AMD Ryzen 1700X CPU Review @ [H]

I'm not upset with the result, and I'm happy with my 2500k still. If performance scaled with resolutions however, then I would understand why, but it doesn't.
As expected, 4 and 6 cores will rule in terms of pure gaming. Still, I think I am going to build a 1700 rig in the coming months.

My 2500k is still plenty for games, though.

I'm pretty disappointed in the gaming benchmarks. I've read reviews from 5 different sites now. Looks like compared to my overclocked 2600k the 1700x isn't giving me much gaming performance. Maybe even lose some. Think I'll keep the preorder and see what happens. I wanted the platform upgrade as much as the CPU anyway for NVME SSD and better audio.

Linus Tech Tips

4k Crysis 3 & ROTR 2 FPS lead on 7700k


so there is hope
 
Not likely.

Agreed, with only a slight possibility that the windows thread scheduler needs a tweak to work best with Ryzen. If that were the case though, I'd suspect AMD would be plastering that caveat everywhere.
 
Being primarily a gamer and VR enthusiast, this is pretty lackluster. Sigh.

At least it's a good workstation chip, I guess.
 
Linus Tech Tips

4k Crysis 3 & ROTR 2 FPS lead on 7700k


so there is hope

There are a handful of games and engines that do scale reasonably well past four cores which could account for that. This is the exception, not the rule.
 
There are FAR fewer games that will be CPU bottlenecked while still at 1440p than GPU bottlenecked.
yeah I will be gaming on my ryzen @ 4 GHZ with a twin titans @ 4k... complaining how Bottlenecked I am at 80fps.... what suffering
 
Pretty disappointed that ryzen is such a shitty overclocker. I wonder if the 6 core and 4 core offerings will be any better at it.

The rumor mill had indicated this was likely some time ago. Reported engineering sample and test silicon clocks were in the 2.5GHz-3GHz or so range which wasn't encouraging. I figured 4.0GHZ or so would be the ceiling for these CPUs.
 
Price comparo at a local store.

AMD Ryzen 7 1700 3.0 GHz 329.00

Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake 4.2 GHz 299.00


AMD has done a good job of bringing the beef to the BBQ with Ryzen. But for gaming and VR (any reasons I would personally want the horsepower) the Intel 7700 is still currently cheaper than the AMD 1700 part and starts with over a gigahertz speed advantage before any extra cycles and/or voltage is applied.
 
yeah I will be gaming on my ryzen @ 4 GHZ with a twin titans @ 4k... complaining how Bottlenecked I am at 80fps.... what suffering

There's potential for Ryzen to be even worse for SLI as it has less PCI lanes than Intel's platform. It will be interesting to see some benchmarks on that for sure.
 
Test with SMT off, man. It's the only way to be sure.

As said in another thread, wasn't SMT supposed to be way superior to intel's HT? it was supposed to offer way better scaling and not supposed to offer negative impact on gaming.. it would be a damn shame if ryzen require to disable SMT to enjoy better gaming experience, that would remind me of.. nehalem times almost 9 years ago..
 
yeah I will be gaming on my ryzen @ 4 GHZ with a twin titans @ 4k... complaining how Bottlenecked I am at 80fps.... what suffering

Obviously, on an enthusiast website slanted towards gaming, I expect people will make a big deal out of the lead Intel still has on AMD. To be perfectly honest, I don't think this was unexpected. The reality of the situation is that Intel had over half a decade lead on AMD and it's surprising that AMD caught up this much. It's a David and Goliath situation in which Intel doesn't have a vulnerability for AMD to really exploit. Intel's apathy is the only reason why AMD had a remote chance to get as close as they have. Despite Intel's obvious reigning advantages, AMD put out a good showing and I think they've priced its offerings accordingly. I wish they had something to compete more directly with X99 to really leverage their position but alas they don't. At least, not yet.

So, Intel remains the king of gaming and single threaded applications. This isn't a surprise. Intel still has the absolute fastest processors for multithreaded workloads, although they come at a price. It's not unlike Bulldozer's position except that the gaps we see today are much smaller and much easier to live with. People will make a big deal about this but the reality is that with gaming being primarily GPU limited, Ryzen would pass the "Pepsi challenge" in game tests just fine. I doubt most people could ever tell the difference without FPS counters or benchmarks going.

