Bit of a Rant about Ryzen & AMD

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CAD4466HK said:
I waited till they started selling mobos with a big fat orange B3 on the box. ;)
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Reading about this sh*t right now... this actually explains a LOT. I'm pretty damn sure I had a recalled board, now. See, as the machine got older, I was running out of SATA ports - I just kept adding drives whenever I needed more space. Eventually I hit the the slower SATA ports, and some strange sh*t started happening. I lost a lot of hard drives - much more than I thought was normal. 2 or 3 drives would go in a year, and all on the 3GBps ports. This sounds like it might be related.

Of course, I lost two sticks of RAM last year, too.

That motherboard was definitely on the verge of death.

Oh hell, maybe I should make a post sh*tting on Intel now, too, just out of fairness.
 
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DuronBurgerMan said:
Reading about this sh*t right now... this actually explains a LOT. I'm pretty damn sure I had a recalled board, now. See, as the machine got older, I was running out of SATA ports - I just kept adding drives whenever I needed more space. Eventually I hit the the slower SATA ports, and some strange sh*t started happening. I lost a lot of hard drives - much more than I thought was normal. 2 or 3 drives would go in a year, and all on the 3GBps ports. This sounds like it might be related.

Of course, I lost two sticks of RAM last year, too.

That motherboard was definitely on the verge of death.
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I would of never known that shit was going on if I hadn't been on the forums, iirc Guru3D and XS were among the first to call it out, I was pissed cuz I couldn't take my C2Q9550 turning my office into a sauna any longer.
 
CAD4466HK said:
I would of never known that shit was going on if I hadn't been on the forums, iirc Guru3D and XS were among the first to call it out, I was pissed cuz I couldn't take my C2Q9550 turning my office into a sauna any longer.
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I still have my old C2Q6600 running my MAME cabinet. The thing is a tank and keeps on trucking.
 
DuronBurgerMan said:
Yeah... maybe I'm overreacting a bit. But I'm seeing this sh*t in an entirely different light now. Rose-colored enthusiast glasses came off.
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Yeah, you are over-reacting a bit. It has teething problems (what new architecture doesn't?) but your money-making computer was on the fritz and you needed a replacement stat. With the workloads you indicated, an 8c/16t chip that wasn't Bulldozer punched the ticket. Once AMD gets the bugs worked out you'll probably have several years of good use out of it. Unfortunately, you're probably going to have a slightly slower machine than you initially thought. But there's nothing wrong with that.
 
DuronBurgerMan said:
Yeah... maybe I'm overreacting a bit. But I'm seeing this sh*t in an entirely different light now. Rose-colored enthusiast glasses came off.
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It just sounds like you'd have been better served by a 6900k. Your last point was basically it. Ryzen offers good price/performance depending on your use case, especially the R5 1600 and R7 1700 if you're overclocking. I don't think anybody expected Ryzen to compete at raw performance. The fact that it does compete with the 6900k in some workloads honestly shocked the hell out of me. Before launch, I expected no better than 6850k performance, even in heavily threaded workloads. But you're right, their SMT is awesome in some scenarios and does somewhat mask some of the processor's weak points.
 
DuronBurgerMan said:
If you've been following some of the other threads... I've quickly become disillusioned with Ryzen and AMD, and the fanboys on both sides. It's weird, because this build went well, no problems, and it performs great next to my old 2600k. At first, it seemed great, and I said as much repeatedly. Having 8 cores is great, so long as they are not crappy cores like Bulldozer was. Multitasking is fast, even with a lot of background tasks. Rendering and encoding is great. And even in gaming, I never really see the CPU max out. No matter what I'm doing, with the exception of rendering/encoding, there's always CPU headroom available.

So that's the good. I don't want to be seen as harping on AMD unnecessarily.

But this isn't a great product, or an amazing advancement. It doesn't push the envelope in any way except maybe price, which I'll touch on a little more in a bit.

It's a Beta Product

First off, let's get the obvious gripe out of the way: this is a beta product. While I got lucky with my build, a lot of folks didn't. Memory compatibility was a disaster for those who strayed off the QVLs. While we can poke fun at those who did (you dummy, why didn't you read the QVL, huh?), when is the last time you even needed to check a QVL for an Intel product? You could buy whatever, it most of the time it'd be fine.

