Benchmarks: Applications & Synthetics
Before checking out memory performance and power consumption, I ran a few synthetic and application benchmarks. Cinebench R15 is good for measuring raw CPU performance and memory performance has little impact here. Interestingly, the Core i7-7820X outpaced the 6900K when matched clock-for-clock, albeit by only 4% faster, but this bucks the trend we've seen so far.
When it comes to multi-threaded performance, the Ryzen 7 1700 and 7820X are on par, though the Intel CPU does enjoy a 5% advantage in single-threaded scenarios. Once overclocked to 4.5GHz, the 7820X pulled well ahead and achieved a score of more than 1900pts.
Next up we have compression and decompression performance with 7-Zip. From what I've gathered, Ryzen's SMT feature helps massively with decompression work but isn't utilized for compression. I haven't looked into this properly yet but whatever the case, Ryzen is worlds better at decompression than it is compression, though that's not too concerning seeing as most users do significantly more decompression work anyway.
Clock-for-clock, the 6900K and 7820X are similar in this test while Ryzen was noticeably faster for decompression but significantly slower for compression. Increasing the memory speed helped Ryzen a bit but had little impact on the 7820X. After being overclocked to 4.5GHz, the 7820X took a large step forward and managed to match Ryzen's decompression performance.
The Blender render time is measured in seconds, so lower is better here. Memory frequency also has little to no impact on performance so this didn't help Ryzen close the gap on the Intel CPUs. Ryzen was 8% slower than the 7820X in this test when compared clock-for-clock and 23% slower once the 7820X was overclocked to 4.5GHz – a pretty solid win for Intel here.
We find a similar story when testing with Corona. The 7820X is a little bit faster than the 6900K and a lot faster than the R7 1700. With both CPUs overclocked to the max, the 7820X was 16% faster, though of course it does cost more than twice as much so this is hardly a win in terms of value.