The Achilles' heels of Ryzen no one is talking about

It's a major issue for some enthusiasts with special wants/needs- the same problem plagues users with Z270-based systems to a lesser degree.

It isn't however an issue for someone who builds a typical system, even for high-end gaming, with one or two GPUs, one M.2, and a few spinning or solid mass storage drives.
 
DDR-4 3600 is not fast enough? There have been countless RAM on gaming or productivity benchmarks comparing X to Y speed DDR4 speeds and they all mean piss. RAM has so far surpassed the ability of any real device to utilize it fully.

I would rather run slower ram with much tighter timings than much faster ram with very slow and loose timing. Brutal bandwidth is not the same as very strict and tight timings. How fast you can access data is far superior than how much bulk transport of data you can move.

I see absolutely no negative conditions imposed by this. For instance the days of having 40 PCIe lanes are LONG gone. Since SLI and Crossfire is going the way of the dinos and the new thing is really high single card performance. I don't see that as an issue either.

The only issue I can forsee with this new platform is the fact that I have to wait many many more moons before I can get a respectable mITX board for it.

Ryzen supports DDR4-3600 ... I'd say thats almost as fast as you can get without some serious overclocking. Corsair makes one module that sits at 3866. I am unsure of where you are going with this?

I want to see the days of Ram becoming fast enough that GPUs no longer have onboard ram and you can just allocate 128GB of graphics ram in a 256GB system.
 
This is from http://semiaccurate.com/forums/showpost.php?p=283673&postcount=7443 :

Grabbed this from Drunkenmaster on OCUK. Some pretty interesting tidbits.

First off we had some rumours about weak IMC due to supposedly low speed. This was followed by a rumour that actually Zen had insane efficiency way above Intel and as such lower speeds actually had same performance as higher on Intel.
http://ranker.sisoftware.net/show_r....1b7c4f9c9&l=en
This is a Zen getting 33.99GB/s out of 2133Mhz memory, which has a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 34.128GB/s... meaning, epic efficiency.
For comparison you have
http://ranker.sisoftware.net/show_r....5b3c0fdcd&l=en
Broadwell-e with 3200Mhz memory achieving 74.97GB/s with max theoretical of 102.4GB/s, so around 75% efficiency.

It is lower but it is faster :) If the example scales to all speeds supported on AM4 :) .
 
I could be wrong but the reason you are seeing so many PCIe 2.0 lanes poping up is due to the x370 only supporting 8 lanes of 2.0. Which yes is a serious set back when you also consider z270 has 14(?) PCIe 3.0 lanes.

An IO bottle neck for sure when you are cramming in a lot of HDDs to include spinners + m.2.
 
Ha, I was wondering the difference on the motherboards between the new x370 and z270 and decided to look at Asus two most comparable products. The rog crosshair VI hero and the rog maximus IX hero.
https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/ROG-CROSSHAIR-VI-HERO/
https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/ROG-MAXIMUS-IX-HERO/

No hdmi/DP socket, irrelevant since I think the new amd does not have built in gpu/apu. Spending that much you'll hopefully have your own accelerated graphics.

I211-AT lan vs I219-V. The I211-AT is older from 2012 whereas the I211-AT is from 2015. There's also a 15 degree C difference in it's tolerance.
https://ark.intel.com/products/64404/Intel-Ethernet-Controller-I211-AT
http://ark.intel.com/products/82186/Intel-Ethernet-Connection-I219-V

Third PCIe slot on the x370 is 2.0 vs 3.0. Not too much to complaint since tri and quad gpu solutions have fallen off popularity in the last 5-10 years or so. I myself only use a single card solution and don't see myself using more than two cards.

1 M.2 Socket vs 2 sockets. 1 x 2242~22110 (PCIe 3.0 x 4 + SATA) does the +sata means it taxes both sata and pci-e? Not everyone will need two of these sockets thou. The faster drives cost quite a bit of pocket change.

DDR4 3200MHz+ vs 4133MHz+. Diminished returns on the higher end memory for it's cost, but I did notice the X370 did not list xmp support for memory..

