AMD Ryzen Review: Ryzen 7 1800X & 1700X Put to the Test

[Jad Chaar]

Also I am curious what type of issues you faced when you say: "Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties that hindered my benchmarking progress these are all the application tests I was able to conduct."

Just wondering

 

[Urgelt]

I'm considering building a new rig with one of these new CPUs to replace my aging Intel 2500K system.

Can anyone recommend which Ryzen CPU will be best to purchase that offers similar capability's to my current i5?

Obviously I will also have to get a new mainboard and DDR4 + aftermarket cooler also.

Just looking for some suggestions really.

Andy, none of these Ryzen CPUs will offer 'similar capability' to your current i5. They're quite a few generations ahead of your i5.

Anyway you're asking the wrong question entirely. Ask instead: what monitor do I want to drive, and how hard will the CPU and GPU have to work to run my apps (or games) the way I want them to run?

The monitor decision is crucial; your choice, and the apps you want to use, should drive all of your configuration choices.

The current generation of CPUs (Core i7, Ryzen) and GPUs (Pascal, with Vega just a few months out) are ideal for driving 1440p monitors. This is the age of 1440p gaming, truly. You don't need much upgrading if you don't want to run ultra-high graphics at 1440p; if you are contented with 1080p or lower resolution for games, you can slot yourself in at the low end, CPU- and GPU-wise, and be quite happy there.

My advice? 1440p gaming is too good to miss out, in my opinion. And it'll be some years before 4K gaming really takes hold; we'll need much better GPUs than Vega or Pascal, and much larger and faster 4K monitors than are currently on the market, before 4K is worthwhile. This is a good moment to upgrade to 1440p.

If you do, AMD solutions will be cheaper. Vega, when it gets here, will undercut nVidia for price/performance. Ryzen already does that versus Intel's offerings. And Freesync monitors, which provide adaptive display sync with AMD's Radeon line, are much less expensive than the same monitors kitted out to work with nVidia's G-sync technology. The sync is just as good, too.

But if you aren't ready to move to 1440p, then you can do without Ryzen, Vega, Kaby Lake or Pascal. Save some bucks and stay at the shallow end, buy a last-gen CPU and GPU and motherboard, and enjoy your fatter bank account.

See? The monitor, and your app needs, are at the center of your configuration decisions. Decide what your needs are, and then match the configuration to those needs.

If you approach the decision any other way, you'll risk spending money uselessly and failing to meet your needs.

 

[OcelotRex]

Why just 1080 p the game? I play always 2560x1080 or 3440x1440 or 2560x1440 . 1080p not good .

Most likely because at 1440p and higher the GPU becomes the primary bottleneck and not the CPU which would produce similar performance.

At 1080p if all the cards were RX 460s or GTX 1050s you'd likely see the same thing at 1080p.

 

[Urgelt]

If all you use your PC for is gaming, then you should sell it and get a fricken Xbox. Some tards think with such tunnel vision

"ya, but I get 400fps in "X" game, and only takes me 45 minutes to extract it, and it loads in like 5 minutes"

I game at 1440p with a G-Sync 27" monitor and regularly get over 100 FPS. It's gorgeous. My box also does everything else a full-blown PC can do.

When X-Box can do all of that, get back to me.

But of course, then it wouldn't be a console, would it? It would be a PC.

The PC Master Race Has Spoken.

 

[Jad Chaar]

I am pretty disappointed when it comes to power consumption and average gaming performance, but I guess the price to performance ratio is enough to ignore that.

 

[NightAntilli]

To say the gaming benchmarks are massively disappointing is an understatement. Battlefield 1 in particular is known to be one of the very best threaded games I have seen, Watch dogs 2 not being far behind on CPU utilization. But even the 1800x can't beat or even really equal the faster 4C/8T intels on either which means it probably can't beat them on anything else, these games are some of their best chances to show off all those threads.

The problem with this too is that Ryzen are touted as enthusiast gamer processors as they have no integrated graphics. They are heavily aimed at the growing gamer market, at least the 4 and 6 core Ryzens certainly will be.

