AMD Ryzen 7 8700F: Eight Cores at No Extra Cost, and Where the Extra Two Matter
Straight answer: the Ryzen 7 8700F is eight Zen 4 cores and sixteen threads at 4.1GHz base and 5.0GHz boost, with 24MB of cache, a 65W power budget and no graphics on the chip. It is the standard processor on all seven of our G6 Fusion 800 and GTA V 1440p machines, from £1279.99, so on those builds the eight cores are already inside the price you were quoted. Most people arriving here are deciding between a Fusion 600 and a Fusion 800, and that is a question about two cores and a graphics card rather than about a spec sheet. This page answers it both ways, including the way that costs us money. Built by hand in Wolverhampton, free UK mainland delivery.
The 600 or the 800 is the most common question we take on the phone, and the answer depends on two things only: what the machine does when it is not playing, and which graphics card you want. Ring 01902 714533 with those two and it takes about a minute.
Eight Cores, One Die, and a Cache Figure Worth Reading
Everything below comes from AMD's own specification sheet, held up against the label our dropdown carries, which reads AMD Ryzen 7 8700f (8x 4.10/5.00GHz) and agrees with it.
Eight cores on one piece of silicon
Sixteen threads across eight Zen 4 cores, and AMD lists the package as a single 178mm² die. That last part is worth a sentence, because most eight-core desktop Ryzen chips are built from a separate core chiplet and an input and output die, and a core on one cluster talking to a core on another pays a small toll to do it. Here there is one cluster and no toll, so the timing inside the processor is even and the idle power is low. It is a quiet advantage that never appears in a headline benchmark and does turn up in how settled a machine feels under a mixed load.
4.1GHz base, 5.0GHz boost
The base figure is what all eight cores hold together when every one of them is loaded, and at 4.1GHz inside a 65W budget it is a good all-core floor for the money. Four of the eight-core chips in the same dropdown sit higher, and every one of them costs more. The boost is the short-burst top speed of a single core. Read the pair together and it tells you the shape of the chip: it does not spike as high as a Ryzen 7 9700X at 5.5GHz, and it holds a firmer floor when the whole processor is working, which is the half of the specification that matters when something is exporting in the background.
24MB of cache, and it is the honest weak point
16MB of L3 plus 8MB of L2. A Ryzen 7 from the 7000 or 9000 desktop families carries 32MB of L3, twice as much, and a Ryzen 7 with stacked cache carries 96MB. So this chip has the cores of a Ryzen 7 and the cache allowance of something smaller, and that combination is exactly why it lands where it does on price. It costs nothing in work that streams through large amounts of data, and it costs something real in the handful of games built on tiny repeated lookups. We would rather write that here than have you find it in a forum after the machine arrives.
65W, no graphics on the chip, and an AI engine nobody mentions
Eight cores inside a 65W budget is a genuinely low number, and it is why the standard cooler on a Fusion build holds the rated clocks quietly. AMD publishes a maximum temperature of 95C and a configurable range of 45W to 65W. The F means the graphics core is absent, which is what makes it cheap and which costs nothing in a machine with a real card in the slot. Two things it has that its Ryzen 5 sibling does not: sixteen threads, and an on-chip AI engine AMD rates at up to 16 TOPS, which local photo and video tools are beginning to use. The socket is AM5, memory is DDR5 in two channels, and the graphics slot runs PCIe 4.0 x8. AMD publishes twenty native lanes with sixteen usable across the whole chip, and Gigabyte's datasheet for the A620M H board we fit states PCIe 4.0 x8 mode for Phoenix processors, with the rest of the lanes going to the NVMe drive.
Fusion 600 or Fusion 800? Four Prices, Two Answers
Nearly everyone who reads this page is holding two tabs open. On one is a G6 Fusion 600 with a Ryzen 5 8400F in it. On the other is a G6 Fusion 800 with this chip in it. The two ranges are built on the same platform: the same Gigabyte A620M H board, the same 16GB DDR5 5200MHz (2x8GB) Dual Channel, the same 1TB M.2 NVMe drive, the same 650W 80+ Bronze supply and the same standard cooler. What separates them is the default processor and the graphics card ladder each one runs.
Which means both processors can go in both ranges, and the grid alongside prices all four combinations on the entry build of each. Two of those four are the machines as we specify them. The other two are the crossings, and each one is right for a particular person.
