To Ryzen or not to Ryzen, that is the question

[Harney]

I go Ryzen it will mature ..it is doing so all ready with faster ram speeds bios updates are thick and fast personally AMD should have waited a month before release then it would have been allot smoother ..plus your not going to be raped by new Intel sockets every month... If Intel really had there way it would be a socket for every cpu Intel makes...

Personally what Intel have done over the past 5 years they do not deserve anybody's money the last great chips Intel did where the 2500 2700 ect the rest have just been a drip feed..

We all need AMD to succeed better for all of us in the long run.... AMD have come along way ...We will start seeing more from Intel in the next year to what we should have had at a few years ago's

Do not be too bothered re game performance it will mature and to be fair its not that bad its just 1080p and lower results once your 1400p and higher there is nothing in it ...

Personally i think the 1700 non x from AMD is a gift what's not to like 6900k on the heels of 6950k performance at $700 cheaper and more power efficient there are more Pro's with the Ryzen than Cons with Intel ...

 

[jeremyshaw]

I go Ryzen it will mature ..it is doing so all ready with faster ram speeds ..plus your not going to be raped by new Intel sockets every month... If Intel really had there way it would be a socket for every cpu Intel makes...
[...]

Amusingly, due to Intel stretching their 14nm process (and thusly, the Skylake uarch), the LGA1151 socket may end up being the longest lasting Intel consumer socket in ages.

That being said, it really comes down to Intel's failed plan to change how power is supplied to the CPU/IGP, which may have been a decent idea for laptops, but it only ended up creating more desktop sockets which was not consumer friendly at all.

 

[Uvaman2]

At a certain point, you just hit information overload. I was set to build a Ryzen box, but now having second thoughts. There's so much back and forth about Ryzen's weird performance irregularities.

I want to build a box for, let's say 20% gaming, 20% general bullsh*t browsing & regular computing, 10% Photoshop, 20% programming/development, 20% heavy rendering (video editing/encoding & 3D), and 10% misc. multi-threaded workloads (like stacking a bazillion VSTs when doing music production). Definitely getting a high-end GPU, probably a single Geforce 1080 Ti, since Adobe sh*t likes Cuda. Definitely want 32GB of RAM (prolly 2 DIMMs for Ryzen, since it doesn't play well with 4). Going with a Samsung 960 Evo 1TB boot drive.

So I've been bouncing back and forth. Do I go 7700k? Ryzen? 6850k? Do I let Intel bend me over for a 6900k? It's really hard to decide, because each one on the list seems to have a list of pros and cons for me.

For reference, my current box is a nearly 6 year old i7 2600k with a motherboard that's on its last legs. Running a Radeon 7970 that was beat to hell and back during the Bitcoin mining days. I don't figure this machine has got much more life left in it.

So, with all that BS... to Ryzen or not to Ryzen?

I would go Ryzen.
First and foremost: Forget the gaming 'irregularities':
Its being worked on, and its almost a definitive guarantee they will go away with newer games.
Also, there is a lot of hair splitting when it come to games, yes 10% this and that, but consider how green the platform is, and those irregularities are already being removed with different setting and tricks.
Personally I wouldn't bother with any tricks and settings play (SMT, no SMT whatever, in games), but the fact that this is already closing the gap 2 weeks in, which hows the room for improvement to come with natural software/bios polishing.
Also high-res gaming removes the gap altogether nearly.. people say it like yeah right big whoop the gap is still there (at 1080p), and I play and 1080p all the time and so on.
Yeah, its not a sarcastic 'big whoop' that the CPU keeps up at high-res, it is a big deal in my eyes.. bulldozer I seem to remember could not keep up at high res (or anywhere really), so its not like any good old shitty CPU closes the gap with top level Intel.. I mean if that was so I think everyone would be gaming in 90$ old AMD CPUs paired with with top level graphics card.
I would wait 1-3 months, mostly for the mobo market to catch-up and polish a bit (maybe have more pricing variety, let competition kick in a bit more).
Again, your budget will define your machine, but with AMD even with the 1700 that is 700 dollars vs the 6900k.. 700$ that can give you even more SSD space, and a graphics card upgrade in some sense, plus maybe even water cooling with big slow fans for silence.
The memory stuff, from what I could read if you want high speed (above officially supported, 3000,3200 which is basically overclocked ram I think) you are 'stuck' with 16GB, as you need to buy single rank 8gb sticks, and can only use 2 dimms.
use of 4 dimms will, so far forcibly limit you to official speeds (this seems to be what people call a 'failure').
Honesly, I am not sure anymore how big memory benefits your work mix (which is NOT mostly gaming) in the day of super fast SSDs (of which you can get 2 on CPUs saving alone).
I do think, that the choice right now is clear, lots of memory=slower memory, less memory = faster memory.
However looking at :
http://www.legitreviews.com/ddr4-me...latform-best-memory-kit-amd-ryzen-cpus_192259
if you look past the actual memory speeds, even with slower memory, its not the end of the world, in real world performance, its all fairly similar except once again gaming which shows those increases/loses everyone goes on about (too much I think), which at 20% your usage, I wouldn't even worry about.
Maybe you would have a better idea how big ram affects your work?, and just go with big RAM even if 'slower' for time to come... However, it could very well be that now a days anything above 16gbs is wasted money, and you should go with as fast as possible which would be 2 high quality, single-rank DIMMs.. I just don't know anymore, SSDs (and you would be getting a blazing fast one) have really changed the 16vs32vs64GB memory equation). Personally I would stick with the official ram speeds for the CPU (the table in the article) regardless of the setup you choose (meaning I would stick with the 2667 for single rank/dual dimm even though you can get 3000-3200).. I have tried to overclock Ram, that is pain and a big ass hit and miss, and the misses were hard system crashes for me.

