AMD Ryzen 1700X CPU Review @ [H]

Have you guys read this review. Very good insight. Those of you that think bios and other changes are not Can't improve anything. Takes you straight to that page. Very well take on the situation. Looks like platform not fully baked in. And yes we won't have exact match with Intel due to probably amd being out of the league for so long but certainly there is room for improvement it seems when it comes to drivers and system bugs.


http://www.pcgamer.com/the-amd-ryzen-7-review/3/

So my question is this: which CPU should I get, Kaby, Ryzen or something else?
Use case: Single PC, that I game on frequently, (read nightly for 3+ hours), run a plex server with 5 to 6 streams being common, mostly x.264 but moving towards x.265 HEVC stuff. Game at 1920x1080, run dual monitors extended desktop. Some work related stuffs, but mostly things like Visio, office stuff, matlab and solidworks.

NKD said:

Have you guys read this review. Very good insight. Those of you that think bios and other changes are not st okay here. Takes you straight to that page. Very well take on the situation. Looks like platform not fully baked in. And yes we won't have exact match with Intel due to probably amd being out of the league for so long but certainly there is room for improvement it seems when it comes to drivers and system bugs.

http://www.pcgamer.com/the-amd-ryzen-7-review/3/

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AMD's first suggestion was to test at 1440p or 4K, which is complete bunk. Testing higher resolutions will absolutely put Ryzen's gaming performance closer to on par with Intel, but only in the sense that running higher resolutions shifts the bottleneck to the GPU. Even AMD's FX-series performs relatively close to Intel in many games, provided you're running at 4K. But if you want to know how Ryzen compares to Core i5/i7 when the GPU isn't the bottleneck, you need to test at lower resolutions.

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and that is what they stated too lol.

The second suggestion from AMD was to disable SMT in the BIOS. Why should this matter? It comes down to resource contention and the Windows process scheduler. Because Ryzen has eight physical cores with eight virtual cores, Windows by default sees 16 available processing cores. The problem is that not all of those cores should be treated identically when scheduling tasks. Specifically, every other core is a 'logical' core, meaning an SMT-enabled core, and it shares resources with a physical core.

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This is not entirely true or a good fix either, cause you will see the same thing on Intel 8 core chips if this was the case as well.

You are getting answers directly from AMD they will not tell you the problem if its hardware related and problem is going to be a while or hard to fix.

Not quite enough to take the crown, but definitely a giant fucking leap in the right direction. Congrats AMD.

It's not quite enough for me to switch back just yet, but I will have no problems recommending them again for mid-range gaming builds. I don't foresee massive improvements with this set of CPU's (up to the 1800x), but the foundation is there for improvement.

Historically speaking, the first few revisions of AMD processors have been duds when compared to the subsequent evolutions of those same chips. Intel usually doesn't have that problem, they just keep ramping up the clock speeds with minimal improvements then switch to a new architecture. However, that is to be expected when they dwarf AMD tenfold. If we roll back to the K8 days and the first releases of Hammer, you will remember how those chips could barely overclock when compared to their Athlon forebears, barely had 200mhz difference between each model, but no one cared about any of that because the Hammer chips were an order of magnitude faster than the Pentium 4 CPU's at that time. Phenom also had the TLB bug and was a terrible overclocker during it's first few revisions, but the Phenom II was an excellent chip despite falling behind Intel. Bulldozer was a egregious step back performance wise but it did buck the trend with overclockability, but at the cost of insane thermals and power consumption.

I fully expect now that AMD actually has a solid architecture base to work with, improvements will come.
Things I will be considering before I switch:
1. Overclocking headroom. Clocking the model near the max theoretical speeds as it is leaves me with no room to play with. As an enthusiast, I want a new toy to tinker with.
2. Get the prices down slightly...maybe $50, if only because the intended market as advertised seems to be enthusiasts buying i5's and i7's. I'm slightly torn on this because the prices seem to work well since Ryzen looks better as a workstation chip, cheaper near equal performing models to Intel's -E chips which are a generation behind the mainstream.
3. Wait for 2nd or 3rd revision... aka next year's model. I'm sure they will find some things to fix as well as give it some more headroom for overclocking.
4. Mini-ITX boards. I really want to go SFF next build. FFS, these need to be out now especially since AMD's top chip isn't a 140w SFF meltdown waiting to happen.

Lot of salt in this thread. Guess people can't be happy that AMD has pretty much caught up (within 10 to 20 percent). (Unfortunately, unless you have something less than an i5 (SB up) or a Core 2 still there isn't much reason to upgrade)

I'm hoping the 4/6 cores turn out to be a good value.

