a reason I went from i5 2500k to i5 3570k ( typing on this one ) and to a AMD 3700x - my other PC .

I'd check intels chips to see whether it was worth upgrading - -the answer was always mostly no - why pay mega bucks for slight increases.

Hopefully the storage guys can get a kick up the b*m soon - the price per TB has really moved for years - hopefully SSD and their ilk can really make them move or Kill them

 

[GamerNerves]

I would be careful recommending any four core chip for gamers, though choosing the AM4 platform with cheap CPU is okay since you can upgrade to more cores easily. Very soon the new consoles will come and games start to demand six cores with preferably twelve threads. R7 1700 especially when tweaked will perform the same in many cases or better than 3300X, on top four core CPUs will suffer from occasional stutter and hiccups. I don't know if you are sponsored or something but your take is not the best.

 

[Mike Koh]

The 1xxx was a godsend for anyone that needed more cores, it was a true game changer. It put 16 threads in the hands of average consumers whereas Intel was charging an obscene amount for the same thing. They might not have been the fastest at gaming, but to call them garbage is insane. The Threadripper series single handedly made Intel irrelevant in that sector.

Edit: Not to mention, you can go from a R5 1600 to an R9 3950x even on $80 mobo such as the excellent ASRock B350m Pro4, how's that for progress. Compare it to Intel and weep.

wait, you can do that ? I mean yes technically with AM4 socket you could, but...such cheap mobo, the VRM thermals and power delivery isnt really great. I am not blown away by 1st gen ryzen either. Its expensive in my country, even after 2nd gen came out, its still more expensive than i5 8400 which I bought considering even R5 2600 is more expensive than it during launch. 3rd gen ryzen was the game changer for me. I am using i7 9700F (which I bought for 220 USD) now on my B360M board but I would definitely recommend R5 3600 to anyone I know that is building a new PC

 

[Sochsun]

I'll just say that the Ryzen 1000 series was the necessary first step in bringing AMD back into the limelight. They performed admirably, and none of the 1700's scores in these benchmarks were necessarily low performing. Frankly, it's a 3 year old chip that's still holding its own. Any individual that invested in a 1700/1700X/1800X with an B350/X370 motherboard had a great platform that was easily upgradeable to Ryzen 2000 and 3000 series processors.

This is the exact reason my fiancee and I built her computer from 2.5 years ago with a Ryzen 3 1200 and B350 motherboard. Took a risk with seeing how AMD did pull off its Ryzen revolution, but here we are nearly 3 years later and once we scrounge up one of the rare and mythical 3300x's we will be performing that upgrade. And heck, depending on what's going on, I may take that Ryzen 3 1200 and do a platform shift from my old i5-4570 running on an old H81 motherboard, get a B450 that'll do the Ryzen 4000 series (Zen 3) shift and follow that path.

 

[Tom Yum]

wait, you can do that ? I mean yes technically with AM4 socket you could, but...such cheap mobo, the VRM thermals and power delivery isnt really great. I am not blown away by 1st gen ryzen either. Its expensive in my country, even after 2nd gen came out, its still more expensive than i5 8400 which I bought considering even R5 2600 is more expensive than it during launch. 3rd gen ryzen was the game changer for me. I am using i7 9700F (which I bought for 220 USD) now on my B360M board but I would definitely recommend R5 3600 to anyone I know that is building a new PC

I jumped from a 1700 to a 3900x on my X370 (not a B350) with no drama's. Don't forget Ryzen 3rd gen brought 7nm so for the most part are more power efficient than the 2700X which run on those boards fine.

As to the review, 3300X is certainly a great chip but at least for me the whole point of the 1700 was that it was on OC away from 1800X performance for 2/3 price, given it was unlocked. Simply set the highest P state to 40x multiplier, voltage to 1.35V and you've got a 1800X. The 3300X has no where near that level of headroom.

 

[OptimumSlinky]

My 1700 games "well enough" for the $130 I paid for it last year. It also crushes my Unity and Unreal workloads, and the highest temp I've ever seen while gaming is maybe 60C. Zen 2 was a big step forward for gaming, but Zen 1 wasn't "bad" especially when you compare to Bulldozer.

 

[photocommander]

2080TI is a flop and a joke. 99% of gamers will not notice the difference between it and a 980TI. SAD. It's not fast enough for 4k, and it's not fast enough for ray tracing, so what is the point of buying it over a 980TI?? THERE IS NO POINT!! I've been holding on to my 980TI for 5 years now, it seems like forever, but for the love of god I can't justify the prices they're charging for these **** cards. I upgraded my CPU to a 3900X and noticed a huge difference in everything. GPU's are dead in the water right now and for some reason they're selling off the shelves... STOP BUYING NVIDIAS TRIPE!!!

 

[Shadowboxer]

2080TI is a flop and a joke. 99% of gamers will not notice the difference between it and a 980TI. SAD. It's not fast enough for 4k, and it's not fast enough for ray tracing, so what is the point of buying it over a 980TI?? THERE IS NO POINT!! I've been holding on to my 980TI for 5 years now, it seems like forever, but for the love of god I can't justify the prices they're charging for these **** cards. I upgraded my CPU to a 3900X and noticed a huge difference in everything. GPU's are dead in the water right now and for some reason they're selling off the shelves... STOP BUYING NVIDIAS TRIPE!!!

Lmao are you trolling? What do we buy instead? AMD? I’ve just switched to Nvidia and trust me Nvidia is far superior, AMD cards are really inconsistent and you spend more time fixing problems than you do on Nvidia in my experience. Also what are you gaming on a 720p monitor or something? Because there is a vast difference between a 980ti and a 2080ti. A 980ti is slower than a Vega 64, probably around the same as a Vega 56. Although If I were currently running a 980ti I probably wouldn’t upgrade yet..

Also, Nvidias pricing isn’t going down. It’s more than likely to go up. Just because you can’t afford their cards doesn’t mean no one can. The 2080ti sold out on release so Nvidia will be kicking themselves knowing they could have charged more and still got away with it. I’m so fed up of hearing people whine about paying for a graphics card. It’s a complete luxury item, you aren’t entitled to cheap graphics hardware. And graphics cards are a lot cheaper than say a smartphone, which many people replace more frequently too.