Price. Newegg lists the Crosshair VI hero at $255, and the Maximus IX hero at $230 (sale atm $214). Is the price difference due to one motherboard being longer in the market and the other one still pre-launch? I feel that because it's lacking some stuff and using some inferior parts (LAN) that the cost should be lower. Are these actual limitations by the platform? or mobo manufacturers trying to do the least


This is the best match I could find to compare oranges and apples. Is this a deal breaker like you asked? Depends on who you ask. You have to remember AMD is selling a product at a different price point than Intel is right now. For less than half the cost you get 8 cores 16 threads. For some ppl money is no objection and they can afford to get the best. But for some people this might seem like a more realistic solution. You have and older processor but want to gain something more than just incremental clock speeds. You can get 4 more cores to mess around with. I was going to replace my aging system with an i7 7700k a month ago and kept hearing more and more about the ryzen. Looks like a good proposition. Now it's time to let it release, have ppl mess with it, let other ppl beta test the product and pull the trigger if it meets my needs. Might be best to just wait for it to saturate the market a little bit and listen to see how some of these limitations affect real world users.
 
It's a major issue for some enthusiasts with special wants/needs- the same problem plagues users with Z270-based systems to a lesser degree.

It isn't however an issue for someone who builds a typical system, even for high-end gaming, with one or two GPUs, one M.2, and a few spinning or solid mass storage drives.

This. AMD isn't going for the very high end with this system. They have set it up for what most people will want and it has the bandwith for a gpu and a m2 ssd which is what most will have at most. Hell it will run the second gpu for those who want to push the system further.
 
This. AMD isn't going for the very high end with this system. They have set it up for what most people will want and it has the bandwith for a gpu and a m2 ssd which is what most will have at most. Hell it will run the second gpu for those who want to push the system further.

This is what it looks like from a traditional angle, but that angle is also defined by Intel's portfolio- it might be fair to say that AMD is taking a different tack at 'high end'.
 
Indeed, the number of PCIe lanes is not at all worthy of an enthusiast class product. 44 PCIe 3.0 lanes would have been good (2 PCIe x16 slots + 8 lanes for M.2 + 4 for chipset). But AMD is known for skimping on PCIe. Maybe mobo manufacturers will use PCIe bridge chips to address this, or maybe not.
Almost all of them have only ONE m.2 interface, and, in the case of mobos that have two of them, the second one is always supporting PCIe 2.0 only. It is clear that the mobo manufacturers have had to cut corners across their boards due to this limitation.
At least MSI X370 Xpower Gaming Titanium has two M.2 (1 PCIe 3.0 x4, 1 PCIe 2.0 x4) and one U.2 (PCIe 3.0 x4) socket.
 
Or maybe the memory wasn't 2133Mhz :)

The IMC isn't AMDs design and its a standard IP PHY.

The links are also broken btw.

Nothing broken here from where are you using the links from my quoted bit or from the SA links ?
 
Hey, its how you get the chip to come in $200 cheaper...

Wait for Ryzen II anyway.
 
Everything beside its crazy core count is Ryzen's Achilles' heel if I'm being brutally honest imho! :p

Take that away and what does Ryzen have over Kabylake? Even on paper?

Allegedly it has a super bad IMC, but in predictable AMD fashion the frequencies are so low, it ends up behind. :rolleyes:

I've a glimmer of hope that it will be possible to take a 1700X, disable Hyper-Threading along with the two weakest cores, and get 6 Zen cores at 5ghz! If I could expect to do that, I would drop ~$1000 on Ryzen no question!


Once you've had 5ghz, you don't go back!
 
From what we have seen of Ryzen thus far (both leaked and official from AMD thus far), it looks like this CPU is likely going to be a big win for AMD and enthusiasts. With that said, two things I've noticed have given me serious second thoughts when it comes to buying it - and they both concern the platform rather than the CPU itself.

First, a minor Achille's heel, seems to be that DDR4 memory speeds supported by Ryzen boards seem to be substantially lower than their Intel counterparts. However, given that such extreme memory speeds often yield negligible performance gains, this is only a small issue.

This brings us to the major Achilles' heel that I am seeing with Ryzen.... I have spent a considerable amount of time reading all of the motherboard documentation I can find regarding almost every X370 mobo that that major manufacturers have announced. (This includes MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte, etc.) I've come to the conclusion that Ryzen seems to have a *major* limitation when it comes to available PCIe 3.0 lanes.