 

[Uvaman2]

I go Ryzen it will mature ..it is doing so all ready with faster ram speeds bios updates are thick and fast personally AMD should have waited a month before release then it would have been allot smoother ..plus your not going to be raped by new Intel sockets every month... If Intel really had there way it would be a socket for every cpu Intel makes...

Personally what Intel have done over the past 5 years they do not deserve anybody's money the last great chips Intel did where the 2500 2700 ect the rest have just been a drip feed..

We all need AMD to succeed better for all of us in the long run.... AMD have come along way ...We will start seeing more from Intel in the next year to what we should have had at a few years ago's

Do not be too bothered re game performance it will mature and to be fair its not that bad its just 1080p and lower results once your 1400p and higher there is nothing in it ...

Personally i think the 1700 non x from AMD is a gift what's not to like 6900k on the heels of 6950k performance at $700 cheaper and more power efficient there are more Pro's with the Ryzen than Cons with Intel ...

I agree the 1700 is an excellent value at 330$ and change.. none of the Ryzen 7 are 'bad' value, but AMD basically gives you more value as you spend less, as they really cut very little as you go down the ladder.

 

[/dev/null]

R7 1700 and B350 board is the best bang for the buck in mixed work (read: not 100% gaming) going right now, and it's not really close. It's a little over $400, $500 with ram, and unlike Intel the socket should be good for 3-4 years...

I'm not sure why everyone thinks they need an x370. That seems to be more for SLI/xfire and high end o/c as the B350 boards seem to get around the same o/c so far. Unless you need the specific io the x370 has, I don't know that it's worth another $70-$100 (or more). You'd be better off investing that extra on the vid card side.

The PCIe lanes & slot configs.

I don't want a 16x/4x for my 2 graphics cards, or my graphics card & 10Gbit card....
Just the fact that x370 can do x8/x8 is reason enough to want it.

 

[bobzdar]

The PCIe lanes & slot configs.

I don't want a 16x/4x for my 2 graphics cards, or my graphics card & 10Gbit card....
Just the fact that x370 can do x8/x8 is reason enough to want it.

Well yeah, sli/cf you pretty much need x370. Barring that or the people that want multiple m.2 drives (neither of which seem to be in the ops plans) there doesn't seem to be much need to spend double on a motherboard. Plus, if you're running sli or cf you probably don't care much about bang for the buck.

 

[Decko87]

Get a 1700 if most of your use isn't gaming. If you're not using a monitor over 75hz, get the 1700 and gaming will be identical and you have all the benefits of the 1700 for work as well. The 1700 is only 10-20 percent off the 7700k in gaming benchmarks. Spend the extra cash on a good cooler and get that sucker cranking to 4 GHz. I do a fair amount of coding and Photoshop/illustrator as well, I think I'd go 8 core on my next build. I'm still rocking a 2500k just fine, but I could use the extra cores for work.

 

[DuronBurgerMan]

Just as a heads up... I went 1700X and an X370 board. I went 1700X because from my reading, some regular 1700 chips get near to 4GHz, just like the 1700X and 1800X. But some are sh*tty and only do 3.6 or 3.7, tops. Every 1700X I've seen does 4.0 no problem. So I figured on doing that. Went X370 because memory support was better, and because updated BIOS are likely to hit the higher end parts before the lower end ones... but I did go with a budget X370 board (the Asus X370 Prime) and not one of the overpriced monstrosities.

Of course, it's getting a Geforce 1080 Ti. Any loss in gaming performance with Ryzen should be adequately rectified with a fat GPU.