BIOS issues abound. At first, they didn't bother me any. Again, I was lucky. But the Agesa 1004a update torpedoed my RAM overclock. Went from 2933 all the way down to 2400. Way to go AMD.

It's clear that this is a product that shouldn't have been released when it was. It needed another few months of work in the BIOSes and misc. minor bugfixes here and there. This is a beta product that AMD felt it needed to rush to get out before Skylake-X. They were behind on Ryzen as it was, they likely felt they could ill-afford to wait any longer.

Feature Set is Lacking

If you need good storage solutions, forget Ryzen. Even the 270 chipset has better options in this regard, much less the X99 that AMD would like you to compare against, given the repeated comparisons between Broadwell in productivity. Lack of support for more than 64GB of RAM is also an issue in that comparison, though less of one compared to the mainstream Intel quads.

Drivers are crappy, too (though that's been a plague in the AMD ecosystem for as long as I can remember).

It's a Just an 8 Core Sandy Bridge with Better SMT

AMD did great on one thing: their SMT support. For technical reasons that folks like juanrga and others have gone into, AMD's SMT support gives it a sizable boost in throughput tasks. This hides a lot of Ryzen's relatively lackluster performance elsewhere. So in encoding, rendering, and other workstation tasks, Ryzen gets a nice little boost, and starts to look competitive with Haswell-E and Broadwell-E.

And to be fair, in these specific scenarios, that's true. But it's due primarily to SMT, and Ryzen being able to make absolutely the most out of its available resources. Kudos to AMD for doing this, but also note that this means, in an absolute best-case, Ryzen-optimized world, where games use all of its threads to the utmost, Ryzen will fall between Haswell-E and Broadwell-E in IPC, and it will not overclock as well.

Overclocking is Crap

4GHz is your ceiling. 4.1 or 4.2 on golden samples, at high voltage, and under water. Mine would boot at 4.1 and 4.2 both, but I could never push enough voltage safely to keep it stable there. Maybe under water I could have done it. But even then, even Sandy Bridge could do 4.5. Ryzen? Nope. 4.0 - 4.2 is your ceiling, depending on your cooling solution, and your luck. And that's with a higher end Ryzen. With the regular, better-value 1700, Kyle shows a max of around 3.9 on both.

Optimizations Won't Fix This

At first, I thought the optimizations for DOTA 2, Ashes, and Total War were promising. But all of these games showed a host of other issues too. In other words, these were cases where Ryzen performance wasn't merely unoptimized, it was downright buggy. They fixed the bugs, and Ryzen benefited, but that only put Ryzen performance where it was supposed to be. In a highly threaded game like Ashes, we saw Ryzen barely edge out a 7700k. In some cases under OC, it still lost to the 7700k. The 6900k remained comfortably dominant.

There may be fixes for buggy implementations like Rise of the Tomb Raider. But don't expect a magic bullet to make Ryzen competitive with the 7700k. It will never be, not in this iteration anyway. You're looking at 20-30% performance deficit on average, in 1080p, in non-GPU bound scenarios, and that's a big sacrifice to make. And even if games get more threaded, Ashes is showing you a best case scenario for Ryzen: competitive with the 7700k

The 6 core Ryzens compete a little better with the 4c/4t Intel parts, though. 4 threads is starting to become a bottleneck in some everyday situations, and so there is an argument for a 6 core Ryzen over a 7600k. But we're not going to see 8 threads become a bottleneck during the lifetime of this crop of CPUs anyway. So the argument for a 1700 or 1800X over a 7700k in gaming is moot.

There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

So what about my use case? You know, someone who does a lot of different sh*t. Rendering, encoding, development, gaming, Photoshop, heavy multitasking, etc... Surely it's a great value for that, right?

The answer is: kind of.

If you're working on a tight budget, and saving $600-$700 on a CPU means you can afford a fatter GPU, more RAM, etc... then yes, Ryzen can be a good value. My Ryzen 1700X + 1080 Ti cost the same together as just a 6900k alone. So for a budget workstation build this can make sense.