It remains to be seen how faster the 6 core like the 1600X is in games or any of the 4 cores, but on this evidence it can surely only be slower than the 1700X seen here anyway.

Don't get me wrong, the productivity benches for Ryzen are off the charts and they could have a major winner in enterprise later in the year, but for gamers then it's a little bit of a 'meh.'

Excess threads can actually have negative scaling in certain cases.

Additionally, this test was set up to specifically to test the CPU power. No one is going to use a Titan X at 1080p only. The performance difference is actually quite negligible. Factor in prices, and Ryzen is a fine choice.

 

[OcelotRex]

The current generation of CPUs (Core i7, Ryzen) and GPUs (Pascal, with Vega just a few months out) are ideal for driving 1440p monitors. This is the age of 1440p gaming, truly. You don't need much upgrading if you don't want to run ultra-high graphics at 1440p; if you are contented with 1080p or lower resolution for games, you can slot yourself in at the low end, CPU- and GPU-wise, and be quite happy there.

I am sorry but I do not agree with this advice. We are not in the age of 1440p gaming; the recent Steam survey puts 1440p at under 2% with 1080p being the preferred resolution (43%+). Perhaps there are plenty of games on Origin (BF1) or Uplay not being considered but 1080p is still king.

Vega also doesn't exist yet. With how Ryzen over-promised in the gaming arena I'd be skeptical until reviews are out on those cards (late May likely June). AMD has a bad history of not having great stock which leads to long waits, over MSRP pricings, and missing SKUs (RX 480 4GB is a good example).

As for Pascal the 1060 6GB is an okay 1440p card for today's games (as is the RX 480 8GB but it's Polaris, not Vega). That means in the near future compromises will need to be made to continue playing at 1440p (reduced settings) with those cards. If you want to play 1440p you'd want a GTX 1070 for today's and tomorrow's games.

Going lower than a GTX 1060 / RX 480 for 1080p also wouldn't be prudent if you're not wanting to upgrade often. Sure the RX 470 is a great "value for money" proposition today but reduced settings will be in the future sooner rather than later.

 

[Rockstarrrr]

Just like with cars, corolla makes the money not the lexus.

I beg to differ and I`m calling Apples iPhone as a witness - they are making the most money out of single sold phone despite the fact that they are most expensive ones. Market in PC gaming is also shifting towards more expensive parts, as for example manufacturing costs of 1080 and 1050 are similar but prices are not - 1080 makes five times money to nVidia. You dont even see GPUs under $100 that used to be most popular choice. We are talking $200 now for 470/1060.

Computers are not cars.

 

[andy06shake]

Andy, none of these Ryzen CPUs will offer 'similar capability' to your current i5. They're quite a few generations ahead of your i5.

Anyway you're asking the wrong question entirely. Ask instead: what monitor do I want to drive, and how hard will the CPU and GPU have to work to run my apps (or games) the way I want them to run?

The monitor decision is crucial; your choice, and the apps you want to use, should drive all of your configuration choices.

The current generation of CPUs (Core i7, Ryzen) and GPUs (Pascal, with Vega just a few months out) are ideal for driving 1440p monitors. This is the age of 1440p gaming, truly. You don't need much upgrading if you don't want to run ultra-high graphics at 1440p; if you are contented with 1080p or lower resolution for games, you can slot yourself in at the low end, CPU- and GPU-wise, and be quite happy there.

My advice? 1440p gaming is too good to miss out, in my opinion. And it'll be some years before 4K gaming really takes hold; we'll need much better GPUs than Vega or Pascal, and much larger and faster 4K monitors than are currently on the market, before 4K is worthwhile. This is a good moment to upgrade to 1440p.

If you do, AMD solutions will be cheaper. Vega, when it gets here, will undercut nVidia for price/performance. Ryzen already does that versus Intel's offerings. And Freesync monitors, which provide adaptive display sync with AMD's Radeon line, are much less expensive than the same monitors kitted out to work with nVidia's G-sync technology. The sync is just as good, too.