Every single X370 mobo that has been announced appears to be seriously limited in this regard - so much so that, in some cases, multiple PCIe slots only support PCIe 2.0. Almost all of them have only ONE m.2 interface, and, in the case of mobos that have two of them, the second one is always supporting PCIe 2.0 only. It is clear that the mobo manufacturers have had to cut corners across their boards due to this limitation.

This seems almost like a deal breaker level issue to me.

Has anyone else taken note of this? Maybe it is not so much of a major issue?

The second point is the reason why I am not interested in this first round of boards with this release. As if the current AMD board lineup isn't already gimped enough compared to what Intel offers in both connectivity and bandwidth.
 
At the prices that AMD boards are at the moment, does it matter if you get a first round board now and eventually upgrade?

I'm seeing prices like 79, 89 and 149 for a premium compared to a stripped down Intel board that's in the 150-200 range.
 
From what we have seen of Ryzen thus far (both leaked and official from AMD thus far), it looks like this CPU is likely going to be a big win for AMD and enthusiasts. With that said, two things I've noticed have given me serious second thoughts when it comes to buying it - and they both concern the platform rather than the CPU itself.

First, a minor Achille's heel, seems to be that DDR4 memory speeds supported by Ryzen boards seem to be substantially lower than their Intel counterparts. However, given that such extreme memory speeds often yield negligible performance gains, this is only a small issue.

This brings us to the major Achilles' heel that I am seeing with Ryzen.... I have spent a considerable amount of time reading all of the motherboard documentation I can find regarding almost every X370 mobo that that major manufacturers have announced. (This includes MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte, etc.) I've come to the conclusion that Ryzen seems to have a *major* limitation when it comes to available PCIe 3.0 lanes.

Every single X370 mobo that has been announced appears to be seriously limited in this regard - so much so that, in some cases, multiple PCIe slots only support PCIe 2.0. Almost all of them have only ONE m.2 interface, and, in the case of mobos that have two of them, the second one is always supporting PCIe 2.0 only. It is clear that the mobo manufacturers have had to cut corners across their boards due to this limitation.

This seems almost like a deal breaker level issue to me.

Has anyone else taken note of this? Maybe it is not so much of a major issue?

The number of pci express 3.0 lanes is limited. Motherboard manufacturers can install a PLX chip to remedy that, but it also may introduce latency issues. I suspect this will be resolved next year when Zen gets a refresh. It is NOT an issue that affects a whole lot of people though, so I do not consider it catastrophic. If you have 1 m.2 NVME drive , that is unusual , they tend to be quite expensive. I recently bought a Samsung 850 Pro M.2 NVME drive that was on sale for my Ryzen build, but I hardly think I will be able to get another anytime soon until the prices drop.
 
At the prices that AMD boards are at the moment, does it matter if you get a first round board now and eventually upgrade?

I'm seeing prices like 79, 89 and 149 for a premium compared to a stripped down Intel board that's in the 150-200 range.

Can you show examples of this? From what I see its rather the other way around. AM4 boards being quite pricy.
 
This actually puts Intel at a disadvantage because the price war that will ensue is more damaging with the expensive manufacturing of more lanes and quad channel memory controllers. While I can definitely see some users needing the lanes with crazy NVME RAID configs and eleventy GPUs, personally I am only interested in the computing performance and if those features are really needed, nothing is stopping users from going LGA20xx but they should still thank AMD for putting downward pressure on prices :D
 
pci-e lanes is negligible IMO.

most people aren't running dual gpu solutions also if you haven't noticed, sli and x-fire are essentially dead (thanks dx12!)

so there are 8 lanes for nvme raid.

or a raid card or a capture card or whatever card.

also like some intel boards you can use a plx chip (like the one on my board in my sig) to get more lanes.
 
pci-e lanes is negligible IMO.

most people aren't running dual gpu solutions also if you haven't noticed, sli and x-fire are essentially dead (thanks dx12!)

so there are 8 lanes for nvme raid.

or a raid card or a capture card or whatever card.

also like some intel boards you can use a plx chip (like the one on my board in my sig) to get more lanes.