But it's a very narrow band of budgeting. For instance, if you have $3k to spend on your workstation, go 6900k. If you're limited to around $2k for the workstation, that's when juggling parts and getting an 8 core Ryzen makes more sense. But you are going to sacrifice a lot to make that happen. And you might be rather displeased with the results compared to a Broadwell rig.

For gaming, forget it. 8 core Ryzens are no good. 6 core Ryzens are better in a price/performance sense compared to their Intel competition, but even then... if you can swing a 7700k, do that instead. It's an extra $100 well spent.

AMD is Competing on Price, Not Performance

In the end, AMD did better with Ryzen than they did with Bulldozer, but let's be honest: that wasn't exactly a high bar to clear. They over-hyped this product. Once again, AMD's Achilles heel isn't its engineers, who occasionally come up with absolutely brilliant products... it's their marketing department. It's like they recruit straight out of the Eighth Circle of Hell, where they stuff all the Astrologists.

If AMD had said they were releasing a budget workstation chip, a mid-range gaming CPU, and a line-up of budget CPUs, that would have been an accurate description of what actually happened here.

They are competing on price, because they cannot win on performance. I don't know if it's ever going to be possible for them to compete on an absolute performance level again. They lost so much ground...

Am I happy with this build? Kind of. It's a great performer, and aside from the loss of RAM overclock with the latest BIOS, I've been spared the issues a lot of other folks have had. But it's looking like I just got lucky. It's a good budget workstation CPU, and I'll attest to that.

But in the end, it's a budget CPU. That's the operative word. No more, no less.
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I respect your opinions but, please, just return it and get your money back. You can then go out and buy the Intel you already wanted in the first place. Dude, you knew what you where getting into before you bought it and are now complaining? Also, why did you not just flash your bios back to 0515 to restore your memory speeds? Also, the IPC of the Ryzen CPU's blow away the Sandy Bridge stuff, flat out.

Very few folks are having actual issues and also, QVL lists are there for a reason, even with Intel based boards. Be happy or return it and get something else. Either that or sell it too someone who will appreciate it and get that Intel you know you clearly want.
 
ManofGod said:
I respect your opinions but, please, just return it and get your money back. You can then go out and buy the Intel you already wanted in the first place. Dude, you knew what you where getting into before you bought it and are now complaining? Also, why did you not just flash your bios back to 0515 to restore your memory speeds? Also, the IPC of the Ryzen CPU's blow away the Sandy Bridge stuff, flat out.

Very few folks are having actual issues and also, QVL lists are there for a reason, even with Intel based boards. Be happy or return it and get something else. Either that or sell it too someone who will appreciate it and get that Intel you know you clearly want.
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I've been told I can't flash back to 515 because 604 came with the microcode update.

And I'll stop bitching now ;).
 
DuronBurgerMan said:
I've been told I can't flash back to 515 because 604 can with the microcode update.
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Good news then, you can, because I did just that at work. :) I flashed back to 0604 though because, at first, I thought it was causing an issue that turned out to be a video driver issue with Outlook 2016, of all things. :D At home, I can only go to 2400 instead of the previous 2666 of my 2800 ram but, I have nearly 8 seconds faster boot times from the bios so I am going to stick with it.
 
I think it kind of depends on where you were coming from. An upgrade from Sandy Bridge i5-2500K that doubles the cores and adds hyperthreading and increases the IPC by about 20% seems pretty good. An i5-2500K 4.5Ghz overclock is pretty standard. If I have a 4.0Ghz Ryzen clock speed, I can multiply that by 1.2 and get 4.8Ghz. That 4.8Ghz is 6.6% faster than my overclocked 4.5Ghz speed and doesn't take into consideration the doubling of the cores or quadrupling of the threads or the memory bandwidth improvements. That's more than the generational improvement that Intel typically wants us to update on without the core/thread increases. And then there's the motherboard improvements of USB 3.1, better audio, SATA 3, PCIe 3, M.2 support , DDR4 support, current OS support, etc. I could have gotten all of this and even higher raw clock speeds on an i7-7700k but the core count wouldn't have changed. To me that's the fundamental difference between this and the previous Intel incremental changes that made me think that now was the time to upgrade after 6 years of waiting for something worthy.
 