But if you aren't ready to move to 1440p, then you can do without Ryzen, Vega, Kaby Lake or Pascal. Save some bucks and stay at the shallow end, buy a last-gen CPU and GPU and motherboard, and enjoy your fatter bank account.

See? The monitor, and your app needs, are at the center of your configuration decisions. Decide what your needs are, and then match the configuration to those needs.

If you approach the decision any other way, you'll risk spending money uselessly and failing to meet your needs.

I'm running a 1070 right now

Andy, none of these Ryzen CPUs will offer 'similar capability' to your current i5. They're quite a few generations ahead of your i5.

Anyway you're asking the wrong question entirely. Ask instead: what monitor do I want to drive, and how hard will the CPU and GPU have to work to run my apps (or games) the way I want them to run?

The monitor decision is crucial; your choice, and the apps you want to use, should drive all of your configuration choices.

The current generation of CPUs (Core i7, Ryzen) and GPUs (Pascal, with Vega just a few months out) are ideal for driving 1440p monitors. This is the age of 1440p gaming, truly. You don't need much upgrading if you don't want to run ultra-high graphics at 1440p; if you are contented with 1080p or lower resolution for games, you can slot yourself in at the low end, CPU- and GPU-wise, and be quite happy there.

My advice? 1440p gaming is too good to miss out, in my opinion. And it'll be some years before 4K gaming really takes hold; we'll need much better GPUs than Vega or Pascal, and much larger and faster 4K monitors than are currently on the market, before 4K is worthwhile. This is a good moment to upgrade to 1440p.

If you do, AMD solutions will be cheaper. Vega, when it gets here, will undercut nVidia for price/performance. Ryzen already does that versus Intel's offerings. And Freesync monitors, which provide adaptive display sync with AMD's Radeon line, are much less expensive than the same monitors kitted out to work with nVidia's G-sync technology. The sync is just as good, too.

But if you aren't ready to move to 1440p, then you can do without Ryzen, Vega, Kaby Lake or Pascal. Save some bucks and stay at the shallow end, buy a last-gen CPU and GPU and motherboard, and enjoy your fatter bank account.

See? The monitor, and your app needs, are at the center of your configuration decisions. Decide what your needs are, and then match the configuration to those needs.

If you approach the decision any other way, you'll risk spending money uselessly and failing to meet your needs.

Im running a GTX 1070 so no plans to move to Vega, as of yet im still an Nvidia fanboy. 1440p gaming does interest me but only once I have upgraded my CPU to something more in line with today standard. Think I will wait a few months yet, as there is still life in my old 2500K, I can overclock the chip to around 4.5Ghz, and that's on air.

 

[NightAntilli]

So... From GamersNexus.... Total Warhammer with 1800X gives 127 FPS average with SMT enabled, and with SMT disabled the average framerate jumps to 153 FPS...

On another note, a BIOS update was apparently also released, which allows the use of faster memory. This might also affect gameplay performance.

Do not discredit Ryzen's gaming performance yet. Let TechSpot do their more in depth game testing.

TechSpot: make sure you test with both SMT enabled and disabled, and also test with affinity settings, to see what 4 cores do.

 

[EEatGDL]

I am pretty disappointed when it comes to power consumption and average gaming performance, but I guess the price to performance ratio is enough to ignore that.

I don't know what power consumption numbers you saw, but the ones I saw put it on-par with the 6900K in both power consumption and performance. I'm guessing everyone calling it a bad performance-per-watt choice must be comparing it to Intel quad-cores, mixing up stress power consumption numbers with gaming performance numbers.

 

[Reehahs]

Ryzen will be my next upgrade from the i5-3570K. The clock speed to power consumption might not be that efficient but it beats Intel clock speed to actual performance. The whole lot of other benefits include not having to upgrade the motherboard after every 2 generations. AMD4 is supposed to be supported well after 2020.

