AMD's Ryzen 5 can be stably overclocked to 4 GHz

[Cal Jeffrey]

The Ryzen 5 series of processors from AMD does not even hit store shelves until next Tuesday, but that has not stopped Antonline, from selling the CPUs from a sample lot. Forbes reported that early reviews of the Ryzen 5 1600 have already surfaced stating that it outperforms the Intel Core i7-7700K. Even though the quad-core 7700K is clocked at a base of 4.2 GHz, the Ryzen 5 was able to beat it with its 6-core/12-thread architecture clocking at 3.2 GHz. In fact, the Intel processor could not even keep up when it was overclocked to 4.9 GHz.

Speaking of overclocking, the boys over at HardOCP were curious how far the new Ryzen 5 CPUs could be pushed. So they too decided to take advantage of the available samples and run them through their water-cooled unit.

The Ryzen 5 series comes in four flavors the quad-core/8-thread 1400 and 1500X, and the 6-core/12-thread 1600 and 1600X. HardOCP purchased two 1400 and two 1600 to put through stress testing. All of the processors have a base clock speed of 3.2 GHz.

First, they tested the 1600 CPUs. After hours of testing, the CPU was running stable at 4.0 GHz using 3200 MHz RAM. The core voltage was set to 1.45 volts and level 5 load-line calibration. Both Ryzen 1600s worked identically.

They then tested the 1400 processors. The first was stable at 3.9 GHz running at 1.4 volts and an LLC at level 2. The second one they really tried to push to 4.0 GHz, but it would only operate at that speed for less than an hour. They got it stable at 3.975 GHz with a 1.45 v core and at LLC 5.

All of these overclocked tests were pushing the CPUs to their absolute limits. All threads were running a full load and the heat produced was high even with water cooling. The 1400 units were operating in a temperature range of 57-67 Celsius, and the 1600s were around 70-73 C.

HardOCP stated that “Once you get past 3.8 GHz on these processors, the voltage usage and heat emitted just gets exponential with them. So they get very hot, very quickly,” so you would be better of giving up that extra 100 MHz.

Overall, the testers were more pleased with the Ryzen 5 1600. They said that the 1600s were more consistent and easier to set up and get stable. However, they recommend that overclockers be sure to have their BIOS updated because they have experienced buggy issues involving RAM.

Ryzen 5 series will hit store shelves April 11, but if you cannot wait that long Antonline is still selling them on Ebay for $180 for the 1400 and $232 for the 1600.

Check out TechSpot's full review of the Ryzen 5 1600X and 1500X coming up next Tuesday after the official embargo lifts.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/68855-amd-ryzen-5-can-stably-overclocked-4-ghz.html

 

[psycros]

I'd be very hesitant to snag a sample chip as a main driver. There have been a few cases where there were last-minute bugfixes in the full production runs.

 

[EEatGDL]

I'd be very hesitant to snag a sample chip as a main driver. There have been a few cases where there were last-minute bugfixes in the full production runs.

Well, then you would be calling Ryzen 7 a sample chip. Ryzen 5 and 3 are the same chips as the Ryzen 7, just fused differently and with additional validation to ensure undesired effects don't appear when disabling cores.

 

[hahahanoobs]

The question is: Do you want to overclock it when it already beats the i7-7700K in heavy multi-threaded workloads?

No. Not for any reason in fact.

 

[Cal Jeffrey]

I'd be very hesitant to snag a sample chip as a main driver. There have been a few cases where there were last-minute bugfixes in the full production runs.

I would agree. Caveat emptor.

 

[ZackL04]

I love how they say it beats the i7 7700k stock and overclocked to 4.9.

Well duh, the damn thing has 2 more cores and 4 more threads. Lets talk single core performance and gaming.

Lets see the 4 core 8 thread Ryzen 5 "compete"

 

[OcelotRex]

Even more impressive is the Cinebench R15 rendering test, where the AMD CPU's score of 1,123 is not just faster than the stock speed Core i7-7700K, but it actually beat it when the Intel CPU was overclocked to 4.9GHz too.