First rule, dont rush out and try a new bios until a few other suckers... I mean users try it out first and see how it goes. If all looks good and no screaming posts about how my stuff is borked now then your all set to update. New does not always mean it will be better then what your using right at the moment, I know I skipped several beta bioses for my motherboard and my choices were based on reading feedback.
 
I agree that certain aspects of the launch could have been better and there is an argument that AMD wasn't fully ready. However, I think overall Ryzen is a solid product, both on it's performance and especially the price.

The one thing I do think was a big blunder is the cooler compatibility. For example, I'm building a SFF 1600X build now, and didn't realize until after buying that the 1600X lacked a cooler. Out of the slim AM4 cooler selection, I could only find one model that will work, the Cryorig C1. Thankfully, I've been wanting to try Cryorig and the cooler looks great so I ordered. However, I need a special AM4 kit from Cryorig and they are not even ready yet (rumors say mid to late April). So now I am with $1,200 worth of computer parts but must wait 1 or 2 weeks or who knows how much longer because I have no way to use this cooler. This is not a great situation. Either AMD should have given cooler makers ample time to get ready, or they could have included the Wraith with all the Ryzen models, or sold Wraith by itself. As-is it's not a great experience.
 
DuronBurgerMan said:
I bought in pretty early. Few weeks after release date, IIRC. Now I'm wondering if my mobo was supposed to be recalled. It was having some bizarre issues toward the end of its life.
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It's a potential early failure with the 4 SATA 3gbps ports. The 2 SATA 6Gbps ports are not affected.

I bought Sandy in the first month, and decided not to send mine back, because at most I use is an SATA 6 SSD, a hard drive, and an optical drive that I could chuck if it ever started having issues.

Optical drive has been hooked up to that "bad" port for seven years without issue.

And HELL YEAH, x99 was a clusterfuck on-release. Getting speeds up above 2667 was really a crapshoot from one motherboard to the next, and often involved obscene gestures with the bclk.

https://www.hardocp.com/article/2014/08/29/intel_haswelle_core_i75960x_cpu_x99_chipset/2

So yeah, don't want to deal wwith hackjobs on a daily basis? Don't buy brand-new platforms for at least 3 months.
 
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OP, I don't agree that the issues that you mention are significant for a large number of buyers.

My only complaint with Ryzen and the AM4 platform is that AMD cheaped out on PCIe lanes.
Most mobos dedicate only 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes to fast M.2 storage, with only very few and expensive mobos offering another 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes to a U.2 socket. Today's Samsung 960 SSDs already benefit from such a configuration, and will not work optimally with fewer lanes and/or PCIe 2.0.

I think unless socket AM4 can be made support more lanes, this poor decision is going to come back and bite AMD hard. Things are rapidly moving away from SATA HDDs (only bulk storage remains as use case) especially in the enthusiast/prosumer market that AMD targets with Ryzen. There needs to be a way to have 8-12 PCIe 3.0 lanes for fast storage next year, and possibly more later.
 
I expected and was greeted with a number of issues, been around for awhile. To think something as complex as RyZen and also a whole new chipset from a company that has been somewhat in left field with AM3+ forever to just have a perfect setup, perfect bios etc. I find laughable. RyZen and platform to me is almost miracle level for AMD. Intel had far worser F ups.

As for price, really hitting those threads for rendering 3d animations particularly - you could buy several whole Ryzen setups for the price of just one 6950x. If you have that kind of workload Ryzen really makes a lot of sense unless you have zero space. I too would like to see more Ram capability but really this is not the X99/X299 level platform. That should be here second half of this year 32 core and down version.

Ram was easy - it was found out quick what works and what does not work just by looking at what people were reporting - ordered the right stuff and it worked at 3200 14-14-14-14-34. Albeit 16gb and yes there is a ram issue for clocks going 32gb and above. Some have gotten 64gb to DDR 4 3200. Now I did have some Corsair DDR 4 3000 which I traded in for the right stuff without issue. Ram is AMD priority for the May update, so this may change rather shortly.
 
Fair criticisms for my original post so far.

We'll see how it goes with this machine for a while. I can always swap it for a Skylake-X later if things don't get better for Ryzen.

One thing that still irritates me about Intel, they really overpriced the Broadwell parts. Wouldn't be in this pickle if they were more reasonable with their 6 and 8 core pricing. So I give AMD credit for that, at least.
 