 

[STbob]

Why just 1080 p the game? I play always 2560x1080 or 3440x1440 or 2560x1440 . 1080p not good .

To test cpus you do not want to put the load on the cpu so testing is done at a lower rez. If you test 4k then the graphics card comes into play and cpu differences will not be full realized.

 

[andy06shake]

This article seems to suggest Ryzen CPUs may have plenty of head room regarding overclocking potential.

http://www.pcgamer.com/amd-ryzen-7-..._medium=referral&utm_campaign=zergnet_1502621

 

[fuzzbill]

What kind of review does gaming in 1080P? Everybody wants to know about 4k or at the very least 1440P. But 1080? Literally every review I've seen has had 1080 only. You mean to tell me not one single reviewer or the company they work for has a 4k monitor?

 

[JSizzle83]

I also loved that the older CPU's like the Ivy-Bridge/Sandy-Bridge were included. I am currently running an i7-2600K. It is 24/7 overclocked to over 4.4Ghz in Turbo boost. I have been running these overclocks for over 2 years now. I never top 47*C when stress testing with Prime95 and RealTemp. I keep it whisper silent and ice-cool with an enermax branded, 240mm closed-loop liquid cooler with 4-fans in push-pull config. My 2600k nearly matches the performance of a Skylake i7-6700k (not overclocked) in benchmarks. Because of the performance of my overclock I have had no reason to upgrade my PC. Intel's improvements from year to year have been nothing short of pathetic. (Moore's law is so horrifically broken.)

I was extremely hopeful to finally have a reason to update to a new AMD CPU. However, your review has changed my mind. Considering that in most games, your review demonstrates that my 6-year old 2600k kept pace with these $399-$499 CPUs (I paid only $329 for mine 6-YEARS-AGO), there is no reason for me to buy these. In fact, for ANY gamers to buy these, it is a waste of money if they have bought any core-i7 CPU in the last 6 years. Due to my overclock, my core i7 benchmarks about 12% higher than the average on Passmark. I expect that I could probably get similar Overclock performance from a Kaby Lake i7 ($349 on N*wegg). I guarantee my 6-year old, overclocked, i7-2600k OUTPERFORMS these new AMD Ryzen CPU's in some game titles, and basically keeps pace in all the others.

I am making a bet that Intel stands pat on pricing its mainstream i7 CPUs. The reviews have spoken, and Intel still has no competition for gamers. This is another win for Intel, a loss for AMD, and a loss for consumers.

 

[HardReset]

This is another win for Intel, a loss for AMD, and a loss for consumers.

List of Intel price cuts on Microcenter:

Intel Core i7-6950X ($1599 US) – $300 Price Cut
Intel Core i7-6900K ($999 US) – $200 Price Cut
Intel Core i7-6850K ($549 US) – $150 Price Cut
Intel Core i7-6800K ($359 US) – $140 Price Cut
Intel Core i7-5820K ($319 US) – $100 Price Cut
Intel Core i7-7700K ($299 US) – $80 Price Cut
Intel Core i7-6700K ($259 US) – $140 Price Cut
Intel Core i7-4790K ($279 US) – $90 Price Cut
Intel Core i7-7700 ($289 US) – $50 Price Cut
Intel Core i7-6700 (259 US) – $90 Price Cut
Intel Core i5-7600K ($199 US) – $70 Price Cut
Intel Core i5-6600K ($179 US) – $$90 Price Cut
Intel Core i5-4690K ($189 US) – $70 Price Cut
Intel Core i5-7500 ($189 US) – $30 Price Cut
Intel Core i5-6500 ($179 US) – $50 Price Cut
Intel Core i5-4590 ($159 US) – $60 Price Cut
Intel Core i3-7350K ($159 US) – $20 Price Cut
Intel Core i3-7100 ($114 US) – $15 Price Cut
Intel Core i3-6100 ($109 US) – $20 Price Cut
Intel G4400 ($49.99 US) – $20 Price Cut
Intel G3258 ($49.99 US) – $27 Price Cut

Now you are talking about how your overclocked quad core CPU blah blah. Pathetic.