Have no-one ever tested pci-e lane scaling, 8\8x works fine for titan X with no penalty, why should you care about "ohh noes, no 16\16X 16\16X SLI?"
 
From what we have seen of Ryzen thus far (both leaked and official from AMD thus far), it looks like this CPU is likely going to be a big win for AMD and enthusiasts. With that said, two things I've noticed have given me serious second thoughts when it comes to buying it - and they both concern the platform rather than the CPU itself.

First, a minor Achille's heel, seems to be that DDR4 memory speeds supported by Ryzen boards seem to be substantially lower than their Intel counterparts. However, given that such extreme memory speeds often yield negligible performance gains, this is only a small issue.

This brings us to the major Achilles' heel that I am seeing with Ryzen.... I have spent a considerable amount of time reading all of the motherboard documentation I can find regarding almost every X370 mobo that that major manufacturers have announced. (This includes MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte, etc.) I've come to the conclusion that Ryzen seems to have a *major* limitation when it comes to available PCIe 3.0 lanes.

Every single X370 mobo that has been announced appears to be seriously limited in this regard - so much so that, in some cases, multiple PCIe slots only support PCIe 2.0. Almost all of them have only ONE m.2 interface, and, in the case of mobos that have two of them, the second one is always supporting PCIe 2.0 only. It is clear that the mobo manufacturers have had to cut corners across their boards due to this limitation.

This seems almost like a deal breaker level issue to me.

Has anyone else taken note of this? Maybe it is not so much of a major issue?

You weren't worried about PCI Express lane count in 2012 when you bought Z77 instead of X79. Neither was I when I upgraded to Z87 from x58.
 
My Setup will consist of

16GB (2x8) DDR4 3200
1 Video Card
2 SSD's
Maybe a PCI-e sound card. Depends on how well the on board sound is
And in the future, removing an SSD and getting an M.2 drive.

I don't see any issue with this setup. A lot of hubbub for nothing.
 
Zen has more I/O on die but the south bridge connection is just 4 pcie lanes.

AM4-block-diagram-gn_1.png


vs z270 with DMI 3.0 connection the SB.

Z270-Diagram.png
 
Can you show examples of this? From what I see its rather the other way around. AM4 boards being quite pricy.

Just go on Newegg and search 2011v3 motherboards and you'll see a broad range with upwards to 97 boards in the 200-300 (avg) range versus Ryzen only 21 boards currently but the majority is within the 100-200 range even for x370 boards with the top end going for around $299 (ROG and Fatality boards) which is still cheaper than the 2011v3 boards premium boards going for 300-600.

I'm looking at 2011v3 because the current matchup is the 6900K vs the 1800X (X370 / B350).

As far as the 79-149 range I mentioned, the B350 seems capable of handling the 1800X (reserving my opinions until the NDA lifts on OC results). So right now it seems that the only difference with the X370 vs B350 is USB and PCIe lanes and there are a few premium ATX options in the 150 range.

This one is the one I've been looking at for the 1800X

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...44019&cm_re=ryzen_matx-_-13-144-019-_-Product

I dunno at the current rate I see the AM4 boards averaging at the 150-200 range maybe a few ATX boards going up to 300 but def not like the 2011v3 trends atm.
 
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My Setup will consist of

16GB (2x8) DDR4 3200
1 Video Card
2 SSD's
Maybe a PCI-e sound card. Depends on how well the on board sound is
And in the future, removing an SSD and getting an M.2 drive.

I don't see any issue with this setup. A lot of hubbub for nothing.

Better pick up those DDR4 sticks soon lol, since Christmas the prices have skyrocketed to some stupid prices.
 
The number of pci express 3.0 lanes is limited. Motherboard manufacturers can install a PLX chip to remedy that, but it also may introduce latency issues. I suspect this will be resolved next year when Zen gets a refresh. It is NOT an issue that affects a whole lot of people though, so I do not consider it catastrophic. If you have 1 m.2 NVME drive , that is unusual , they tend to be quite expensive. I recently bought a Samsung 850 Pro M.2 NVME drive that was on sale for my Ryzen build, but I hardly think I will be able to get another anytime soon until the prices drop.

