AMD Ryzen 1700X CPU Review @ [H]

Might be interesting to see what Asus, Gigabyte, etc can do with bios tweaking moving forward. Considering it's a brand new platform, we'll probably be seeing bios updates weekly/monthly.

AMD deserves some praise for finally offering Intel some competition, but as well all kind of figured beforehand, it's hardly an i7 killer.

Now they need to get clock speeds up and prices down. I'm curious about the APUs and the lesser core models that are coming. Why do I really need a $400 cpu for gaming when a $200 one does just fine?
 
I guess I'm STILL not sure where everyone is getting this "MARKETED TOWARDS GAMERS" when AMD was releasing benchmarks like Blender.....outside of Doom I heard NOTHING from AMD about competing with the 7700k in gaming.

This seems like it'd make a fantastic high end multiuse machine. What's wrong with that exactly?
 
I thought it would match the 7700k or come damn close. It's just not close enough for me. Can't buy a CPU that might not even match by current rig just can't work. I think Ryzen is a hell of a CPU but it's too far behind in gaming for me to upgrade. That's the only demanding task I do on my home PC.
 
Silver award? It's about equal to much cheaper i3 for gaming. I am frankly disappointed - don't see the insane value the hype led me to believe.

I am however glad that it is fast enough to give Intel some heat to drop prices and put more cores in :)
 
thesmokingman said:
Game code isn't patched for Ryzen yet and there's obviously a few kinks to work. It's kinda funny you guys act surprised. Some games work better with the high perf windows profile, some work better with SMT disabled, etc... that all screams need moar optimization.
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I've never seen requirement for games to be optimised for cpus after thy're already developed. They rarely get any performance changes on the cpu front from the day they were released. Besides, you really think any of the devs out there will revisit their games? good luck with that. Tbh I never even saw any "cpu optimisation" issues for gaming in the past years from one lineup release to the other.
 
stealthballer123 said:
It is odd that so many "power" users are fixated with 1080p.
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It's odd that so many "power" users are fixated with 4k/60hz.

I'm waiting for 120+hz 1440p ultrawide HDR monitors to come out before I upgrade from 1080p/144. And even then it's going to be GPU limited so a much cheaper i5 will still be similar/better than Ryzen for gaming.
 
Raendor said:
I've never seen requirement for games to be optimised for cpus. They rarely get any performance changes on the cpu front from the day they were released. Besides, you really think any of the devs out there will revisit their games? good luck with that. Tbh I never even saw any "cpu optimisation" issues for gaming in the past years from one lineup release to the other.
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Ryzen has a new SMT method. Why wouldn't they update for the cpu? They can insert it at their next patch. WTF?
 
I smiled when I saw the silver award at the end.
That's like showing a photo of the two companies on a podium.
 
I'd be interested in seeing 4 and 6 core chips with higher clocks for gaming, might be more competitive with the 1150 i7s in gaming.

Otherwise pretty cool, a bit slower than i thought for gaming.
 
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Great review. Good to see AMD has a horse in the race again.

That said, I see no reason to move from my Haswell, especially seeing the mediocre overclocking and the fact that further CPU performance is not what I need at 1440p and 4k. That said, if I was building a new rig, x1700 would be top of my list.

What I do suspect is Ryzen is a prime candidate for Mac/MacBooks considering its content creation advantages.
 
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Different people use their desktop PCs for different tasks and a good builder knows which hardware components are best for which usage scenarios. I've averaged 2-3 builds per month over the last three years, with peaks during tax return season and around Black Friday.

The majority of desktops that I build for my customers are aimed at doing work, and gaming is a secondary consideration - or not a consideration at all. In other words, these computers are going to be used for productivity for 6-8 hours/day (or more depending on automated tasks) and gaming for 4-8 hours/week. They typically cost $1,000-1,500 for the tower alone. Niche cases aside, Ryzen has rendered Intel irrelevant for these systems. I am personally replacing my i7-4790K (at 4.5GHz) system with an 1800X system.