Ryzen fills a nice niche in which it offers good enough performance in desktop scenarios at the right price. It offers a lower cost and very competitive alternative in content creation and professional applications which is a good thing. It hits a nice entry level point where you may not get the X99's versatility with regard to PCIe lanes and ultimately, I/O but you get the CPU performance in a Z270/Kaby Lake style price point. That's a good thing.
 
meh.
Very nice review, as always.

No reason to buy this. There's alot or "yeah, but" being thrown around.
The only redeeming point is the price.....for now.

Now on to the 1080 Ti review!!!!!!
 
Fair and Balanced review. Hat's off HardOCP for probably one of the most accurate reviews I've seen this morning.

I've already seen a lot of people giving super high-praise and ignoring the fact that the Intel is still king when it comes to gaming. Those type of reviews actually do the potential buyer out there a huge disservice.

I'm a gamer first and foremost so those 3 or 10 or 20 frames per second are more important to me than saving a little money or additional cores I will not use 95% of the time.

Also, the Intel 7700K @ $299 is imho not only a cheap buy but a smarter buy.

This is what makes this release so interesting. Primary gamers are going to pass. If you are primarily a productive user, Ryzen is a huge value. Now we have CPU's that will specialize in what we are most interested in, and be passable for the side interests. If you are gamer first, go Intel. If you are productivity first, go AMD. Makes for a much more interesting market.

The hope being GPU limited? That's a terrible hope. Just as those thinking time will fix Ryzen. People did that too with FX.

FX did get considerable improvements over time. FX 8350 is a much better CPU than FX 8150. The problem was, there was so much improvement needed, that it was never going to be enough to effectively compete with Intel CPU's. Ryzen has much less ground to make up in gaming only - as is obvious with productivity, it is at or better than Intel.
 
So there is literally no overclocking headroom? 4/4.1ghz is the max on all cores? So out of the box, the chip frequency is at its' limit?

I recall Intel chips going like 4.4/4.5 GHz right?
Well this is both good and bad.
The bad is obvious, the good is that if ~4.2GHz is the hard limit, might as well save $$$ and get the R7-1700 instead.
Kinda like back in the old PII-333 vs. PII-400 days.
 
Pretty disappointed that ryzen is such a shitty overclocker. I wonder if the 6 core and 4 core offerings will be any better at it.
I completely agree. Huge deal breaker for me as I mainly game. 100mhz overclock on an 1800x is pathetic. Atleast Intel chips reach 4-4.5ghz. Stock to Stock, Ryzen is the better deal. Overclock to overclock, Intel is way better.
 
FX did get considerable improvements over time. FX 8350 is a much better CPU than FX 8150. The problem was, there was so much improvement needed, that it was never going to be enough to effectively compete with Intel CPU's. Ryzen has much less ground to make up in gaming only - as is obvious with productivity, it is at or better than Intel.

FX performs just as bad today if not worse than at release. And you have to be a fool to think time will fix everything for Ryzen.
 
As said in another thread, wasn't SMT supposed to be way superior to intel's HT? it was supposed to offer way better scaling and not supposed to offer negative impact on gaming.. it would be a damn shame if ryzen require to disable SMT to enjoy better gaming experience, that would remind me of.. nehalem times almost 9 years ago..

I am aware of your opinion on SMT. Even after all these years, having it disabled during gaming sessions would be preferred regardless of the platform. I don't care about it in terms of AMD vs Intel and neither should anyone. It's a bullshit feature for gaming.
 
I was hoping to see a bit more on the gaming front but this looks to be a pretty solid performer regardless. While low res benchmarks are lower than hoped, typical res evens things out for todays GPUs; how long this will remain true will be interesting to see.
 
Isn't it about what we all expected? Slower than intel single core ipc + clocked slower than intel = not as good at gaming. I'm impressed that the multi-threaded/multi-core actually seems to be very well done in Ryzen.

It's all going to come down to pricing and stability at this point. If they think there is another 15% of easy wins for Ryzen 2 (similar to the nehalem to sandy bridge jump) then that should help the gaming side of things next year. For servers, network video recorders, workstations etc I think Ryzen looks pretty good (provided it's stable). Hopefully we'll see some intel price drops, but more importantly hopefully we'll see intel mix it up a bit with more cores or other new tech.
 
I'll be in for one. Literally just got a 7700k together, but I feel I need to have a backup system. (y) Thinking a summertime Ryzen build!
 
The rumor mill had indicated this was likely some time ago. Reported engineering sample and test silicon clocks were in the 2.5GHz-3GHz or so range which wasn't encouraging. I figured 4.0GHZ or so would be the ceiling for these CPUs.