Yep, and it is 24 PCIe Gen3 lanes from the CPU. If you are running one card, you have 8 left for whatever is needed. The Gen2 lanes are more than sufficient for everything else. Oh well, I guess it is easy to find fault where there truly is none for a brand new product. No faults from my perspective anyways and besides, I have no reason to buy a PCIe SSD since they are no faster in real life than a Sata SSD.
 
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Can you show examples of this? From what I see its rather the other way around. AM4 boards being quite pricy.

LOL! You have trolled a lot better than this before, you must be falling off the wagon. :D Just go to Newegg and Microcenter, you will see exactly what he is saying, if you can be bothered.
 
My point exactly :)
And strength to the point:
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_PCI_Express_Scaling/24.html

pci-e lanes isn't that important as long as it's the last gen that usually last quite a few years before it has any effect and where HEDT owners would have purchased something new to support their 1000 $ + graphics card(s)
 
I'm going to address these posts primarily because I think discussion on these topics should cover the subject nicely.

From what we have seen of Ryzen thus far (both leaked and official from AMD thus far), it looks like this CPU is likely going to be a big win for AMD and enthusiasts. With that said, two things I've noticed have given me serious second thoughts when it comes to buying it - and they both concern the platform rather than the CPU itself.

I agree. Ryzen looks to be a nice surprise for and from AMD. They are surprised it came out so good and so are we.

First, a minor Achille's heel, seems to be that DDR4 memory speeds supported by Ryzen boards seem to be substantially lower than their Intel counterparts. However, given that such extreme memory speeds often yield negligible performance gains, this is only a small issue.

What people often fail to grasp is that different CPU architectures benefit more from memory bandwidth than others. Theoretical maximums are meaningless. Case in point: Skylake performs considerably better than Haswell-E with DDR4 memory. It's controller is more efficient and it impacts gaming performance on Skylake in a positive way vs. not meaning much at all on Haswell-E.

This brings us to the major Achilles' heel that I am seeing with Ryzen.... I have spent a considerable amount of time reading all of the motherboard documentation I can find regarding almost every X370 mobo that that major manufacturers have announced. (This includes MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte, etc.) I've come to the conclusion that Ryzen seems to have a *major* limitation when it comes to available PCIe 3.0 lanes.

Every single X370 mobo that has been announced appears to be seriously limited in this regard - so much so that, in some cases, multiple PCIe slots only support PCIe 2.0. Almost all of them have only ONE m.2 interface, and, in the case of mobos that have two of them, the second one is always supporting PCIe 2.0 only. It is clear that the mobo manufacturers have had to cut corners across their boards due to this limitation.

This seems almost like a deal breaker level issue to me.

In the past I've argued that if Ryzen shaped up to be about like we were all thinking that the platform needed to be real strong to encourage sales for enthusiasts. It was likely that these usages would have been for home based VM and file serving, but those are sales just the same. Since Ryzen is a much more solid CPU offering than we initially hoped, or at least the current evidence leads to this conclusion I think it's safe to say the platform is a little less important.

In part, AMD seems to have built a better CPU than we could have imagined but sadly they don't have a strong platform to go with it. This is both unfortunate, and not too surprising. AMD's always had a platform weakness compared to Intel in a number of areas. It's unfortunate that AMD either didn't allocate the R&D or have the foresight to invest in a better and more competitive motherboard platform. Then again, it might be betting on the motherboard manufacturers to do their thing with third party controllers and PLX chips to make the platform better than it seems on paper. AMD has usually fallen behind on I/O and connectivity performance in previous chipsets so it's not terribly surprising. AMD may have also decided not to drop the coin on platform development, instead positioning the X370 as more of a mid-level or even a value proposition. To some extent there is logic to that because few people run more than one or two expansion cards and probably fewer still run more than one M.2 drive. I think M.2 RAID arrays are relatively rare.

Has anyone else taken note of this? Maybe it is not so much of a major issue?

I have and I find it disappointing.

It's a major issue for some enthusiasts with special wants/needs- the same problem plagues users with Z270-based systems to a lesser degree.

It isn't however an issue for someone who builds a typical system, even for high-end gaming, with one or two GPUs, one M.2, and a few spinning or solid mass storage drives.