I know the first thing I do every morning is wake up and fire up Cinebench. It's the start of my workflow, along with the tens of millions of daily video editors/rendering not gaming, web browsing, media streaming, or worrying about single-threaded workloads. If it ain't a multithreaded benchmark I ain't running it!

 

[Evernessince]

Even more impressive is the Cinebench R15 rendering test, where the AMD CPU's score of 1,123 is not just faster than the stock speed Core i7-7700K, but it actually beat it when the Intel CPU was overclocked to 4.9GHz too.

I know the first thing I do every morning is wake up and fire up Cinebench. It's the start of my workflow, along with the tens of millions of daily video editors/rendering not gaming, web browsing, media streaming, or worrying about single-threaded workloads. If it ain't a multithreaded benchmark I ain't running it!

Cinebench, like all benchmarks, are representative of a type of workload. No one has a benchmark in their workflow (except reviewers!) but you can expect Ryzen to do well in workloads akin to Cinebench.

The 7700K isn't a CPU designed for productivity, Ryzen's cache is much faster and larger. The extra cores come in handy in many work environments, where the programs are often multi-threaded and/or you are using multiple programs at the same time.

You can push your point of single threaded performance, and it is a valid point, but it only matters in a decreasing amount of games and even less applications.

 

[OcelotRex]

Cinebench, like all benchmarks, are representative of a type of workload. No one has a benchmark in their workflow (except reviewers!) but you can expect Ryzen to do well in workloads akin to Cinebench.

The 7700K isn't a CPU designed for productivity, Ryzen's cache is much faster and larger. The extra cores come in handy in many work environments, where the programs are often multi-threaded and/or you are using multiple programs at the same time.

You can push your point of single threaded performance, and it is a valid point, but it only matters in a decreasing amount of games and even less applications.

If by decreasing you mean the vast majority of games slightly decreasing sometime in the next few years then I agree with you. The tens of millions of gamers far outweigh those content creators or production environments where ryzens lead makes any difference. For the rest of the world (non content creators) single threaded performance is key including in the Enterprise environment.

 

[SymphonyX7]

Cinebench, like all benchmarks, are representative of a type of workload. No one has a benchmark in their workflow (except reviewers!) but you can expect Ryzen to do well in workloads akin to Cinebench.

The 7700K isn't a CPU designed for productivity, Ryzen's cache is much faster and larger. The extra cores come in handy in many work environments, where the programs are often multi-threaded and/or you are using multiple programs at the same time.

You can push your point of single threaded performance, and it is a valid point, but it only matters in a decreasing amount of games and even less applications.

If by decreasing you mean the vast majority of games slightly decreasing sometime in the next few years then I agree with you. The tens of millions of gamers far outweigh those content creators or production environments where ryzens lead makes any difference. For the rest of the world (non content creators) single threaded performance is key including in the Enterprise environment.

Single threaded performance important in enterprise environment? Are you sure about that? I was a systems engineer at my previous work and I handled IT administration and operation, which includes procurement of hardware. In your typical enterprise environment, multithreaded performance is far more important particularly when you host thin clients and VPNs. That's the reason why you have 16C/32T Xeons running below 3 Ghz. This is the same reason AMD's Naples and Intel's Skylake-EP are gunning for 32 core chips. And fyi, the server market is waaay more lucrative than the PC gaming market. If anything, the gaming market is just there to keep brand awareness in the mind of the consumers. The real money is in the server and enterprise market.

 

[hansl1]

Cinebench, like all benchmarks, are representative of a type of workload. No one has a benchmark in their workflow (except reviewers!) but you can expect Ryzen to do well in workloads akin to Cinebench.

The 7700K isn't a CPU designed for productivity, Ryzen's cache is much faster and larger. The extra cores come in handy in many work environments, where the programs are often multi-threaded and/or you are using multiple programs at the same time.

You can push your point of single threaded performance, and it is a valid point, but it only matters in a decreasing amount of games and even less applications.

