AMD Ryzen 1700X CPU Review @ [H]

[Riccochet]

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.

It's a good thing I'm not talking about servers. Rather workstations. I'm also in healthcare, we support a number of radiation oncology groups with a lot of nuclear physicists running high end i7's without ECC RAM.

 

[Bandalo]

So basically I'm safe with my 5820K @ 4.5Ghz for another year or two.

Now the really interesting stuff will be two things. One, what does Intel respond with? Accelerated release of next-gen? Price Drops? Or nothing? And two, what will Gen 2 Ryzen be capable of?

 

[yourgrandma]

The inevitable 'a patch will fix everything' posts have already started...

 

[NKD]

I am sick and tired of all these people bitching about overclock on 8 core chips. This AMDs brand new architecture, give me a damn break. They are getting it to 4.0 to 4.2ghz out of the gate on an 8 core chip. Give me intel overclocks on 8 core chip, yea 4.3ghz max. Go check it out. You all are sitting here comparing it to 7700k, which you knew from the beginning that amd chip wont match in overclocking. Give it more time, shit. This exactly what amd needed, a solid chip. Why you all mad at a 8 core chip running at 4.0 to 4.2ghz?

Great solid overall chip. I have a 6850k running at 4.4ghz max. Yea I love it. But for anyone here to knock on AMD for finally coming out with a chip that is solid and performs and lays a great foundation for the future. Its just pure hate..

 

[thesmokingman]

Did you not read the article? Overclocking puts the 1700 and 1800X around 4.0GHz to 4.1GHz max at around 1.4v.



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.

“Oxide games is incredibly excited with what we are seeing from the Ryzen CPU. Using our Nitrous game engine, we are working to scale our existing and future game title performance to take full advantage of Ryzen and its eight-core, 16-thread architecture, and the results thus far are impressive. These optimizations are not yet available for Ryzen benchmarking. However, expect updates soon to enhance the performance of games like Ashes of the Singularity on Ryzen CPUs, as well as our future game releases.” - Brad Wardell, CEO Stardock and Oxide

 

[chx]

The big deal today IMO is http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph11170/85875.png this. In heavily multithreaded workloads the 1700 just won the performance / dollar AND the performance / watt crown at the same time (!!!!) and not by small margins. I can't believe my eyes. Also, do you know what else is heavily multithreaded and very wattage sensitive? Servers, that's what. If this image didn't put The Fear in Intel's hearts I do not know what would.

Edit: apparently I missed the 7700T delivering about 5% more performance per watt. There is a 62% price premium for that 5% on the other hand.

 

[legcramp]

Dang, I am pretty disappointed with the gaming performance.. oh well life goes on and I'll be on my X58 setup for another couple years. Good showing otherwise though.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

I am sick and tired of all these people bitching about overclock on 8 core chips. This AMDs brand new architecture, give me a damn break. They are getting it to 4.0 to 4.2ghz out of the gate on an 8 core chip. Give me intel overclocks on 8 core chip, yea 4.3ghz max. Go check it out. You all are sitting here comparing it to 7700k, which you knew from the beginning that amd chip wont match in overclocking. Give it more time, shit. This exactly what amd needed, a solid chip. Why you all mad at a 8 core chip running at 4.0 to 4.2ghz?

Great solid overall chip. I have a 6850k running at 4.4ghz max. Yea I love it. But for anyone here to knock on AMD for finally coming out with a chip that is solid and performs and lays a great foundation for the future. Its just pure hate..

Replace "hate" with "unintelligent" and I agree 100%. If this is Day Zero then the next three-four years are going to be FUN for enthusiasts.

 

[AgentxofxChaos]

Well it's good to see AMD back in the game with a solid processor that competes with Intel on at least a majority of fronts. I haven't put an AMD chip in my main rig since I won that 1090T from a contest on here. It's good to know that I can start considering them again.