Putting the 8700F into a Fusion 600 costs £63.60 on any build in that range, which takes the entry Fusion 600 X1 to £1133.59. That is the move for someone who wants eight cores without moving up a graphics card tier, and it is cheaper than the equivalent Fusion 800 on the three cards that appear in both ranges. More on that in the table below, because it is the part of this page most likely to save you money.
Taking the 8400F out of a Fusion 800 saves £60.00, which brings the Fusion 800 X2 to £1219.99. That is the move for someone who wants the Fusion 800's card and knows they will never load eight cores. It is a real saving and we will fit it without arguing, though it is worth asking why you are on the 800 page at all in that case.
The other thing the Fusion 800 buys is choice. Its processor dropdown carries nineteen options against the Fusion 600's fifteen, and four chips live only on the longer list: the Ryzen 5 9600, the Ryzen 7 9700X, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D and the Ryzen 9 9900X. If one of those is where you are heading, the Fusion 800 is not optional, it is the only door.
Three Cards Appear in Both Ranges
If the card you want is one of these three, you can reach it from either direction, and the cheaper direction is not the one you would expect. Every price here was read live from the configurators on 30 August 2026 and every machine was in stock with a live add-to-cart button.
| Graphics card | From the Fusion 600, six cores | From the Fusion 800, eight cores | Gap | Eight cores on the 600 costs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RTX 5060 | Fusion 600 X4, £1179.99 | Fusion 800 X2, £1279.99 | £100.00 | £63.60 in the dropdown |
| RX 9060 XT | Fusion 600 X6, £1264.99 | Fusion 800 X1, £1354.99 | £90.00 | £63.60 in the dropdown |
| RTX 5060 Ti | Fusion 600 X5, £1289.99 | Fusion 800 X3, £1389.99 | £100.00 | £63.60 in the dropdown |
Read the last two columns together. Where the same graphics card appears in both ranges, the gap between the two machines is £90.00 or £100.00, and the only difference in the specification is the processor. Fitting the 8700F to the Fusion 600 build costs £63.60. So if the card is your target and eight cores are what you are after, starting from the Fusion 600 and adding the processor gets you there for less than starting from the Fusion 800. That is our own price list saying so, and writing it down loses us the difference on a fair number of orders.
Two things still argue for the Fusion 800, and they are real. The first is the top of its ladder: the Fusion 800 X4 with a 16GB RTX 5060 Ti at £1559.99, the X5 with an RTX 5070 at £1629.99 and the X6 with an RX 9070 at £1664.99 have no equivalent in the Fusion 600 range at all, so if that is the card you want there is nothing to compare. The second is the longer processor list, nineteen options against fifteen. That is the only route anywhere in our range to a Ryzen 5 9600, and the cheapest route to a Ryzen 7 9700X, a Ryzen 7 9850X3D or a Ryzen 9 9900X, all three of which the Fusion 1200 range also offers. If neither applies, take the cheaper route with our blessing.
The cheapest 8700F machine on the site is one to avoid
You will find it eventually, so here it is first. The G6 Fusion 600 X1 starts at £1069.99 and will take the 8700F for £1133.59, which is the least anyone can spend to own this processor from us. The graphics card in that build is an RTX 3050.
Eight cores behind an entry graphics card is the wrong way round. At 1080p on an RTX 3050 the card is the part you are waiting for in every title, so the two extra cores sit idle in games and the £63.60 changes nothing you will see. The exception is a machine that genuinely does heavy background work and only plays casually, in which case it is a sensible little box. If you are buying it to play, keep the Ryzen 5 8400F at £1069.99 and put the £63.60 towards the Fusion 600 X4 and its RTX 5060 instead. That advice is on this page because it is what you would be told on the phone.
Buying the X5 or the X6? Read the lane note before you order
The 8700F gives the graphics slot eight PCIe 4.0 lanes rather than sixteen. On the RTX 5060 and the RTX 5060 Ti that costs nothing you could measure, because those cards only use eight lanes themselves. The RTX 5070 in the G6 Fusion 800 X5 at £1629.99 and the RX 9070 in the X6 at £1664.99 are sixteen-lane cards, so on those two machines the narrower slot is a real consideration rather than a footnote.