I'm assuming when the Vega or the Volta GPU come out and if it's enough to remove the GPU bottleneck that any Ryzen CPU bottleneck would become more noticeable in higher resolution gaming. I made the decision some time ago to separate my gaming and production systems. The best gaming system still seems to be an Intel/Nvidia system and best overall now shifts to AMD Ryzen. I'm not sure if I've got a compelling reason yet to upgrade either though. If I had to choose though, I think upgrading the gaming system to a new I7700K would be the way to go since it's the system that I'd first notice speed issues on.

Appreciate the review Kyle. Will say in the holding pattern for socket 2066 on my primary box. Glad to see it performed reasonable well - will keep this summer interesting.

ob1 said:

So my question is this: which CPU should I get, Kaby, Ryzen or something else?
Use case: Single PC, that I game on frequently, (read nightly for 3+ hours), run a plex server with 5 to 6 streams being common, mostly x.264 but moving towards x.265 HEVC stuff. Game at 1920x1080, run dual monitors extended desktop. Some work related stuffs, but mostly things like Visio, office stuff, matlab and solidworks.

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Ryzen when prices drop.

Private_Ops said:

Lot of salt in this thread. Guess people can't be happy that AMD has pretty much caught up (within 10 to 20 percent). (Unfortunately, unless you have something less than an i5 (SB up) or a Core 2 still there isn't much reason to upgrade)

I'm hoping the 4/6 cores turn out to be a good value.

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This is kind of the problem AMD was irelevent for so long most people switched to intel, so now they where looking at possibly upgrading, but if you bought an i5 or i7 within the last 3 years Ryzen still is not an upgrade unless you need more than 4cores 8 threads.

I think Ryzen will be a great gaming CPU once new API's are programmed to use multicore cpu's beyond 4 physical cores, I think that will happen when MS releases the new XBOX console that uses 8 physical cores.

As for now I don't see a reason upgrading to Ryzen strickly for gaming if you already have a fast Intel 4 core CPU.

Review not available. Was it taken down?

Error 520 Ray ID: 3397a52ca6XXXXXX • 2017-03-02 22:03:17 UTC
Web server is returning an unknown error

Trying to read the review here first yo... Sorry, time for some PCPer, have to go to work soon dammit!

I did manage to get the first page to load, then it crapped out on the next. Servers hammered?

Spoonie_G said:

Review not available. Was it taken down?

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https://status.linode.com/incidents/c3mcjrx18cny

Ryzen is a great start. If they can increase the ipc and clocks in Zen+ things get much more interesting.

Kyle wrote..

AMD has delivered what will be a disappointment to many. The Intel fanboys have won this round. There just isn't any way around it. AMD fans, get ready to eat crow. If you expected something to outshine Sandy Bridge in terms of performance overall, it is just not there.

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I'm waiting now till Zen+ since I mainly game on my computer these days. I hope Zen+ brings a bit more performance to the table.

Tup3x said:

Ryzen is a great start. If they can increase the ipc and clocks in Zen+ things get much more interesting.

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As long as Intel moves at a snail's pace in innovation like they have been.

Well riding home with a crosshair VI and a 1700x.
Upgrading from a 2600k running at 4.8ghz. I mostly game, and when I do it's at 1080p on my 980ti. "Haven't you seen the benchmarks, that's not an upgrade!"
Maybe.
I'll admit, I seriously considered making the upgrade a 7700k.
I realize I might still regret this, by here are my reasons.
A big reason I wanted to upgrade, was for all the chipset improvements since my z-68. Nvme, ddr4 ,etc...
Both x370 and z-270 offer that, so that's a wash. Sure Intel has more pcie lanes, but after suffering through years of the ups and downs of multi-gpu setups, I've decided I'm done with them, so those extra lanes don't matter.

Note there is no question the 7700k spanks Ryzen at 1080p gaming. I hold out hope for some improvement down the line between BIOS and software, but that difference won't go away, just potentially be minimized.
That being said it's rare for the difference to be enough to relegate the Ryzen to sub-60fps. Don't get me wrong, I would of course prefer 85fps to 60fps, but if they can shrink that gap...
Throw in the gamble of better game threading support in the future... Well we've been hearing that for I don't know how many years, which is why it remains a gamble, but I think it remains a factor worth considering.
I read somewhere AMD plans on AM4 lasting through 2020, till we get pcie 4 and ddr5, which hopefully means the board will remain drop in compatible for Ryzen refreshes through then, so I might potentially just pick up a new chip in two years if they can make enough of an improvement. Compare that to the rate Intel goes through chipset and sockets...
I don't do the compute type stuff, but it's nice to have the option if necessary, and I was planning on ripping my hddvds to avoid having to replace them all with blurays.
Also while I don't stream and play, I often have a decent amount of things open, I've frequently seen my CPU usage sitting between 20-40% just browsing, or reading something, so I figure the extra cores might come in handy and offload some of that for when I do game.
Basically, I'm taking a chance on Ryzen, knowing it might not pan out, but cautiously optimistic on the whole.