 

[razor1]

Dan_D and AMD are talking about two different things, when you look at critical path code for GPU calls to the CPU, the calls have to be done in a manner that doesn't stall the CPU, or stall the GPU. SMT is not where the problem lies in this, its the scheduler, which is what Dan_D is talking about.

So this is not a rework of how the multithreading in the game works, but how the instructions should be dispatched and in what order

 

[Dan_D]

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:

Nothing to see here.

I've got news for you: Hardware companies provide review guides to hardware sites and reviewers such as myself which ALWAYS try and get you to show their products in the best possible light. Intel's done it, AMD's done it, NVIDIA, ASUS, MSI, GIGABYTE, Corsair, and every one else in the industry does the same exact thing. Most sites have a standard test methodology of their own which ignores these guides but ultimately, those guides exist for virtually every product I've ever seen. These companies have many tactics for trying to get the reviews skewed in their favor. The reviewer's guide is just one of them.

It's shady as fuck I'll agree but it's also par for the course.

 

[Raendor]

So basically I'm safe with my 5820K @ 4.5Ghz for another year or two.

Now the really interesting stuff will be two things. One, what does Intel respond with? Accelerated release of next-gen? Price Drops? Or nothing? And two, what will Gen 2 Ryzen be capable of?

Intel already promised to raise the core count in mainstream line by 2018/2019. You're definitely alright with your 5820k on both single and multicore front. I wouldn't even bother in a first place. Hell, i wasn't even bothered with my 6700k.

 

[Bankie]

It's a good thing I'm not talking about servers. Rather workstations. I'm also in healthcare, we support a number of radiation oncology groups with a lot of nuclear physicists running high end i7's without ECC RAM.

And you think that these businesses that run critical functions are going to move to a brand new and untested architecture from a company that has next no trust just to save a few bucks? Ha!

 

[Teenyman45]

Dang, I am pretty disappointed with the gaming performance.. oh well life goes on and I'll be on my X58 setup for another couple years. Good showing otherwise though.

This is a very solid upgrade from X58

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.

It's a good thing I'm not talking about servers. Rather workstations. I'm also in healthcare, we support a number of radiation oncology groups with a lot of nuclear physicists running high end i7's without ECC RAM.

It looked to me like this is where AMD's biggest market for this sort of chip is going to be found, especially if it poaches sales from lower core count XEONs.

 

[drescherjm]

And you think that these businesses that run critical functions are going to move to a brand new and untested architecture from a brand that has next no trust just to save a few bucks? Ha!

We would consider it for our medical imaging research. However our workstations are not mission critical.

 

[Armenius]

I am sick and tired of all these people bitching about overclock on 8 core chips. This AMDs brand new architecture, give me a damn break. They are getting it to 4.0 to 4.2ghz out of the gate on an 8 core chip. Give me intel overclocks on 8 core chip, yea 4.3ghz max. Go check it out. You all are sitting here comparing it to 7700k, which you knew from the beginning that amd chip wont match in overclocking. Give it more time, shit. This exactly what amd needed, a solid chip. Why you all mad at a 8 core chip running at 4.0 to 4.2ghz?

Great solid overall chip. I have a 6850k running at 4.4ghz max. Yea I love it. But for anyone here to knock on AMD for finally coming out with a chip that is solid and performs and lays a great foundation for the future. Its just pure hate..

The i7-6900K can go to 4.5 GHz, typically. With a base clock of 3.2 GHz, that is a 40.625% overclock. The R7 1700X does 4.1 GHz with a base clock of 3.4 GHz, which is a 20.589% overclock. The i7-6900K overclocks twice as well as the R7 1700X.

 

[gunzofdanavarone]

I been supporting RYZEN all day.... but I cancelled my order..... i have my broadwell for my workstation tasks and i have to go back to intel for my hardcore gaming.... the low overclock is what killed me.... 4.1 just wont cut it for me..... still a good chip... its not GAMING TURD as the intelliots like to day

 

[Dan_D]

And you think that these businesses that run critical functions are going to move to a brand new and untested architecture from a company that has next no trust just to save a few bucks? Ha!