Agreed. I think most people use one graphics card and a single high performance M.2 drive. People that want a lot more than that are the same ones who invest in either the monstrous Z270 boards like GIGABYTE's Z270X Gaming 9 or a nice X99 motherboard.

DDR-4 3600 is not fast enough? There have been countless RAM on gaming or productivity benchmarks comparing X to Y speed DDR4 speeds and they all mean piss. RAM has so far surpassed the ability of any real device to utilize it fully.

DDR4 3600MHz is behind the 4133MHz that Intel motherboards can achieve in some cases. Again, straight memory bandwidth is hardly telling of performance. We don't know what impact this will or will not have on the final product. In games you can't say it isn't important because Skylake showed definite improvement over Haswell with DDR4 memory and clock speeds in excess of DDR4 3000MHz. We do not see that with Haswell-E and we might not see that with Ryzen. We just don't know yet. The point is, anything we might think about this is speculation at the moment.


I would rather run slower ram with much tighter timings than much faster ram with very slow and loose timing. Brutal bandwidth is not the same as very strict and tight timings. How fast you can access data is far superior than how much bulk transport of data you can move.

Not quite. Again this comes down to CPU architecture and how it behaves in regard to memory. Intel CPUs have almost always shown virtually no change in performance based on latencies. In contrast, Intel CPUs have often shown better gains through raw bandwidth. This doesn't always translate to application level performance, but this is the tendency Intel's designs tend to have with regard to RAM. For the longest time this was thought to be a product of the chipset based IMC's but didn't change even when the IMC became integral to the CPU. AMD CPU's on the other hand showed remarkable performance increases based on timings more than raw bandwidth. Again this brings me back to the topic of architectural differences and how they relate to actual application performance.


I see absolutely no negative conditions imposed by this. For instance the days of having 40 PCIe lanes are LONG gone. Since SLI and Crossfire is going the way of the dinos and the new thing is really high single card performance. I don't see that as an issue either.

Wrong, we need more PCIe lanes than ever before. With high end configurations using up lanes for storage, networking and audio, I don't think the need for 40 PCIe lanes is going to change anytime soon. While its true that SLI and Crossfire may fizzle out, we can't know that for certain. NVIDIA and AMD will do all they can to fight that because it's just good business. Consoles are what hurt us here, but again the PC market shows signs of growth. At least this is what many motherboard and graphics cards manufacturers' research shows. Believe me, I've sat in many presentations from Intel and other companies showing the same data trends. PC gaming is on the rise. If AMD and NVIDIA can sell guys like me two GPUs instead of one, they will. Dual GPUs may not go anywhere in high end systems. It depends on how much influence they can exert on the game developers. Oddly, what hurts us here is DirectX 12 placing multiGPU performance on the devs and not NVIDIA/AMD.


The only issue I can forsee with this new platform is the fact that I have to wait many many more moons before I can get a respectable mITX board for it.

Ryzen supports DDR4-3600 ... I'd say thats almost as fast as you can get without some serious overclocking. Corsair makes one module that sits at 3866. I am unsure of where you are going with this?

I want to see the days of Ram becoming fast enough that GPUs no longer have onboard ram and you can just allocate 128GB of graphics ram in a 256GB system.

I have no idea on the mITX boards for Ryzen. It remains to be seen how well the industry will take to this. We won't really know if its well suited to the form factor until we get processors in hand. We need to see temperatures, power consumption etc. to really know if mITX makes sense for Ryzen. I'm sure ASRock and a few others will make mITX motherboards for it but I don't know how common they'll be. As for RAM, there are 4133MHz modules that exist now. Dedicated GPU memory isn't going anywhere either. System RAM is still far from being on the level as GDDR5 or HBM2.
 
My point exactly :)
And strength to the point:
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_PCI_Express_Scaling/24.html

pci-e lanes isn't that important as long as it's the last gen that usually last quite a few years before it has any effect and where HEDT owners would have purchased something new to support their 1000 $ + graphics card(s)

Enough to make Intel look slower than AMD in their test so AMD can brag about 4% better performance. This is something Intel will contact independent reviewers about it to make sure they don't disable quad memory channel and also do not make 2x16 to run as 2x8 and that's what AMD did.
 