AMD can't catch a break here with [H] members...

https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-processor-review,20.html

Except Deus Ex 1080p, ties or beats i7 5960x in all the other games on that page. And look at the 1440p results, most are like 1 fps difference.

Also, people saying the AM4 platform will be good for years of upgrades... maybe, maybe not. They said the same thing about AM2, then there was AM2+. Then AM3, then AM3+. FM2, FM2+ etc etc etc. Minor revisions, sure, but enough to where a newer CPU wouldn't work (or wasn't supported anyway) on an older board. When I bought my AM3 board with my Phenom II 955, I was plenty pissed a year or two later when I wanted to upgrade and couldn't without a mobo swap.

Now, compare that to Intel that makes you buy a new motherboard every generation. Yeah, so it's a little better, but we have no way to predict forward compatibility.

polonyc2 said:

AMD can't catch a break here with [H] members...

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truth, AMD just dropped a 52% improvement, lower power, and under half the cost of intels top stuff. and has 1 point on the board that is underwhelming. even if you HATE AMD, at least be glad there is finally some competition again.

I guess now I dont have to feel incredibly bad about my 7700k upgrade, especially considering 1700x is over a $100 more than what I paid.

razor1 said:

not just that either the amount of cache in each cluster as well, I think, trying to read it myself.

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8M is also what intel skylake uses, i can't see that being an issue =p, unless memory latency is terrible without the additional queries that are sent out across the package to the other cluster.

What's going on with games?

I was expecting the Ryzen 7 1800X to be able to keep up with the Intel Core i7-6900K.

_mockingbird said:

What's going on with games?

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Some weird ass teething issues.
There's also the issue of AMD not caring about drawcall performance, but these won't show themselves in most cases.

I was AMD up from (and I always get this wrong) a K6-200?, a Slot A, and a 2400+? Socket 939. I7-3770K was my first Intel chip, top rig is I7-5960X now, still have the 3770K, an I5- 4690 and an I3-4130.

And here's how salty I was this morning:

Dullard said:

I say "Good show, AMD!"

It's interesting how AMD and Intel trade blows depending on the task at hand. As someone who found 8 cores a revelation for Handbrake, it's sure nice to see Ryzen do so well in that application. For people who do stuff other than gaming on their PC, this should be a no brainer - and I bet gaming will come around. It's not like the thing won't game at all.

Hard to see how anybody could be disappointed with these new AMD offerings.

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polonyc2 said:

AMD can't catch a break here with [H] members...

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The R1700X is slower than the 7700K in *every* gaming benchmark. And the 7700K is $50 less.

I mean...I'm sorry that AMD didn't do better? If you need 8 cores then sure, go for Ryzen. For gaming I see no reason whatsoever to choose the AMD product over Intel's offering.

curious has anyone noticed that literally every review using supplied chips from AMD have hit a brick wall at 4Ghz and insane temps at 1.55v? be it the 1800x or the 1700x. kinda wondering if there's something bios related causing this because it's pretty damn rare to see that many reviews hit the exact same bottle neck with the exact same results..

MavericK said:

The R1700X is slower than the 7700K in *every* gaming benchmark. And the 7700K is $50 less.

I mean...I'm sorry that AMD didn't do better? If you need 8 cores then sure, go for Ryzen. For gaming I see no reason whatsoever to choose the AMD product over Intel's offering.

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I said that months ago, AMD can only do so much. The idea is to draw people into buying 8C16T for the price and not so much beating Intel at gaming performance (do well enough).
If you look at the financial means then AMD did one helluva job making Ryzen.

WhoBeDaPlaya said:

Not sure if you can swing it, but would be nice to see if the 1700 non-X can be similarly pushed.
Bad for AMD, but nice for us since the $170 saved would be like getting a free mid-high end AM4 mobo.

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I have one on order from Amazon.

hakstarr said:

Kyle
Do you suspect this could be some weird optimization issue? it just seems strange considering how well it preforms otherwise.

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Certainly something going on. Too many theories right now to bat all those around.

trandoanhung1991 said:

Hey Kyle, seems like the rumours of Ryzen not playing nice with high speed RAM is true.

Can you chase AMD on more info and maybe ETA on fixes for this?

Also very disappointed in OC headroom. Seems like I'll be sticking with Intel, especially since prices are dropping.

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I would not count on that being fixed "too much." The IMC is robust how it is though.

geok1ng said:

I missed power draw numbers. and temps. And the chess benchmarks.

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I have these, forgot to include these.

These are full load numbers at the wall using Prime95.