They also have to deal with the long held belief in the IT industry that any server without an Intel CPU in it is cheap crap. Standardization and other factors including internal testing contribute to what companies buy. It's not always about the bottom dollar. I do think Ryzen is a good alternative to those lower core count Xeons that someone else mentioned. Unfortunately, we don't really know how many companies have done the QVL testing to ready Ryzen based servers for release. We don't know how many models of these exist or how available they will be.

 

[lolfail9001]

The i7-6900K can go to 4.5 GHz, typically.

Uh, not really. I mean, if you use silicon lottery, you could get one, but generally their safe range is 4.2-4.3. From all core turbo of 3.5 or 3.7. It is still much more headroom than 1800X though rofl

 

[OrangeKhrush]

The inevitable 'a patch will fix everything' posts have already started...

If the problem is rooted in firmware, yes patches work. I went throught the X99 issues, this is worse, there are so many stability issues all starting from the bios.

 

[Dan_D]

Uh, not really. I mean, if you use silicon lottery, you could get one, but generally their safe range is 4.2-4.3. From all core turbo of 3.5 or 3.7. It is still much more headroom than 1800X though rofl

This is why I never wanted the 6900K or even the 6950X CPU's in my own machine. Broadwell-E at 4.3GHz isn't enough to beat out Haswell-E at 4.5GHz. It sure as hell wouldn't justify the cost of the upgrade over the existing Haswell-E CPU for a system that's primarily used to write motherboard reviews, do Photoshop stuff and play games.

 

[NKD]

Did you not read the article? Overclocking puts the 1700 and 1800X around 4.0GHz to 4.1GHz max at around 1.4v.



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.

Best post I have read. If everyone reads this they would just calm down lol.

 

[Presbytier]

So if you are a competive PC gamer or just like high refresh rates Ryzen, as of right now, seems like it won't be all that great. However I am willing to give it a few months to see if this really is all unoptimized micro code and bios. I do not need to build a new system yet.

 

[sover]

So basically I'm safe with my 5820K @ 4.5Ghz for another year or two.

Now the really interesting stuff will be two things. One, what does Intel respond with? Accelerated release of next-gen? Price Drops? Or nothing? And two, what will Gen 2 Ryzen be capable of?

Unless intel sales of their high margin parts see a significant downturn while AMD starts killing it in their financial reports I doubt intel does anything at all in the near future.

 

[xTrident]

Sounds like it doesn't much matter but I am quite disappointed with Ryzen's single threaded performance. Good on AMD for running neck and neck - even winning some against Intel's $1k CPU. But damn... I really expected more of a pick up in IPC considering that's been the problem AMD has had.

 

[Dan_D]

The inevitable 'a patch will fix everything' posts have already started...

They have and they are all wrong. UEFI BIOS updates do not result in significant performance increases. The only reason we'd see such a thing here is if an update allowed significant improvements in memory clocking. Even so, I'd temper my expectations on this. We have no evidence to suggest that such increases will have real world benefits. Secondly, OS patches and "driver" updates aren't likely to do much if anything either. A patch to the Windows scheduler as others pointed out probably wouldn't do anything. If AMD thought it would they'd be screaming very loudly that this was necessary to get the full performance of Ryzen CPUs.

 

[Dan_D]

Sounds like it doesn't much matter but I am quite disappointed with Ryzen's single threaded performance. Good on AMD for running neck and neck - even winning some against Intel's $1k CPU. But damn... I really expected more of a pick up in IPC considering that's been the problem AMD has had.

AMD always said "40% over Excavator." What we got was 52%. I'm not sure what there is to be disappointed about unless you had unrealistic expectations to begin with.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Looks decent so far. Toms showed 15+% increase in gaming FPS just by setting Windows to high performance power plan and disabling SMT. I think there may be some kinks to be worked out (which is still a mark against AMD) but once things settle out we should see some compelling value.