If by decreasing you mean the vast majority of games slightly decreasing sometime in the next few years then I agree with you. The tens of millions of gamers far outweigh those content creators or production environments where ryzens lead makes any difference. For the rest of the world (non content creators) single threaded performance is key including in the Enterprise environment.

Single threaded performance important in enterprise environment? Are you sure about that? I was a systems engineer at my previous work and I handled IT administration and operation, which includes procurement of hardware. In your typical enterprise environment, multithreaded performance is far more important particularly when you host thin clients and VPNs. That's the reason why you have 16C/32T Xeons running below 3 Ghz. This is the same reason AMD's Naples and Intel's Skylake-EP are gunning for 32 core chips. And fyi, the server market is waaay more lucrative than the PC gaming market. If anything, the gaming market is just there to keep brand awareness in the mind of the consumers. The real money is in the server and enterprise market.

for servers I agree. but I can tell you that a lot of enterprise computers are better off with a 4 core processor. there are a lot of CAD tools which prefere single core performance and gamer cards. its always funny to see pc's with a xenon and a quadro card for this applications. at least twice the price for less performance.

 

[Rockstarrrr]

I love how they say it beats the i7 7700k stock and overclocked to 4.9.

Well duh, the damn thing has 2 more cores and 4 more threads. Lets talk single core performance and gaming.

Lets see the 4 core 8 thread Ryzen 5 "compete"

Core2Duo was beating Core2Quad back in the day in almost all games, so your point?

 

[Vulcanproject]

I love how they say it beats the i7 7700k stock and overclocked to 4.9.

Well duh, the damn thing has 2 more cores and 4 more threads. Lets talk single core performance and gaming.

Lets see the 4 core 8 thread Ryzen 5 "compete"

Core2Duo was beating Core2Quad back in the day in almost all games, so your point?

At what point did the C2Q win in most games against a higher clocked C2D? Much before the architecture was so slow and much faster newer chips were so cheap it was besides the point? I didn't think so.

I can point to a 4 thread i5 2500k beating up the 8T FX8350 in most 2012 games and doing the same thing in most 2017 games.

At this moment in time both of those chips are borderline for powering a modern mid range GPU too. Your point is moot if a Ryzen can only start to win in most games and it takes 5 years to do it, because it'll be uselessly slow for a high end GPU by then anyway and you will have spent the previous 5 years with a chip that was for the majority of games slower....

 

[Rippleman]

Some Intel fans seem stuck to the weak human psyche trait where "the more you pay for it, the more you will enjoy it".

 

[OcelotRex]

Single threaded performance important in enterprise environment? Are you sure about that? I was a systems engineer at my previous work and I handled IT administration and operation, which includes procurement of hardware. In your typical enterprise environment, multithreaded performance is far more important particularly when you host thin clients and VPNs. That's the reason why you have 16C/32T Xeons running below 3 Ghz. This is the same reason AMD's Naples and Intel's Skylake-EP are gunning for 32 core chips. And fyi, the server market is waaay more lucrative than the PC gaming market. If anything, the gaming market is just there to keep brand awareness in the mind of the consumers. The real money is in the server and enterprise market.

Key word being host. For the laptops/thin clients single threaded is more important. The vast majority of the workers are working in Windows, using Office or front-end apps, and the heavy lifting is happening off their machines.

 

[OcelotRex]

for servers I agree. but I can tell you that a lot of enterprise computers are better off with a 4 core processor. there are a lot of CAD tools which prefere single core performance and gamer cards. its always funny to see pc's with a xenon and a quadro card for this applications. at least twice the price for less performance.

How many enterprises are running CAD versus Excel?

 

[OcelotRex]

Some Intel fans seem stuck to the weak human psyche trait where "the more you pay for it, the more you will enjoy it".

There are 13M+ players on Steam right now, ~4M in-game. How many people are currently working on a workload represented by Cinebench?

Multi-threaded performance of Ryzen is enviable for Intel users who work in those environment's; AMD's new offerings are an incredible value. Most people aren't working in those environments enough to justify the trade-off in gaming and single-core performance.

