8 Best Motherboards For Ryzen 7 3700x Builds In 2021
One downside of the Asus ROG Strix B450-F Gaming is its lack of WI-FI support. It does feature an Intel Gigabit LAN network conection, but the lack of Wi-Fi is a curious omission on what’s marketed as a mid-level board. Maybe it’s because this is a gaming-centric board and most gamers prefer a wired connection for stability. gigabyte gtx 1060 3gb As far as looks go, the Asus ROG Strix B450-F Gaming is about what you’d expect from a gaming-focused board. It’s painted in matte black and decorated with customizable RGB LEDs, an industry standard in this day and age. It won’t catch too many eyes, but it’s got an appealing space-age sort of look and feel.
Fortunately, they are easy to control and match to the rest of your RGB set-up. At this price point, though, you can’t expect a lot of bells and whistles if you’re uncompromising on performance, like the TUF is. Performance-wise, the ASUS AM4 TUF Gaming X570 stacks up well to its competitors.
Wanting a substantial GPU for both gaming and productivity, we’ve gone with the RTX 2070. Not only does it give us great 1440p gaming but it also has a lot of CUDA cores to give it plenty of legs for video rendering and encoding. With one of the highest ratings for any cooler on the market, this decently sized 240mm water cooling AIO is a great choice for wanting substantial cooling without looking too obnoxious. Okay, enough with the various cheesy lines… but I was told I couldn’t use the Ryzen up to the top one anymore! “A beautifully balanced design” is how AMD describes this CPU, so—at the price this is coming in at—I can see why Intel might be getting a bit nervous.
If you want to know about the inner workings of CPUs, GPUs, or SSDs, he’s your man. He subsists off a steady diet of crunchy silicon chips and may actually be a robot. Maximum boost clocks on the 3800X are only 100MHz higher than the 3700X, but minimum ‘guaranteed’ clocks are potentially 300MHz higher. In practice, however, the 3700X mostly runs well above the minimum clockspeed, particularly in light to medium workloads. If you do a lot of 3D rendering or video encoding, moving to the Ryzen X makes sense, but for everyone else the 3700X is a great choice.
He previously covered the consumer tech beat as a news reporter for PCMag in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where he rode in several self-driving cars and witnessed the rise and fall of many startups. Before that, he worked for PCMag’s sister site, Computer Shopper, where he occasionally dunked waterproof hard drives in glasses of water. In his spare time, he’s written on topics as diverse as Borneo’s rain forests, Middle Eastern airlines, and big data’s role in presidential elections.
There are really only two potential concerns with the Ryzen X. First, if you are planning on buying a top-tier GPU like the RTX 2080 Ti or RTX 2080 Super, and if you’re shooting for 144fps, Intel CPUs still win out in gaming performance. It varies by game, but at 1080p ultra I’ve measured up to a 30 percent difference in framerates, and even at 1440p high can still favor faster gtx 1090 CPUs. The 9700K actually tops the overall gaming performance chart—yup, Hyper-Threading isn’t always beneficial for games. That makes the 9700K 10 percent than the 3700X, while the 9900K is 9 percent faster. Of course, that’s when running games at 1080p with the fastest current GPU available. The gap would be substantially smaller at 1440p and basically non-existent at 4K.
x264 version 4.0 is a video encoding benchmark uses MPEG 4 x264 compression method to compress a sample HD video. Pass 1 is a faster variant that produces a constant bit rate output file. Its result is measured in frames per second, which means how many frames of the source video file were encoded per second. However, the Ryzen X lacks something compared to its Intel competitors. Generally, the processor performs on par with the Core i5-9600K at low resolutions, where the GPU is rarely a bottleneck.
Needless to say the AMD instructions are microscopic and pretty useless. Hardware virtualization is available on the Ryzen X, which greatly improves virtual machine performance. Programs using Advanced Vector Extensions can run on this processor, boosting performance for calculation-heavy applications. Besides AVX, AMD is including the newer AVX2 standard, too, but not AVX-512. He is currently on an unremitting quest to create the world’s ugliest gaming PC and is often found tinkering on the testbench in a vain attempt to resurrect another failed RGB experiment gone awry.
Speaking of premium quality, the MSI MEG X570 Godlike is very well-made. It features a server-grade PCB for maximum stability and durability, massive heatsinks and an extensive heatpipe. You will find premium components on every corner of this motherboard.
As with all Ryzen chips except for the Vega-graphics-equipped G series, you’ll need to buy a separate graphics card for video output. This is a significant drawback for general-use computing, since most Intel chips include basic integrated graphics processors built into the CPU. And many serious content creators will want a graphics card, too, for GPU-accelerated applications. To match the serious performance of the core components, we’ve gone for a very serious motherboard. Fit to bursting with features, the main thing that impresses with the board is the impressive cooling and power delivery, something which is important when looking to do some serious overclocking.