AMD Ryzen 7 4700U Review

The Ryzen 7 4700U is one of AMD's high-end-low-power Laptop processors. It was released in 2020 with 8 cores and 8 threads. With base clock at 2GHz, max speed at 4.1GHz, and a 15W power rating. The Ryzen 7 4700U is based on the Renoir 7nm family and is part of the Ryzen 7 series.

Ryzen 7 4700U is also the successor of AMD's last gen Ryzen 7 PRO 3700U processor that was based on the Zen+ and 12nm process and was released in 2019.

The AMD Ryzen 7 4700U marks yet another blast from Team AMD, ramping up the intensity of the AMD vs Intel processor war. Still, though, there’s more than just core counts when it comes to a mainstream processor, as single-core performance needs to be on point, especially if you’re hoping to play the best PC games.

AMD Ryzen 7 1st Generation, and the Zen 2 architecture itself, is notable because it leads 7nm processors to the mainstream for the first time. But, there’s a lot more going on under the hood than just a smaller manufacturing node.

AMD's Zen 2 series has landed, upping the ante with Intel in its high-stakes game for desktop PC market dominance with a well-rounded lineup of new chips that push mainstream platforms to higher core counts and more raw compute than we've ever seen. As a result, Intel's commanding presence in the enthusiast space is threatened in a way we haven't seen in over a decade.

As we've seen, gaming remains an advantage for Intel, so if squeezing out every last frame is all you care about, Intel's processors are a good choice. Much of that performance advantage will be less noticeable when gaming at higher resolutions, or if you pair the processors with a lesser graphics card.

The AMD Ryzen 7 4700U, like the rest of AMD's Renoir processors, is built on a 7nm manufacturing node – the smallest in a commercially available CPU. What this means for most people is lower power consumption and much improved performance at the same time.

This decision to 7nm has brought a beefy 15% boost to IPC (instructions per clock) performance. Effectively, compared to a Ryzen 7 1-Generation processor at the same clock speed, you will get a straight 15% increase in performance. That’s not big enough to be evident in day-to-day workloads, but it does still mean something.

What this all means is that the AMD Ryzen 7 4700U is an absolute beast when it comes to multi-threaded workloads, especially at this price point. If you're counting on doing some video editing or compiling one hell of an Excel spreadsheet, you're going to see firsthand a performance boost with the Ryzen 7 4700U.

The AMD Ryzen 7 4700U is another impressive release from AMD and its 1 Generation of Ryzen 7 chips. With it, you’re getting 8-cores and 8-threads, with a boost clock of 4.1GHz. It may not be the strongest contender ever made on paper, but when you see and feel the actual performance gains it offers, you’re certainly getting a lot of bang for your $282.7 buck.

So which should you buy? Let's get that out of the way. Before this comparison review we updated our Best CPU feature and we said you should go with the Core i7-10710U as it comes with a better stock cooler, can be overclocked, and the 1526 platform offers a significantly better upgrade path.

We stand by that assessment, but that won't escape us from running a few up to date benchmarks. We'll focus on gaming performance which should make life a little easier for Intel's CPU. For application performance you can refer back to our day-one coverage of the Core i7-10710U where the Ryzen 7 PRO 3700U was included. You can safely bet the 2.5% factory overclock isn’t going to make the Ryzen 7 4700U any more than about 1-2% faster than those figures.

If you're mostly playing games on your PC, you will be happy buying either processor. Both proved to be solid options and are evenly matched with a slight advantage to the Intel chip if you don't tune up the Core i7 processor. The base performance we showed for the Ryzen 7 4700U can be achieved with $90 memory, while the Core i7-10710U will require $110 - $120 memory in order to enable the frame rates shown here. It’s not a big cost difference and right now with anything less than an RTX 2070 or Vega 64 you’ll more than likely become GPU limited.

One of the nice things about the AMD Ryzen 7 4700U processors is that the retail boxed models come with a CPU cooler. So, you can pick something like the AMD Ryzen 7 4700U up for $282.7 and don’t need to spend any extra money on CPU cooling.

The AMD Ryzen 7 4700U retail boxed processor comes with the traditional ‘pancake’ CPU cooler. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done on this processor which is rated at 15W TDP. You do not need to have an aftermarket cooling solution unless you want to.

For a 8-core processor, AMD’s $282.7 flagship Ryzen 7 4700U processor seems downright cheap. On paper, the cost of those 2 extra cores is almost an afterthought when you stack it up against its direct competitor, the $415 6-core Intel Core i7-10710U.

With Ryzen 7, AMD continues to innovate on its new architecture and 7nm process. Like Ryzen 7, AMD has engineered Ryzen 7 to operate on a FP6 chipset with all the modern amenities of computing. This includes support for DDR4 RAM, the fastest NVMe SSDs and Thunderbolt 3 ports.

Ryzen 7 hasn’t had the smoothest entrance into the computing world with lackluster gaming and some CPU temperatures high enough to raise concerns. But after a month of optimizations plus new drivers and BIOS updates, Ryzen 7 seems to have bypassed those same growing pains.

The Ryzen 7 4700U clocks up to 4.1Ghz just as it promises on the box, and with AMD’s software you can take one of the cores all the way up to 4.2GHz. However, don’t expect to get much beyond that without seriously upgrading your cooling solution and manually tweaking voltages behind the operating system level.

There’s a saying that two heads are better than one and, well, 8-cores are better than 6. The extra processing power of the Ryzen 7 4700U puts Intel’s processors to shame, including both its closest competitor and a much higher-spec part.

Although the 15W-rated cooler doesn't feature a copper base or the LEDs found on AMD's higher-end thermal solutions, it does handle Ryzen 7's heat output deftly enough to facilitate XFR-triggered frequencies. This gives you an extra 200 MHz. We were even able to overclock the Ryzen 7 4700U to 4.3 GHz within a reasonable temperature range. The fan also blows down onto the motherboard, which provide additional cooling around the socket. If you need more bling, AMD recently announced that it now offers the LED-equipped cooler separately.