There is not going to be a lot of real-world cases where the Ryzen 5 outperforms the i7-7700k, hence my satirical "Cinebench every morning" comment.

 

[Rippleman]

There are 13M+ players on Steam right now, ~4M in-game. How many people are currently working on a workload represented by Cinebench?

Multi-threaded performance of Ryzen is enviable for Intel users who work in those environment's; AMD's new offerings are an incredible value. Most people aren't working in those environments enough to justify the trade-off in gaming and single-core performance.

There is not going to be a lot of real-world cases where the Ryzen 5 outperforms the i7-7700k, hence my satirical "Cinebench every morning" comment.

Like I said, some people are against getting 99% of performance for 50% cheaper. They enjoy that extra 1% for 2X the money and that's very good for Intel stock. Intel thanks them with all their heart I bet.

 

[Rockstarrrr]

Like I said, some people are against getting 99% of performance for 50% cheaper. They enjoy that extra 1% for 2X the money and that's very good for Intel stock. Intel thanks them with all their heart I bet.

+1

 

[Puiu]

Cinebench, like all benchmarks, are representative of a type of workload. No one has a benchmark in their workflow (except reviewers!) but you can expect Ryzen to do well in workloads akin to Cinebench.

The 7700K isn't a CPU designed for productivity, Ryzen's cache is much faster and larger. The extra cores come in handy in many work environments, where the programs are often multi-threaded and/or you are using multiple programs at the same time.

You can push your point of single threaded performance, and it is a valid point, but it only matters in a decreasing amount of games and even less applications.

If by decreasing you mean the vast majority of games slightly decreasing sometime in the next few years then I agree with you. The tens of millions of gamers far outweigh those content creators or production environments where ryzens lead makes any difference. For the rest of the world (non content creators) single threaded performance is key including in the Enterprise environment.

Single threaded performance important in enterprise environment? Are you sure about that? I was a systems engineer at my previous work and I handled IT administration and operation, which includes procurement of hardware. In your typical enterprise environment, multithreaded performance is far more important particularly when you host thin clients and VPNs. That's the reason why you have 16C/32T Xeons running below 3 Ghz. This is the same reason AMD's Naples and Intel's Skylake-EP are gunning for 32 core chips. And fyi, the server market is waaay more lucrative than the PC gaming market. If anything, the gaming market is just there to keep brand awareness in the mind of the consumers. The real money is in the server and enterprise market.

for servers I agree. but I can tell you that a lot of enterprise computers are better off with a 4 core processor. there are a lot of CAD tools which prefere single core performance and gamer cards. its always funny to see pc's with a xenon and a quadro card for this applications. at least twice the price for less performance.

you have a weird definition of an "enterprise computer".

there are 2 types of PCs you generally find people using for work: simple PCs where CPU performance doesn't matter (the typical office PC for word, excel, email, etc) or PCs where you need a **** ton of threads (pros using productivity software).
there are some productivity applications that prefer higher clocks on certain workloads, but those are the exception.

for example: when I try to write something in Java --> I open the IDE (or 2), the command line, a few tens of chrome tabs, a VM or 2 and several other applications --> you will never do just 1 thing at a time.

if you work in IT and you don't do what I wrote above you will not care that your CPU has 8 cores or high clocks. a cheaper CPU will be more than enough for your work.

You mention CAD... trust me when I say that I have a ton of friends who use it. They never have just CAD open. For example, they may be working while having SketchUp or Artlantis or Lumion open and doing some renders.

Even in gaming PCs, people like to keep their browser open, listen to music/video/a stream and generally have something running in the background. --> this is why you pay big bucks, to be able to do what others can't, not to get 10 extra FPS. the min FPS can drop a lot on Intel CPUs when there is something running in the background.

 

[Puiu]

I love how they say it beats the i7 7700k stock and overclocked to 4.9.

Well duh, the damn thing has 2 more cores and 4 more threads. Lets talk single core performance and gaming.