THis is interesting. It suggests some further tweaking of the windows scheduler and Ryzen drivers may be needed.

 

[noko]

Great job Kyle for including VR results! I think that also goes along with content creation from 360 videos, 360 3d videos as well as game content creation. You can do both well at an incredible price point with Ryzen!

RyZen looks very strong on working on large data sets, crunching numbers from a number of reviews. Personally game results at 640 or 1080 for me is totally meaningless. I don't see anything indicating any CPU would give a meaningful better gaming experience with my 60hz 3440x1440p and Vive then an OC 1700x with two 1070s in SLI. Moving on from there Ryzen definitely kicks maxed out OC Intels 4 core processors when doing more serious work at roughly the same price. AMAZING!

I also have a lot of relief since all the reviews pretty much shows it works without major crashes etc. (Toms Hardware did have 2 crashes). Considering all software tested including the OS was not compiled or tweaked with RyZen in mind this is an astonishing achievement!

So right now I am very much eagerly waiting for my Ryzen parts to be delivered, this is going to be way fun and probably frustrating at times as well. A worthwhile challenge that is what will makes it all worth it.

When I got my Skylake processor I7 6700K and Gigabyte motherboard I had to load Win 10 two times due to corruption mostly pinned down to the memory. Gigabyte F3 bios and later solved that and it now is one very stable impressive system. With XMP profile the DDR4 3000 memory would run with varying speeds up to 3.4ghz . It would run 12 hours plus gaming etc. a number of times. Shutdown and restart and the memory would be wonk crashing no matter what you did. Here it looks like RyZen is in better shape but I also expect some growing pains like I had with Skylake not to long after launch.

As for improvements from the OS, we have to hear from AMD and/or Microsoft if something has to be updated and when it is updated. Same goes for firmware, bios etc. Growing pains. By far it is looking much better then Bulldozer ever did.

 

[Bandalo]

Intel already promised to raise the core count in mainstream line by 2018/2019. You're definitely alright with your 5820k on both single and multicore front. I wouldn't even bother in a first place. Hell, i wasn't even bothered with my 6700k.

They already had that plan in the works long before the Ryzen stuff started to come out. I'm curious if this initial success by AMD will make them change their plans. It looks like they're going to need to do something to compete in this market, even if it's just price drops.

Unless intel sales of their high margin parts see a significant downturn while AMD starts killing it in their financial reports I doubt intel does anything at all in the near future.

It's not Intel's biggest market, but it IS one they currently dominate. They can't afford to completely abandon the desktop to AMD.

 

[Nathan_P]

"The issues, however seem to not affect Ryzen gameplay once the resolution scales up to 1400p/1600p/4K."

Man you have been doing this for a very long time and don't understand that you're entering a GPU bound state here... How the fuck are you reviewing CPUs and GPUs and not know that?!?!

Bench it with GTAV, Titan Fall 2, BF1, anything recent that people actually play or throw that CPU in a CFX or SLI config and we can watch it tank, cause you know it will. You're a pile of shit and a horrible reviewer.

I'm impressed that in your 1st post you call out the owner of the whole site. What an idiot

 

[sover]

They already had that plan in the works long before the Ryzen stuff started to come out. I'm curious if this initial success by AMD will make them change their plans. It looks like they're going to need to do something to compete in this market, even if it's just price drops.

If intel does anything it'll probably be strongarming their major OEM customers to keep Ryzen systems marketed in ways that will avoid impacting intel's bottom line.

Their first move will likely be to ignore ryzen and hope it doesn't displace marketshare for them.

We've seen the scenario before.

 

[Shintai]

Unless intel sales of their high margin parts see a significant downturn while AMD starts killing it in their financial reports I doubt intel does anything at all in the near future.

Ryzen isn't going to do that. Its simply too pricy and too poor for that.