I also build a fair number of primary gaming systems, and whatever else they do with the computer is not demanding on hardware (and hasn't been for years). Almost every such system I've built in the last three years has been aimed at 1080p gaming because the jump to 4K or even 2K has been cost-prohibitive to my customers. I will continue to recommend Intel Core i5s for these systems. I'll have to wait and see how the Ryzen 5s compare when they are released.

The last sizeable segment comes from budget gamers who want to spend $500 or less. Not a chance in hell the lowest-end Ryzen 3 displaces the new G4560 there.

It is odd to see a nearly total inversion from Intel at the high end and AMD at the low end to AMD at the high end and Intel at the low end.
 
I think from everyone's consensus so far it's evident...

1700X + 100 dollar board + 16GB-32GB of ram under $800 dollar upgrade = BEAST media/contentcreating/gaming(yes I said gaming) rig to date.
 
I'll add to the speculation. From what I have been reading, Ryzen doesn't play well right now with high speed memory, which is causing the latency in games.

I don't know if that is a design flaw, or something that can be fixed with updated bios/chipset drivers, but it seems that is the source of the gaming dilemas at 1080p. At higher resolutions, it starts to rely more on the GPU and ram on GPU, which is why higher resolutions work fine.
 
yep there is a ryzen in my future. Don't game and run multi-threaded applications. The OC results are not surprising. Intel has a large process advantage that is much more mature than what AMD is able to use.
 
lolfail9001 said:
Well, 3d rendering stuff generally uses all the threads i can. SMT issues are probably core parking related.

Anyways, the cognitive dissonance over at /r/amd is amusing.
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Yeah that's a possibility!

LOL reddit must be a blaze with insults by now
 
Snowdog said:
After looking at gaming benchmarks on a number of sites, I would say, she doesn't turn in the best gaming benchmarks, but games just fine. It's really only behind at 1080p or below, where FPS are 90+ to start with.

Is there any scenario when people would actually be able to tell a difference while gaming without an FPS counter. 90 FPS vs 100 FPS is not something hardly anyone could detect.

But yes, if you live to report the highest FPS, this is definitely not your CPU.
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LUL, when he said "She doesn't game", he is referring to his WIFE, not Ryzen. :ROFLMAO:
 
There is probably a few people feeling like this at the moment..

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https://s12.postimg.org/vsoo25l7x/ezgif_3_2d317cac52.gif
 
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Looks like I am going to wait another year or so.. Let the product cycle mature and the competition ramp up. There is a reason why AMD held back and only did a dual channel memory controller when they could have done quad. That along with process improvements to hit 4.5(+) Ghz, in say a 1900X or 2000X whatever I think that will interest me more.
 
Has this really changed anything outside of heavily multi threaded computing? If you absolutely need more cores go AMD as Intel just doesn't compete for price/performance. If you are primarily (high end) gaming then stick with Intel as the 7700K is cheaper and faster than the entire R7 line. Not really any hard choices to make.
 
Snowdog said:
After looking at gaming benchmarks on a number of sites, I would say, she doesn't turn in the best gaming benchmarks, but games just fine. It's really only behind at 1080p or below, where FPS are 90+ to start with.

Is there any scenario when people would actually be able to tell a difference while gaming without an FPS counter. 90 FPS vs 100 FPS is not something hardly anyone could detect.

But yes, if you live to report the highest FPS, this is definitely not your CPU.
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I haven't ran a benchmark in a long time.... if its smooth with all the eye candy turned on... I am good... your eye can tell if it the game is running quick
 
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PhaseNoise said:
How would we know the difference?
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Only way is profiling the cpu vs the gpu work load, and that gets complex, really have to know what the program is doing in the first place. From end user point of view, we can do it, but man its going to be time consuming.
 
I like it overall. From Kyle's review it looks like it's a monster for the money when it comes to rendering etc. Roughly equal to a Sandy bridge at 4.5 (ryzen at 4.0) in gaming. For gaming only I'd absolutely go Intel no question, but I'd still call ryzen "competent". I find most of my time is being used on production items such as video conversion, etc. For this ryzen is a winner. Looking forward to my build.

Only question is what if you disabled SMT and even 2-4 cores? Does that help clocking and any possible affinity issue?
 