Lets see the 4 core 8 thread Ryzen 5 "compete"

Core2Duo was beating Core2Quad back in the day in almost all games, so your point?

At what point did the C2Q win in most games against a higher clocked C2D? Much before the architecture was so slow and much faster newer chips were so cheap it was besides the point? I didn't think so.

I can point to a 4 thread i5 2500k beating up the 8T FX8350 in most 2012 games and doing the same thing in most 2017 games.

At this moment in time both of those chips are borderline for powering a modern mid range GPU too. Your point is moot if a Ryzen can only start to win in most games and it takes 5 years to do it, because it'll be uselessly slow for a high end GPU by then anyway and you will have spent the previous 5 years with a chip that was for the majority of games slower....

it won't take 5 years. in max 2 years you'll see big AAA games using more and more threads. you can blame DX11 for the very long period where games didn't use more than 4 threads. the adoption of DX12 and Vulkan will take a bit more time, but eventually it will become the standard like how DX11 replaced DX9/10.

 

[OcelotRex]

it won't take 5 years. in max 2 years you'll see big AAA games using more and more threads. you can blame DX11 for the very long period where games didn't use more than 4 threads. the adoption of DX12 and Vulkan will take a bit more time, but eventually it will become the standard like how DX11 replaced DX9/10.

This is true because games don't need development time and developers don't take into account the user base of their games.

 

[OcelotRex]

you have a weird definition of an "enterprise computer".

there are 2 types of PCs you generally find people using for work: simple PCs where CPU performance doesn't matter (the typical office PC for word, excel, email, etc) or PCs where you need a **** ton of threads (pros using productivity software).
there are some productivity applications that prefer higher clocks on certain workloads, but those are the exception.

for example: when I try to write something in Java --> I open the IDE (or 2), the command line, a few tens of chrome tabs, a VM or 2 and several other applications --> you will never do just 1 thing at a time.

if you work in IT and you don't do what I wrote above you will not care that your CPU has 8 cores or high clocks. a cheaper CPU will be more than enough for your work.

You mention CAD... trust me when I say that I have a ton of friends who use it. They never have just CAD open. For example, they may be working while having SketchUp or Artlantis or Lumion open and doing some renders.

Even in gaming PCs, people like to keep their browser open, listen to music/video/a stream and generally have something running in the background. --> this is why you pay big bucks, to be able to do what others can't, not to get 10 extra FPS. the min FPS can drop a lot on Intel CPUs when there is something running in the background.

Enterprise - as in business or company. CSD reps, bankers, traders, accountants, analysts, programmers, coders, etc. do not have workloads where cores > frequency. VMs would be a great case where 8 physical would be better than 4/4 but very few people, relatively speaking, are using them compared to the vast number who are not. For home builders it's the same case - gamers far outweigh content creators.

 

[Raiderman]

Since when does the FPS that a particular PC/cpu can generate become the standard for how well a cpu performs? Sorry, but It hasn't.

 

[Puiu]

Enterprise - as in business or company. CSD reps, bankers, traders, accountants, analysts, programmers, coders, etc. do not have workloads where cores > frequency. VMs would be a great case where 8 physical would be better than 4/4 but very few people, relatively speaking, are using them compared to the vast number who are not. For home builders it's the same case - gamers far outweigh content creators.

go in any bank and you'll notice that they have the cheapest possible PC there. accountants and analysts need high clocks? for what? office and accounting software?
I'm sorry man, but I have to be honest. you absolutely need to go out more in the world and look at what people are using when they work. hell... in the west (US, UK, France, etc) Apple laptops are prefered by IT companies for coding. they don't even check what CPU the laptops have when they buy them.

TL;DR those who do care about the CPU in their workstation will almost always go for more cores than higher clocks. there is a good reason why Intel sold 8 core CPUs for 1000$ even though they don't clock as high as the mainstream 4 core CPUs.
Only specific workloads require higher clocks, most scale with better with cores. (with the condition that there isn't a huge difference in clocks)