Synthetic & Application Benchmarks

Okay well we might as well start here, the Cinebench R15 results. This is where the fun began for me, though it did quickly become somewhat frustrating. The multi-threaded score of 1624 pts for the Ryzen 7 1800X is incredible. AMD advertised 1601 pts so we are well on track here. However AMD stressed that the single-thread performance has to be hitting at least 160 pts or the CPU isn't boosting correctly.

I tried three different motherboards while testing and the best result I got was 154 pts on the Asrock X370 Taichi. The Asus and Gigabyte boards went as low as 148 pts in this test. So going forward I'm down around 5% on what AMD claims the single thread performance should be at. For those wondering for the most part my 1800X chip was clocked at just 3.7 GHz for this test but on occasion briefly clocked up as high as 4.1 GHz. Temperatures didn't see to be an issue either as the chip only ran at just over 50 degrees when all cores were active.

AMD also tells me that other reviewers have reached and even exceeded 160 pts, that said I do know of others who haven't, so I'm hoping a future BIOS update can solve the issue.

The 1700X also looked mighty impressive when looking at the multi-threaded performance scoring 1529 pts. The single thread score came in at 143 pts and that's not bad, that places it just ahead of the Core i7-5960X and just behind the 6800K. This is also similar to the single threaded performance of the Ivy Bridge 3770K for example.

So to recap: amazing multi-threaded performance with reasonable single thread results, it will be interesting to see how this impacts real world testing.

The last synthetic benchmark I had time to look at was PCMark's Creative test. Here the 1800X produced a respectable 8802pts and while that is lower than the 6700K and 7700K processors, it did outpace the 5960X and 6800K processors.

The 1700X was 6% slower, dropping it down alongside the 6800K and 6600K processors. Still overall decent results for the Ryzen processors though it's admittedly hard to gauge overall performance from this test so let's move on.

The Monte Carlo simulation is an old favorite and this heavy Excel workload crushes weak CPUs. The old FX-8370 took five seconds to complete the workload, making Ryzen more than twice as fast here.

The 1700X beat the 5960X by a reasonable margin taking just 2.27 seconds. Granted, 300 milliseconds isn't a lot but it does mean the AMD processor was 13% faster.

The 1800X of course was faster again taking just 2.13 seconds. The fastest desktop processor which is also by far the most expensive, the Core i7-6950X, is able to complete this test in 1.7 seconds. The 1800X's performance was nonetheless mighty impressive.

The 7-Zip dictionary test sees the 1800X and 5960X go head to head and the result is a dead heat. Meanwhile, the 1700X had no trouble out-muscling the six-core, 12-thread 6800K in this test. So another great showing for AMD's new eight-core Ryzen processors.

Those of you who spend a good deal of time encoding videos in programs such as Premiere Pro will love what Ryzen has to offer. Premiere is generally best handled by something like the 7700K overclocked to the max, but here we see the 1800X delivering truly impressive results out of the box.

Completing the workload in 585 seconds made it a whisker faster than the 5960X and 9% faster than the 7700K. The 1700X was also impressive, taking just 618 seconds. These are truly remarkable results.

Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties that hindered my benchmarking progress these are all the application tests I was able to conduct. Next up I have the results from four games.