Stryke1983 said:
Has this really changed anything outside of heavily multi threaded computing? If you absolutely need more cores go AMD as Intel just doesn't compete for price/performance. If you are primarily (high end) gaming then stick with Intel as the 7700K is cheaper and faster than the entire R7 line. Not really any hard choices to make.
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if no one buys AMD chips.... then no cash for R & D and intel can keep the screws to our collective asses.... I support competition with money in AMD pockets
 
I think the issues with gaming and other anomalies will iron out as the platform gets run in with updates and stuff, if you have Ryzen on pre-order, you are in for a very rough month, it is not fun at all now. I think the gaming performance will evolve, it will not beat Kaby lake but it will be good enough to game above the game line with healthy Frames.

I am looking for proper frame time variance benches, I am happy to game at 60FPS if there is low latency in frames.
 
Single core IPC is about equivalent to Sandy Bridge. Man, am I on a hot streak. I guess I won't be building the AMD PC this year after all.
Pieter3dnow said:
For a chip that is slated 3.4ghz and single core 3.8ghz turbo, first 14n AMD cpu , Did first generation 14nm Intel overclock that well?
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Better. The i7-5775C was a 3.3 GHz chip that could overclock to 4.4-4.5 GHz.
Ocellaris said:
Official AMD excuse list:
  • Games and apps aren't optimized yet
  • It's clearly a driver issue
  • Wait for BIOS updates
  • I like to play games with 300 browser tabs and Photoshop open
  • Just wait for DX12
  • Most games are GPU limited anyway
  • Things will clearly work better on the motherboard I ordered instead of the one in the review
  • People haven't figured out how to overclocking these yet
  • What really matters is [pick any game that wasn't included in the review]
  • These are great for "office work"
  • Intel has been ripping people off for years, so I'm buying a slower CPU to support AMD
  • I encode Blu Rays 14 hours a day, delete those, then encode them again
  • The CPU will last longer in the future when programs support more threads
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Sounds oddly similar to the Bulldozer launch. Hmm...
Riccochet said:
Exactly. Architectural firms, construction management, video/photo production, healthcare, science and tech firms are going to gobble these up saving tons.
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Riccochet said:
and they're also running high dollar Xeon's go along with those high dollar workstation graphics cards. Now, take the high dollar Xeon out of the picture and you free up money to invest in even better workstation GPU's increasing productivity.

Don't limit yourself to content creation. Healthcare uses these types of workstations as well.
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Not until Ryzen supports ECC memory. I don't know about other healthcare systems, but the one I work for would laugh in your face if you budgeted servers using non-ECC memory.
Burticus said:
Might be interesting to see what Asus, Gigabyte, etc can do with bios tweaking moving forward. Considering it's a brand new platform, we'll probably be seeing bios updates weekly/monthly.

AMD deserves some praise for finally offering Intel some competition, but as well all kind of figured beforehand, it's hardly an i7 killer.

Now they need to get clock speeds up and prices down. I'm curious about the APUs and the lesser core models that are coming. Why do I really need a $400 cpu for gaming when a $200 one does just fine?
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You mean like an i5-7600K?
 
Raendor said:
AMD was advertising it as such btw.
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No, people just ignored the key point. And it was that the 7700K was running so much else on the cores with higher priority on the 7700K so it was used up.

Its a nice little trick, run 8 threads with say high priority. Run game at normal. Do the same on a CPU with twice the cores/threads and watch. Sleezy? Absolutely.

Just as this:
 
Stryke1983 said:
Has this really changed anything outside of heavily multi threaded computing? If you absolutely need more cores go AMD as Intel just doesn't compete for price/performance. If you are primarily (high end) gaming then stick with Intel as the 7700K is cheaper and faster than the entire R7 line. Not really any hard choices to make.
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No I don't think anything has changed, but ppl's expectations went from get close to Intel, to now it must beat the 7700k in low threaded or poorly threaded situations like games. Ryzen clearly has a lot left in the tank if it can hang with Broadwell E but trails in some scenarios where we would have expected it to maintain that parity. The fact that it does this in some cases and not others shows that it still needs to mature some.
 