 

[meric]

What about virtualization? Any tests on that?

 

[HardReset]

What about virtualization? Any tests on that?

I guess it's way too hard to test because it requires something else than just running benchmark/script.

 

[Kibaruk]

So Ryzen's best is on par with a 3770k, give or take.
And my i7 from 6+ years ago, for gaming, is on par with a 3770k.
So guess what you filthy animals?

Merry Christmas and HOHOHO HAHAHA cause I am dancing baby, dancin to happy hour after work today to once again celebrate Bloomfield rocking the s**t still.

I will never ever comprehend or try to this type of posts... self-confirmation looked through forum replies...

 

[amstech]

I will never ever comprehend or try to this type of posts... self-confirmation looked through forum replies...

My forum replies and reputation here is very good, but good try..wait... not really.
But hey if it makes you feel any better I have Chocolate bars for sale.
And don't be so butthurt, I didn't say anything negative about Ryzen, just happy with my old Bloomfield. Chill out dude and stop being brand protective, you lose objectivity. Ryzen is doing good IMO.

 

[howzz1854]

I will put this here for people wondering about the gaming results:

We had a lot of trouble benchmarking games with Ryzen. It seems we weren't the only ones, and many other reviewers have reported strangely low performance here. Our initial Asus board was plagued with bugs, and we saw some gains simply by switching to a Gigabyte or Asrock board. This really isn't the sort of behavior you'd expect, and AMD even acknowledged there were some issues with some Asus boards.

While we are pretty confident in our application test results, there could be some unresolved early issues with Ryzen and AM4 boards that is leading to strangely low gaming performance. We're not 100% sure what is going on there; Steve and I spent a while discussing what could be up, and we ended up confused more than anything else.

So if you're a gamer that's looking at our gaming results and thinking "that's disappointing", there could be an unresolved story here.

Of course one possible conclusion is simply that Ryzen isn't that amazing in games, but we're just not fully sure that is truly the case if all hardware was working correctly

EDIT: Don't get your hopes up about a potential fix. The results we achieved could be it, and you should make any buying decisions accordingly at this stage. The best thing may be to wait a few weeks just to make sure

not sure why your gaming results were weird. here is Guru 3d's extensive comprehensive test across both content creation, rendering, and gaming. their gaming result seem to be more on par with the initial expectation ie. either matches intel's 6900 or surpass it.

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_ryzen_7_1800x_processor_review,9.html

 

[NightAntilli]

not sure why your gaming results were weird. here is Guru 3d's extensive comprehensive test across both content creation, rendering, and gaming. their gaming result seem to be more on par with the initial expectation ie. either matches intel's 6900 or surpass it.

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_ryzen_7_1800x_processor_review,9.html

People seem to forget that we're talking about an 8C/16T CPU here... A 4C/8T CPU like the 7700K will obviously beat it in gaming since the lesser cores allow for higher core clocks and therefore higher single threaded performance.

These Ryzen CPUs are good all-purpose CPUs. If you want specifically something for gaming, the 7700K is still the better choice... Or you have to wait until 4C/8T Ryzen CPUs that will likely achieve higher clocks than their 8C/16T brothers. It doesn't make this CPU bad.

 

[amstech]

not sure why your gaming results were weird. here is Guru 3d's extensive comprehensive test across both content creation, rendering, and gaming. their gaming result seem to be more on par with the initial expectation ie. either matches intel's 6900 or surpass it.

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_ryzen_7_1800x_processor_review,9.html

I just looked at your link, in all 4 games they tested, Ryzen is far from the top, Hitman, Far Cry, ext. It even lost to an i5 in some cases.
Did you mean it passed the 6900 in synthetic benchmarks?
It did well on synthetic benchmarks on Techspots review as well.

 

[koblongata]

Sigh... most compilers are optimized for Intel instruction sets I think...