On those two builds, look at the processor dropdown before you order. Every chip above the 8700F in that list is a chiplet part rather than a Phoenix one, and Gigabyte's datasheet for the same A620M H board puts a Ryzen 7000 processor on the full sixteen lanes. On the Fusion 800 X2 the nearest steps up are a Ryzen 7 9700X at £93.00, a Ryzen 9 7900 at £120.00 and a Ryzen 7 9800X3D at £216.00; the X5 and the X6 carry the same nineteen options and the current figure is always in their own dropdown. Ring Kevin on 01902 714533 and he will tell you which of those is worth it for the games you play, or that none of them is.
The 8700F is also standard on the G6 Fusion 800 X4 at £1559.99 and the X6 at £1664.99, and it can be fitted to any G6 Fusion 600 build and to all three custom PC builders for the same £63.60. It is not offered on the Fusion 1200 range, which starts at the Ryzen 7 7700, or on any Apex machine, because the Apex configurators carry X3D processors only. Browse the finished builds on the Ryzen 7 gaming PC page, and the current figure is always in the dropdown on the product page.
Three Readers Who Want a Different Chip
Every price here is on the G6 Fusion 800 X2, which starts at £1279.99 with the 8700F already in it, so each figure is a straight swap against the machine as we build it.
You Only Play, at 1080p, on a Mid-Range Card
Take the Ryzen 5 8400F. Same Zen 4 generation, same socket, same 65W, six cores instead of eight, and behind an RTX 5060 at 1080p you will not feel the difference in a game. The dropdown takes £60.00 off the Fusion 800 X2 for choosing it.
Do not take it if: you record, broadcast, or keep something heavy running behind the game. That is exactly the load the extra two cores exist for, and it is the one place six will bite.
Frame Rate Is the Only Thing You Care About
Then cache beats cores, and it is not a close contest. The Ryzen 5 7500X3D has two cores fewer and clocks lower, and it carries 96MB of L3 against this chip's 16MB. In competitive shooters, simulators and heavy strategy maps it is clearly the faster gaming processor. On a Fusion 600 build the same chip is an £84.00 step.
Do not take it if: the machine also renders, exports or compiles. Six cores at 4.5GHz is a gaming shape and the 8700F is the better all-rounder by a distance.
The PC Has to Earn a Living
If exporting video, rendering or compiling is a weekly job rather than an occasional one, buy cores and architecture. The Ryzen 7 9700X is eight Zen 5 cores with 40MB of cache and PCIe 5.0 at £1372.99, and the twelve-core Ryzen 9 7900 is £1399.99 on the same machine.
Do not take either if: the work is occasional. The 8700F finishes those jobs perfectly well, just later, and the money does more in a graphics card you use every evening.
And the honest general rule underneath all three. On a machine in this band the graphics card sets your frame rate and the processor rarely does. If any of the three swaps above would come out of the card rather than out of the total, do not make it. The 8700F being free on a Fusion 800 is not a marketing line, it is the reason these machines are priced where they are: the eight cores are already paid for, so every remaining pound can go where it is felt.
Call 01902 714533 or email [email protected] with four things and you will get a build named back to you: 1. The three or four games you spend most of your evenings in. 2. Your screen, its resolution and its refresh rate. 3. Whether the PC streams, renders, exports or compiles, and how often. 4. What you would rather not go over.
Everything named on this page can be picked in the AMD custom PC builder. If the underlying question is where the value sits across the whole AMD range, the best value AMD gaming PC covers it, and getting more frames from an AMD gaming PC deals with the settings side. 0% finance available via PayPal Pay in 3 on orders over £500. Subject to status.
One Generation Behind Is the Point, Not the Problem
The 8700F is a Zen 4 chip in a year when AMD is selling Zen 5, and any specification comparison will show you that. It is worth being direct about what that really means and what it does not. It means slightly less work done per clock than a Ryzen 7 9700X, a lower peak boost, half the L3 cache, and a PCIe 4.0 x8 graphics slot rather than PCIe 5.0 x16. It does not mean an old processor: it launched in April 2024, it takes the same firmware updates as everything else on AM5, and it will be supported for as long as the socket is.
What being a generation back buys you is the reason this chip is the default on seven of our machines. A current-generation eight-core Ryzen is a £93.00 line item on the Fusion 800 X2. The 8700F is a £0.00 line item. That difference does not vanish, it moves: it is why a Fusion 800 X2 has an RTX 5060 in it at £1279.99 rather than a smaller card, and at this end of the market the card is the component that decides how the machine feels. Buying one generation back on the processor to buy one tier up on the graphics card is, for a gaming PC, close to always the right trade. It is a decision we make on your behalf when we specify these builds, and this paragraph is us showing our working.