gigatexal said:
Lackluster gaming. Sad. But I'm curious how it OC's and I'd be using it as a workstation for VMs etc so it's still compelling to get 16 votes for 400 bucks.
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Did you not read the article? Overclocking puts the 1700 and 1800X around 4.0GHz to 4.1GHz max at around 1.4v.

thesmokingman said:
Game code isn't patched for Ryzen yet and there's obviously a few kinks to work. It's kinda funny you guys act surprised. Some games work better with the high perf windows profile, some work better with SMT disabled, etc... that all screams need moar optimization.
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Game code isn't patched? That's not how this works. The reality is, the CPU supports a standard set of instructions. It processes data that goes into it in a very specific way according to how the architecture was designed. That architecture may work better with some workloads than others. There is no changing this outside of the CPU's design phase. The Windows scheduler handles CPU core affinity. The game works through standard API's. There is nothing to patch. Even if there are some small tweaks that could be put in place here or there, you won't find improvements that will suddenly reverse the delta's in these graphs. It just isn't going to happen. Games working better with HT or SMT being disabled is nothing new. We used to have to disable HT on Pentium IV systems when they didn't handle hyper-threading well. Technically, many still don't and you can gain a bit of performance disabling HT. It just isn't usually worth going into the BIOS/UEFI to disable it for such miniscule gains.

If any "optimization" needs to be done it's to the Windows scheduler and the difference probably won't be all that pronounced. People need to quit making excuses for AMD. There is no need to. If you thought AMD was going to have an i7 killer at half the price you haven't been paying attention to history or to the information that's been leaking out about Zen / Ryzen from the beginning. There aren't really any surprises here beyond Ryzen being slightly better than we thought it might be. It's not a bad CPU for gaming. Again, GPU limitations are far more important than CPU limitations. Ryzen is great for professional use and multithreaded applications. It competes pretty well with Intel's offerings at a reduced price. This is because Ryzen's IPC improvement was more than AMD had initially said it would be. That's great.

We've got an alternative CPU that costs less for more cores than any of Intel's offerings and does pretty well against them in most cases. No, AMD isn't the fastest option but when priced aggressively enough, it's a viable option. Far more viable than anything AMD has produced since K8. again people quickly forget history. This is to be expected. AMD having the performance crown for a period of time several years back was the fluke, not something easily reproducible just because Jim Keller worked on it. An entire lineup of circumstances had to happen for AMD to overcome Intel's huge R&D and manufacturing advantages. The fact that AMD is as close as they are this time is astounding. AMD made it within a stone's throw of Skylake's IPC when they were behind Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge-E, Haswell, Ivy Bridge-E, Devil's Canyon, Haswell-E, Skylake, Broadwell, Broadwell-E and Kaby Lake. Granted the "E" series CPU's are HEDT based but good lord AMD couldn't compete for a fuckton of Intel processor releases.

Is anything happening here besides Ryzen being this good actually surprising? Well it shouldn't be. Basically, Ryzen is cheap (relatively), its great for productivity and good enough for gaming. I'm not sure what more you could realistically ask for. There is no reason to make excuses for AMD and no reason to be disappointed. AMD has released a product that will hopefully shock Intel out of its apathetic state and still give AMD an architecture to build on for the future which will hopefully remain competitive. This CPU should be a resounding success and give AMD the much needed cash flow it requires to press onward. Ryzen isn't the best CPU ever released but its exactly what we needed. Ideally it would have been an i7 killer or have equal parity with Intel but that just wasn't realistic.
 
gunzofdanavarone said:
if no one buys AMD chips.... then no cash for R & D and intel can keep the screws to our collective asses.... I support competition with money in AMD pockets
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Or I could just make purchasing decisions based on which products offer me the best value rather than choosing to subsidize multi national, multi billion dollar, for-profit companies just because they aren't the biggest in their industry.
 
So what are the odds this will make Skylake-X either slightly better or slightly cheaper?
 
Armenius said:
ot until Ryzen supports ECC memory. I don't know about other healthcare systems, but the one I work for would laugh in your face if you budgeted servers using non-ECC memory.
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I don't understand why it does not. I mean Naples should be a different segment totally from this.
 
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