Any idea if less cores will equal better overclocks for zen?
 
The hope being GPU limited? That's a terrible hope. Just as those thinking time will fix Ryzen. People did that too with FX.
What?

you gain 2 FPS ~4% using 1800x too bad they didn't show Min frame

I'm not sure of your logic, you get slightly better FPS when gaming at a proper resolution and you get better multicore performance to speed up encoding etc etc. Nothing to fix, it's a better cpu than my i5 and i7, would deliver same framerate gaming and improve upon all the multitasking intel sucks at.

If they want to test 1080p then lets use some 970's and 390's for the benchmarks.
 
My biggest issue is that AMD kept pushing this as a gaming enthusiast CPU and now gaming benchmarks are out and look disappointing. I was hoping it would blow Intel out of the water but either way I think the pricing is still competitive and should force Intel to rethink there pricing scheme.
 
Isn't it about what we all expected? Slower than intel single core ipc + clocked slower than intel = not as good at gaming. I'm impressed that the multi-threaded/multi-core actually seems to be very well done in Ryzen.
IPC and clocks have nothing to do with what we are witnessing with it's performance, both of these are actually on the level of Haswell-Broadwell (okay, a little lower than Broadwell and that sucks, but not for me).
Do you suspect this could be some weird optimization issue? it just seems strange considering how well it preforms otherwise.
I have said it earlier and will say it again: memory latency rears it's head and says "Hello idiots, i matter in games!".
 
What?

you gain 2 FPS ~4% using 1800x too bad they didn't show Min frame

I'm not sure of your logic, you get slightly better FPS when gaming at a proper resolution and you get better multicore performance to speed up encoding etc etc. Nothing to fix, it's a better cpu than my i5 and i7, would deliver same framerate gaming and improve upon all the multitasking intel sucks at.

If they want to test 1080p then lets use some 970's and 390's for the benchmarks.

There is a long way between a 1800X and a 7700K in gaming.
 
Any idea if less cores will equal better overclocks for zen?

I have no idea. I've not read anything or seen anything which would indicate one way or another. I suspect it wouldn't make enough of a difference even if there is some advantage. Intel's clock speed advantage is simply too great for AMD to overcome.
 
Don't they have the WattMan capability to clock individual cores differently? Haven't seen that addressed in reviews.
 
Kyle
Do you suspect this could be some weird optimization issue? it just seems strange considering how well it preforms otherwise.

It is possible that some games are manually assigning thread affinities, and are putting two heavy workloads on one physical core instead of on two. Or, the OS in an untuned state is doing basically the same.

While it doesn't seem super likely, it would lend some credence to the observation some sites have made that disabling HT improves performance considerably.
 
As someone that is building a system for my wife to do content creation, BIM/CAD and lots of multi-threaded rending this is a home run. I'm, literally, going to save a ton of money over going with a 6900K or comparable Xeon. She doesn't game.

These will be a fucking home run in the workstation and nuclear physics department.

I think that's what AMD was really aiming for, and they succeeded big time. That's also where the real money is, not the gamer market, people seem to forget that.
 
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Soo, it's kinda OK, but still dragging its feet comparing to mainstream Intel cpu when we get to the most important purpose of the cpu for the majority of us here - gaming. After all that hype it seems like another flop for AMD alongside with still no Vega around for months to come and polaris rebrandeon.
 
It is possible that some games are manually assigning thread affinities, and are putting two heavy workloads on one physical core instead of on two. Or, the OS in an untuned state is doing basically the same.

While it doesn't seem super likely, it would lend some credence to the observation some sites have made that disabling HT improves performance considerably.

Games shouldn't be setting affinity at all. This is up to the Windows scheduler. It could be that the Windows scheduler needs an update in regard to Ryzen.
 
I think that's what AMD was really aiming for, and they succeeded big time. That's also where the real money is, not the gamer market, people seem to forget that.

The "real money" is in home users that use highly-threaded workloads and have their SO build their PCs? No, it's in businesses and professionals. Stability, TCO, and trust in the brand are the deciding factors there; not a marginal cost savings.
 
Hmm, very interesting! Thankfully i'm not doing a new build until closer to summer (heck, Vega should be out as well for more comparisons). Hopefully in the next short while AMD will have "fixes" for the odd performance. To me it really looks like the mem speeds drastically affect this chip so hopefully support for 3600 or some such DDR4 will be out and working properly?
 
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