Where the extra two cores over a Ryzen 5 earn their place. Not in most games: a modern engine does not fill eight cores, and at 1080p on a mainstream card you would be pushed to tell an 8400F from an 8700F with a frame counter running. They pay in everything that happens beside the game. A broadcast encoded by the processor rather than the graphics card. A recording written to disk while you play. A browser with forty tabs, a chat client, a launcher, a capture tool and a game, all wanting attention at once. A video export that starts while you go back to playing. Six cores handle those one at a time and eight handle them together, and the difference is not a frame rate, it is whether the machine stays smooth while doing two things.
Where they do not pay, said plainly. If your evenings are one game at a time at 1080p, the two extra cores are insurance rather than performance. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to buy at no extra cost on a Fusion 800, and a poor thing to pay £63.60 for on a Fusion 600 if the money would otherwise go into the card. The 16MB of L3 is the real limit on this chip rather than the core count, and it is why the cache recommendation above matters more than the core recommendation.
How one of these leaves the workshop. The memory goes in as a matched pair, 16GB DDR5 5200MHz (2x8GB) Dual Channel, never as a single module, because one stick hands the processor half the memory bandwidth it was designed around, and on a chip with 16MB of L3 that shortfall shows up sooner than it would on something with a deep cache. The profile is switched on and proved on the bench rather than left dormant. At 65W the standard cooler holds the rated clocks quietly, and the liquid options, £51.00 for a 240mm radiator and £64.99 for a 360mm, are bought for silence rather than necessity. The board is a Gigabyte A620M H with Wi-Fi via the included USB adapter, and a Gigabyte B650M D3HP AX with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth on the board is £54.00 in the same dropdown if you would rather have it there. The finished machine then runs under load for a full 24 hours in Wolverhampton, which is where a marginal part gives up instead of in your front room.
Kevin has been building these since 2001, assembles them himself and answers 01902 714533 in person, so a call about a machine inside its 3-year warranty reaches the bench it was built on rather than a queue. UK mainland delivery is free and the Trustpilot score is 4.9 from more than 1100 reviews. And where the truthful answer is a cheaper processor or a bigger graphics card, that is the answer you will get.
What People Ask Before Buying an 8700F
The Ryzen 7 8700F is an eight-core, sixteen-thread desktop processor AMD launched on 1 April 2024. AMD gives the codename as Phoenix, the architecture as Zen 4, and the package as one 178mm² die made by TSMC on a 4nm process. It runs at a 4.1GHz base and up to a 5.0GHz boost, carries 16MB of L3 alongside 8MB of L2 for 24MB of cache in total, draws 65W with a configurable range of 45W to 65W, and tops out at 95C. It fits the AM5 socket with DDR5 memory in two channels and a PCIe 4.0 x8 graphics slot, with sixteen usable lanes in total across graphics and storage, and it includes an on-chip AI engine AMD rates at up to 16 TOPS. The F means there is no graphics core on the chip, so a graphics card is required.
Yes, in the machines it is fitted to. Eight Zen 4 cores at 5.0GHz run every current game, and behind an RTX 5060, an RX 9060 XT or an RTX 5060 Ti at 1080p and 1440p the graphics card is the part setting your frame rate rather than the processor. Where it gives ground is the small group of games decided by cache rather than by cores: competitive shooters chased to very high frame rates, flight and racing simulators, and strategy campaigns late in a long game. This chip has 16MB of L3 where a Ryzen 5 7500X3D has 96MB, and in those specific titles the 7500X3D is the faster processor despite having fewer cores and a lower clock.
Seven machines carry it as standard with nothing added to the price: the G6 Fusion 800 X2 at £1279.99, X1 at £1354.99, X3 at £1389.99, X4 at £1559.99, X5 at £1629.99 and X6 at £1664.99, and the G6 GTA V 1440p at £1404.99. It can also be fitted to any G6 Fusion 600 build and to all three custom PC builders for £63.60, which puts the Fusion 600 X1 at £1133.59. It is not offered on the G6 Fusion 1200 range, which starts at the Ryzen 7 7700, or on any Apex machine, because the Apex configurators carry X3D processors only.