 

[Presbytier]

Great job Kyle for including VR results! I think that also goes along with content creation from 360 videos, 360 3d videos as well as game content creation. You can do both well at an incredible price point with Ryzen!

RyZen looks very strong on working on large data sets, crunching numbers from a number of reviews. Personally game results at 640 or 1080 for me is totally meaningless. I don't see anything indicating any CPU would give a meaningful better gaming experience with my 60hz 3440x1440p and Vive then an OC 1700x with two 1070s in SLI. Moving on from there Ryzen definitely kicks maxed out OC Intels 4 core processors when doing more serious work at roughly the same price. AMAZING!
QUOTE]
Gaming at 1080 is not meaningless. it is the most common resolution and if you want high refresh rates 1080 is a must as of now. Even if GPU get better at higher refresh rates at higher resolutions that CPU is going to become a bottleneck just as it is at 1080.

 

[thesmokingman]

I'm impressed that in your 1st post you call out the owner of the whole site. What an idiot

That is impressive huh? Could probably use an IP on aisle 10 on that poster lol. Avoiding the banhammer with an alt...?

 

[noko]

THis is interesting. It suggests some further tweaking of the windows scheduler and Ryzen drivers may be needed.

That is how it sounds to me as well. I am sure AMD will have some kind of response on this in a few days. Maybe a hotfix until Microsoft can do an official fix.

As time goes on and adjustments, fixes, software updates I expect to see better performance.

 

[Cmdrmonkey]

So they finally have a mediocre i7 competitor, like a decade later. Meh.

 

[Zion Halcyon]

SO, I don't know who is following the AMD AMA with Lisa Su, but we now have an official answer from the top on the gaming performance:

Thanks for the question. In general, we've seen great performance from SMT in applications and benchmarks but there are some games that are using code optimized for our competitor... we are confident that we can work through these issues with the game developers who are actively engaging with our engineering teams.​

For what its worth.

 

[sover]

Ryzen isn't going to do that. Its simply too pricy and too poor for that.

I agree, but not in that it's overly pricey or poor, more that it probably won't make it's way into major oem workstations in the near term. In the near time it's likely to be mostly an enthusiast part and boutique system selection. By the end of the year we might start to see it getting some traction from the major OEMs in mid tier workstations, but it's going to be long hard climb back to relevance for AMD.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

RyZen looks very strong on working on large data sets, crunching numbers from a number of reviews. Personally game results at 640 or 1080 for me is totally meaningless. I don't see anything indicating any CPU would give a meaningful better gaming experience with my 60hz 3440x1440p and Vive then an OC 1700x with two 1070s in SLI. Moving on from there Ryzen definitely kicks maxed out OC Intels 4 core processors when doing more serious work at roughly the same price. AMAZING!

I mostly agree.

There is a large subset of the gaming crowd these days that insist on very high frame rates on 144hz Free/G-Sync screens.

For them this will be a measurable difference in their real world gaming. I question - however - whether it is meaningful. I find games more than sufficiently smooth and playable as long as they don't ever drop below 60fps. There is some evidence to suggest that at the borders higher framerates are noticeable, but as you start climbing above 60fps the diminishing returns set in very quickly, and by 90fps any further returns are pretty much negligible.

So, there will be games in which a 4 core intel screamer overclocked will max out 144hz screens, and Ryzen may "only" hit 120 or maybe even 90fps, but is this practically significant? I doubt it. We are talking placebo land here.

Even if I had a 144hz screen, I'd probably lock the game engines down to 90fps somewhere so my GPU didn't get as hot and loud. In the grand scheme of things, as long as my minimum framerates don't drop below 60fps, I am happy.

I probably won't be rushing out to buy a Ryzen system though. It won't show much if any difference in my workloads over my 5+ year old [email protected]. I'll probably wait this one out, and when my 3930k starts getting really flaky after years of high voltage overclocking, I'll decide what to do next.