I agree with you on many points...and I absolutely do feel like a F-ing BETA tester every day. My Asus C6H and my 1700 have been nothing but the least enjoyable build in my 15+ year history of building PCs. This last round of microcode/BIOS updates borked my ram from being stable at 3200 to not even close to bootable at 3200. Everything is so inconsistent. Part of this is ASUS's fault, but most of the blame lays with AMD, as they are shoving microcode updates out to fix their pre-mature release.

This computer is fast and I don't fully regret it, but I've given up on trying to get my ram to run at it's rated speeds and overclocking until the platform matures.

If I had a time machine I wouldn't have done ANYTHING for a few more months. Maybe I'm just getting old, but playing with Ryzen at this time feels like I'm just wasting time and effort. I'll come back to it in a few months and see if they have changed my tune. And this is coming from an AMD fanboy....I mean I was one of the few people dumb enough to run an FX processor for all these years. Ryzen is immature, frustrating, and this whole launch was rushed.
 
A 500+ mhz overclock on the 1700 is fairly easy to obtain on all 8 cores. To me I don't see an issue with that. The 1800X yes is not going to get you near as much of a "bonus" and I agree with GN that it isn't generally as good value.

AMD may have done better to just hold off another 6-8 weeks and get the memory support hammered out better along with some stability improvements. While it wasn't a problem for me it clearly upset a lot of people to be stuck at 2400mhz for a month.
 
y0bailey said:
I agree with you on many points...and I absolutely do feel like a F-ing BETA tester every day. My Asus C6H and my 1700 have been nothing but the least enjoyable build in my 15+ year history of building PCs. This last round of microcode/BIOS updates borked my ram from being stable at 3200 to not even close to bootable at 3200. Everything is so inconsistent. Part of this is ASUS's fault, but most of the blame lays with AMD, as they are shoving microcode updates out to fix their pre-mature release.

This computer is fast and I don't fully regret it, but I've given up on trying to get my ram to run at it's rated speeds and overclocking until the platform matures.

If I had a time machine I wouldn't have done ANYTHING for a few more months. Maybe I'm just getting old, but playing with Ryzen at this time feels like I'm just wasting time and effort. I'll come back to it in a few months and see if they have changed my tune. And this is coming from an AMD fanboy....I mean I was one of the few people dumb enough to run an FX processor for all these years. Ryzen is immature, frustrating, and this whole launch was rushed.
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That's kind of like dating a stripper, then complaining that she/he is a stripper. Like ya didn't know the issues with dating a stripper? Come on man, wtf. In this case replace stripper with new uarch.
 
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thesmokingman said:
That's kind of like dating a stripper, then complaining that she/he is a stripper. Like ya didn't know the issues with dating a stripper? Come on man, wtf. In this case replace stripper with new uarch.
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I've "early adopted" plenty of time in the past, and this is a shit-show comparatively. Just because X99 was also a shit-show, doesn't excuse Ryzen. So your analogy doesn't work, because I've been doing this for a long time and no system I've ever built has been this much of a nightmare. It's like dating a girl and finding out she is a stripper. I didn't sign up for that.
 
y0bailey said:
I've "early adopted" plenty of time in the past, and this is a shit-show comparatively. Just because X99 was also a shit-show, doesn't excuse Ryzen. So your analogy doesn't work, because I've been doing this for a long time and no system I've ever built has been this much of a nightmare. It's like dating a girl and finding out she is a stripper. I didn't sign up for that.
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Honestly, it's probably a bit of both. Maybe I should have been more skeptical of early adoption, but OTOH, it doesn't excuse AMD either. So at least half my fault, in that respect.
 
ManofGod said:
Well? Did you flash back yet?
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I'm mulling it over right now. I'm still a bit worried this could f*ck something up. And you're right about the boot time, it is quicker in that respect. I don't know man. Maybe not worth the risk right now. Maybe I stick with this, STFU, stop bitching, and let other people beta test the next BIOS update before pulling the trigger on the next one.
 