2600K - 274w
7700K - 206w
6900K - 337w
1700X - 293w

sirmonkey1985 said:

curious has anyone noticed that literally every review using supplied chips from AMD have hit a brick wall at 4Ghz and insane temps at 1.55v? be it the 1800x or the 1700x. kinda wondering if there's something bios related causing this because it's pretty damn rare to see that many reviews hit the exact same bottle neck with the exact same results..

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I think you are just seeing limitations of the architecture/process.

sirmonkey1985 said:

curious has anyone noticed that literally every review using supplied chips from AMD have hit a brick wall at 4Ghz and insane temps at 1.55v? be it the 1800x or the 1700x. kinda wondering if there's something bios related causing this because it's pretty damn rare to see that many reviews hit the exact same bottle neck with the exact same results..

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I don't think it's bios related. I think AMD has just developed a more efficient power control that enables them to max things out on their chips. 1milliamp regulation etc.

MavericK said:

The R1700X is slower than the 7700K in *every* gaming benchmark. And the 7700K is $50 less.

I mean...I'm sorry that AMD didn't do better? If you need 8 cores then sure, go for Ryzen. For gaming I see no reason whatsoever to choose the AMD product over Intel's offering.

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it's not about Ryzen crushing Intel in every benchmark...that was never possible...the point was to become competitive with Intel, offer better multi-threaded support, hope that DX12 becomes more popular that way the extra cores can shine...but most importantly you need to look at the price points of all the new Ryzen CPU's to their Intel counterparts...the price/performance margin is heavily with AMD

good to see that amd is close and showing signs of life.

polonyc2 said:

it's not about Ryzen crushing Intel in every benchmark...that was never possible...the point was to become competitive with Intel, offer better multi-threaded support, hope that DX12 becomes more popular that way the extra cores can shine...but most importantly you need to look at the price points of all the new Ryzen CPU's to their Intel counterparts...the price/performance margin is heavily with AMD

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Not for gaming, as I just pointed out. The 7700K is faster and cheaper.

But for 8-core tasks, sure.

Laughing at all the people making excuses for Ryzen's relatively poor gaming performance. Get over it.

lucidrenegade said:

Laughing at all the people making excuses for Ryzen's relatively poor gaming performance. Get over it.

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I agree. Anything other than gaming? Sure there might be a few select reasons to use these.

WhoBeDaPlaya said:

Quoted from a technical thread about Ryzen
>>>

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"Overclocking Ryzen, at least the higher-end models is kind of a double-edged sword. Due to how the Turbo / XFR operates in Zeppelin and the rather slim overclocking margins, the user might end up actually losing single core performance when the CPU is overclocked. Since the Turbo / XFR will always be disabled when the CPU is overclocked (upon entering the “OC-Mode”), the single core performance might actually be lower than at stock, if the user is unable to reach the same speed on all cores as the CPU operated at single core stress at default (e.g. 4.1GHz on 1800X SKU)."

Well that is mighty interesting. Link?

Dan_D said:

Again I think people need to temper their expectations. We won't see a stepping improvement that will close the gap between Ryzen and Kaby Lake. That just isn't going to happen. I don't think the gap will shrink enough to ever be called "irrelevant."

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Well, I guess it depends on what you consider relevant.

If we go down the list of Kyle's gaming benchmarks, except for the AoTS CPU Focused bench, which I am not convinced how relevant it is to real world gaming, all of the other benchmarks were able to clear 144fps where the fastest of the commonly available monitors top out by quite a wide margin.

Most people still play games at 60hz, but even if you have a 144hz monitor, and a GPU fast enough to not make it GPU limited, a Ryzen CPU is not going to prevent you from hitting either 60 or 144fps. I'd call that irrelevant for the practical purposes of playing games today.

Now, I don't play any of these games, and maybe there are other titles out there that cause more problems, I don't know for sure. Let's look at PC Perspectives results:


(I'm intentionally excluding Civ VI, because it is a wacky game from a benchmark perspective, ALL CPU's in the test underperformed on it, and its DX12 mode he used is slower than DX11 mode.)

• Rise of the Tomb Raider: 103.73fps
• Hitman: 96.41fps

Here are two more titles I have never played. Now these won't be pinning a 144hz monitor, sure, but neither are the Intel CPU's and framerates above 90fps are mostly irrelevant anyway

So, already today, I'd say that while slower than its Intel counterparts, it's not really relevantly so. The differences are small enough, and at high enough framerates that if you were playing the same game on both, you'd probably not even notice unless you were measuring the fps.

The way people are complaining about a 96fps frame rate... It seems rather ridiculous. I'd consider 96fps to be fantastic and more than I need.

My feelings are this is still a huge huge jump for AMD and this makes this product without a doubt competitive.

It will make a difference, and if I needed to save some coin on the CPU in order to afford a higher GPU for gaming, this is a very
reasonable trade off to get a GPU to the next price point.

Not an AMD fanboi, but without a doubt, I like this CPU from them, finally.