Who cares if they disable that stuff as long as they make it known in the review under their test config. In and of itself, while somewhat lame, is not that huge of a deal. Covering it up would be a legit issue IMO.

Sometimes it makes sense from a scientific stand point to "level the playing field" in certain ways by clocking things down or up to make them as "equal" as possible.

From a buyer standpoint, the majority of us, we would prefer they don't do that type of thing. It can yield interesting info however as a matter of curiousity.
 
Enough to make Intel look slower than AMD in their test so AMD can brag about 4% better performance. This is something Intel will contact independent reviewers about it to make sure they don't disable quad memory channel and also do not make 2x16 to run as 2x8 and that's what AMD did.
Proof to claims ?
All things are rumors until otherwise proven by the likes of Kyle and others.

Another one for the rumor mill, high memory clocks!
 
Who cares if they disable that stuff as long as they make it known in the review under their test config. In and of itself, while somewhat lame, is not that huge of a deal. Covering it up would be a legit issue IMO.

Sometimes it makes sense from a scientific stand point to "level the playing field" in certain ways by clocking things down or up to make them as "equal" as possible.

From a buyer standpoint, the majority of us, we would prefer they don't do that type of thing. It can yield interesting info however as a matter of curiousity.

If you want the platforms compared accurately, you need to compare them at their relative "bests". An Intel Core i7 6900K vs. A Ryzen 1800X or whatever its called should be quad vs. dual, etc. They shouldn't be equal as each platform in their natural state isn't going to be equal. They should be compared stock for stock and overclocked. I think these are the most valid comparisons. Like for like clock speeds and memory configurations are interesting academically and have some validity when speculating on certain configurations or usage scenarios. They are however, not real world representations of how people use the systems, or how they will perform with actual software.
 
From a buyer perspective for the majority of people you do two tests. One at default clock speeds with nothing intentionally disabled. And another with max achievable overclock also nothing disabled. This should be the primary focus of any type of review designed to give us the information we need to make a decision.

It can from a strictly experimental stand point be useful to turn off certain features or equalize clock speeds to see how things compare when those types of variables are altered. That is all I was getting at.
 
Just go on Newegg and search 2011v3 motherboards and you'll see a broad range with upwards to 97 boards in the 200-300 (avg) range versus Ryzen only 21 boards currently but the majority is within the 100-200 range even for x370 boards with the top end going for around $299 (ROG and Fatality boards) which is still cheaper than the 2011v3 boards premium boards going for 300-600.

I'm looking at 2011v3 because the current matchup is the 6900K vs the 1800X (X370 / B350).

As far as the 79-149 range I mentioned, the B350 seems capable of handling the 1800X (reserving my opinions until the NDA lifts on OC results). So right now it seems that the only difference with the X370 vs B350 is USB and PCIe lanes and there are a few premium ATX options in the 150 range.

This one is the one I've been looking at for the 1800X

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...44019&cm_re=ryzen_matx-_-13-144-019-_-Product

I dunno at the current rate I see the AM4 boards averaging at the 150-200 range maybe a few ATX boards going up to 300 but def not like the 2011v3 trends atm.

So you compare LGA2011 boards with much more PCIe lanes, quad channel etc to AM4? I thought you used Z270 on LGA1151. :)
 
Comparing apples to apples, I think the Z270 and X370 are far closer than X99 to X370 is. Even then, I think Z270 is better on paper at the very least. I think the issue is that AMD targeted Haswell and it's platforms which is why the X370 motherboard platform is so underwhelming.
 
Comparing apples to apples, I think the Z270 and X370 are far closer than X99 to X370 is. Even then, I think Z270 is better on paper at the very least. I think the issue is that AMD targeted Haswell and it's platforms which is why the X370 motherboard platform is so underwhelming.

The fact that I can run B350 and an 8 core is half the deal for me here.
Affordable cpu with 8 core 16 threads and a cheap motherboard with sufficient specs for me and not having to buy X99 at as it stands minimum of 250 bucks in my country for a board.

If amd comes with X390 maybe they can do heads to heads with X99 ?

Amd fills a very big area with their AM4 currently and for guys like yourself who seek some more is the few who's left out, this X370 is nothing close to what 790FX was back in the days which was quite on par with x58.
 
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