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DuronBurgerMan said:
I'm mulling it over right now. I'm still a bit worried this could f*ck something up. And you're right about the boot time, it is quicker in that respect. I don't know man. Maybe not worth the risk right now. Maybe I stick with this, STFU, stop bitching, and let other people beta test the next BIOS update before pulling the trigger on the next one.
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Well, the most important thing is to set everything to default and flash the firmware from inside the bios. I have two of the Prime X370 Pro's and other than I cannot reach 4GHz, I have had no real issues with these boards. (3.8 GHz stable is really fast, nonetheless.)
 
y0bailey said:
I've "early adopted" plenty of time in the past, and this is a shit-show comparatively. Just because X99 was also a shit-show, doesn't excuse Ryzen. So your analogy doesn't work, because I've been doing this for a long time and no system I've ever built has been this much of a nightmare. It's like dating a girl and finding out she is a stripper. I didn't sign up for that.
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Other than the bricking of the CH6 with the original bios, I have no idea what you mean by crap storm at all. (That was because they set the SSVDC, I think that is what it is called, to 1.2v, which was way to high.) I have installed 32GB of ram in both of my computers and other than not being able to run them at full speed, there is nothing wrong with them at all.
 
travm said:
Know what really pisses me off about the Ryzen launch,
I cant buy an FX 8350 for $35 yet. When will the bullshit end.
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Hmmmm, I have a FX 9590 and ASUS Saber (R1) in a Rog CrossHair 6 Hero Box. . .
 
thesmokingman said:
That's kind of like dating a stripper, then complaining that she/he is a stripper. Like ya didn't know the issues with dating a stripper? Come on man, wtf. In this case replace stripper with new uarch.
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What are you talking about?

What issues?

I've dated 2 strippers in my life. No issues at all!
 
I've read this thread and still I've yet to really find any reason against Ryzen.

I use a lot of 3D apps as well; Maya, 3DSMax, Substance Painter, ZBrush... 2D: Premiere, AE, PS, Ndo, Ddo.. etc etc

I've got a $5k system at work that runs 32 threads, 128GB of ram and Quadro to boot.... it's amazing... but yes it's also $5k.

Find me a solution where you can get an 8-core 16-thread processor, support for 32-64GB of ram, performance that rivals that of a 6900K, can game, for under an $800 (cpu/mobo/ram/nvme) dollar upgrade, and I'll eat my shoe.

Ryzen is a hell of a chip and although marketing pointed it at "gamers" which I'm still not sure what the hell that terms really means in the real world, but for the first time, it actually targeted the budget person wanting solid performances in their multi-threaded apps and wow, can actually play games as well.

I mean at the end of the day if it's not powering up then sure that's a hassle and the headaches of having your system not run to full potential is frustrating... but again I challenge you to find anything to actually compete with it, and so help me if you mention the 7700k in this thread, ima just ignore you.
 
DuronBurgerMan said:
What did I get wrong?
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You have some valid points. Prior to ryzen i had an 8 core broadwell intel and an 8 core amd fx8320e. The ryzen FAR surpassed my expectations -- so if anything i would say it was under hyped. I read countless articles where amd says they targeted haswell IPC so i never expected it to even be close against kabylake at anything with 4 or less threads. My broadwell chip was locked at 2.8ghz and the ryzen absolutely stomps it at everything. I will say my intel build was cheaper though. I paid $115 for the CPU, $129 for the motherboard after rebate. I loved the X99 motherboard for the quad channel ddr, storage, usb, etc etc -- Your right, ive never had to check QVL for AMD or Intel in the past. I was lucky, i bought the fastest ram that was on sale and it just worked with my Ryzen. I purchased from microcenter $329 - $30 + $89 motherboard. If i could do it over again, i would still make the same purchase. I have no interest in quad cores. I am starting to encode 4k video, so bring on more cores.
 
look guys, from what i've absorbed so far is that ryzen kicks ass on general cpu duties and high rez gaming. just not at 1080p. could it have something to do with gaming/driver code??? maybe. are we still getting over 60fps?... yes. but is it a smooth 60fps???.. from what i hear. So what about ryzen's future iterations and game code that is amd inclusive?.. IDK, but i'm on board. funny the only thing besides high mem clocks the intel crowd has to bash amd with is the 1080p benchmarks! haha! just wait! SO, if this IS a beta, I can't wait to see the RC!!!
 
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