A finished machine with it fitted as standard starts at £1279.99, which is the G6 Fusion 800 X2 with an RTX 5060, 16GB of dual-channel DDR5 and a 1TB M.2 NVMe drive. Above that the G6 Fusion 800 X1 with an RX 9060 XT is £1354.99, the G6 GTA V 1440p with an RTX 5060 Ti is £1404.99, and the range runs up to £1664.99 for the Fusion 800 X6 with an RX 9070. A cheaper route exists, since a G6 Fusion 600 X1 will take the chip at £1133.59, and we would steer you off that one because it puts eight cores behind an RTX 3050 that will be the limiting part in every game. Every price includes free UK mainland delivery, a 3-year warranty and a 24-hour stress test.
Answer one question: does anything happen on the PC while the game is running? If the answer is no, the six-core 8400F is enough and on a G6 Fusion 800 build it takes £60.00 off the price, bringing the Fusion 800 X2 to £1219.99. If the answer is yes, and it usually means broadcasting, recording, or leaving heavy applications open behind the game, take the 8700F, which is already included at no cost on every Fusion 800 machine and is a £63.60 step on a Fusion 600. The two chips share a generation, a socket, a 65W budget and the same 16MB of L3. The difference is two cores, four threads and 300MHz of boost clock, and it shows up beside the game rather than inside it.
It depends on which graphics card you want. The two ranges share a platform: the same Gigabyte A620M H board, the same 16GB DDR5 5200MHz (2x8GB) Dual Channel, the same 1TB M.2 NVMe drive, the same 650W supply and the same standard cooler. Three cards appear in both, and where they do the Fusion 800 is £90.00 to £100.00 dearer while the 8700F upgrade on the Fusion 600 is only £63.60, so the Fusion 600 route to the same machine is cheaper. The Fusion 800 earns its price in two other ways: its ladder runs higher, up to an RX 9070 at £1664.99 with no Fusion 600 equivalent, and its processor dropdown carries nineteen options against fifteen, which is the only route anywhere in our range to a Ryzen 5 9600 and the cheapest route to a Ryzen 7 9700X, a Ryzen 7 9850X3D or a Ryzen 9 9900X, all three of which the Fusion 1200 range also offers.
No, and that is what the F in the name records. AMD's specification sheet lists the graphics model for this processor as Discrete Graphics Card Required, so there is no display output from the chip itself and a graphics card has to be fitted. Leaving the graphics core off is the reason it costs less than the versions that keep it, and in a gaming PC it changes nothing, because the card in the slot does all of the drawing from the moment the machine is switched on. The single practical loss is on the day a graphics card fails, when a processor with a display output would let you get a picture on screen without borrowing one. Tell us if that matters and we will fit a chip that has it.
Three years of cover comes as standard, and the parts element can be extended at checkout. The machine is built by hand in the Wolverhampton workshop, the memory goes in as a matched pair with its profile enabled and proved rather than left dormant, the cooler mount and fan curve are set for the chip that is in the case, and the finished PC is held under load for a full 24 hours so a marginal component gives up on our bench instead of at your desk. Wi-Fi comes via the included USB adapter on a Fusion build, with a Gigabyte B650M D3HP AX board carrying Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth available for £54.00 if you want it on the motherboard. Delivery to UK mainland addresses costs nothing, Ginger6 has been at this since 2001, and more than 1100 reviews put the Trustpilot score at 4.9.
The Three Chips This Page Argues With
One has fewer cores and costs less, one has more cache and wins in games, one is a generation newer. The Ryzen 8000 series guide covers the family this chip belongs to and why two of its members are the standard processor in most of our machines.
Ryzen 5 8400F
The six-core version of the same idea, standard on eight machines from £1069.99, and £60.00 off a Fusion 800.
Read the GuideRyzen 5 7500X3D
Fewer cores, lower clocks, 96MB of L3, and the better buy when frame rate is the only thing that matters.
Read the GuideRyzen 7 9700X
The Zen 5 eight-core with 40MB of cache and PCIe 5.0, at £93.00 over this chip on the Fusion 800 X2.
Read the GuideThe Eight Cores Are Already in the Price
On every G6 Fusion 800 machine this processor costs nothing extra, so the decision in front of you is a graphics card rather than a chip. Whichever you pick, it is assembled by hand in Wolverhampton, held under load for a full 24 hours before it is boxed, and covered for three years. If the honest answer is the cheaper six-core or the cache chip, that is what you will hear on the phone.