 

[Decko87]

Just as a heads up... I went 1700X and an X370 board. I went 1700X because from my reading, some regular 1700 chips get near to 4GHz, just like the 1700X and 1800X. But some are sh*tty and only do 3.6 or 3.7, tops. Every 1700X I've seen does 4.0 no problem. So I figured on doing that. Went X370 because memory support was better, and because updated BIOS are likely to hit the higher end parts before the lower end ones... but I did go with a budget X370 board (the Asus X370 Prime) and not one of the overpriced monstrosities.

Of course, it's getting a Geforce 1080 Ti. Any loss in gaming performance with Ryzen should be adequately rectified with a fat GPU.

Congrats man, enjoy! I'm jealous

 

[cybereality]

Awesome, hope you're happy with it. I'm really digging Ryzen.

 

[Kato1144]

Just as a heads up... I went 1700X and an X370 board. I went 1700X because from my reading, some regular 1700 chips get near to 4GHz, just like the 1700X and 1800X. But some are sh*tty and only do 3.6 or 3.7, tops. Every 1700X I've seen does 4.0 no problem. So I figured on doing that. Went X370 because memory support was better, and because updated BIOS are likely to hit the higher end parts before the lower end ones... but I did go with a budget X370 board (the Asus X370 Prime) and not one of the overpriced monstrosities.

Of course, it's getting a Geforce 1080 Ti. Any loss in gaming performance with Ryzen should be adequately rectified with a fat GPU.

My 1700 is hitting 3.7GHz easy at only 1.18v core reported, I want to push it harder but I'm going to wait till the issues with v-core and temp reporting gets resolved, it might say it's under 1.2v but in reality it might be 1.3v+, I did confirm my reported V core in the BIOS but I need accurate windows reporting too and it might seem fine right now I don't want to risk over volting my CPU by accident trying to hit 4.0GHz.

I do agree with your logic as you can get unlucky and have a chip that will hit a wall at 3.6-3.7, I kinda regretted buying only a 1700, that was untill I tried overclocking and for me if it wont get past 3.7 at any voltage I can live with that as the current Vcore and temps are perfect for 24/7 use and the CPU is plenty fast as it is.

Also another win with my system is my non QVL list RAM is running XMP 1 @ 3200MHz 14-14-14-34 witch is really nice, I was kinda worried i efd up on getting this ram as when i tried manually increasing the frequency form 2066 but the computer failed to boot every time, I only tried XMP as a last resort because I read some were that XMP was not working right with Ryzen but I guess gigabyte fixed that in the lasted BIOS revision,


>as I was finishing this I opened up CPU-z and my PC crashed I gusse 1.18v core is a little low, bumped it up to 1.225v core, rechecking load temps now, Ryzen master reports my vcore wrong lol.. I'm not going to be doing any serious overclocking any time soon<



Burger man I wish you luck with your new system, hopfully you get a great overclock on reasonable v core, may you temp's always be low

 

[DuronBurgerMan]

Built the rig today. Will post pics later.

Everything was flawless. Easy build. Easy OS install. Even my RAM was supposed to only go to 2666 according to the QVL list... But immediately DOCP to 3000 without so much as a hiccup.

 

[carbide]

Can't wait to see the pics and hear more about how it's working out. I'm among the legion that's on the fence between Ryzen and something Intel based; my current rig is a Xeon W3670 (X58/LGA1366) that I've been keeping at a ~4.2GHz overclock. It's served me pretty well, but it's simply an old platform at this point. I do a mix of gaming and photo/video work, so I'd prefer to at least maintain the same number of cores I have now. I was between a 6800K and a 1700X, but then I thought I might be able to wait for the X299 platform and Skylake-X and see how things are shaping up then. On the other hand, I'm itching to do a new build. So maybe you'll be the one to convince me to take the plunge now. Your build is pretty close to the one I'd been thinking of too.

 

[groebuck]

It depends on what you want to do with it. For content creation you are getting the most bang for the buck. I have seen some video renders comparison for speed (jaystwocents on youtube) and the Ryzen is about 2 minutes behind a 1000 dollar Intel chip - even overclocked to 4.5 (the intel) there is not much of a gap. If you strickly want to game at the fastest frame rate at 1080P the stick with Kabylake.

I went Ryzen over 7700K because...well 8 cores! I got the 1700 and oced it to 3.9 which appears to be about the range of all ryzens right now so save your money and buy a 1700 if you want to go Ryzen.

 

[DuronBurgerMan]

Here are some pics of the build.

 

[Private_Ops]

Just as a heads up... I went 1700X and an X370 board. I went 1700X because from my reading, some regular 1700 chips get near to 4GHz, just like the 1700X and 1800X. But some are sh*tty and only do 3.6 or 3.7, tops. Every 1700X I've seen does 4.0 no problem. So I figured on doing that. Went X370 because memory support was better, and because updated BIOS are likely to hit the higher end parts before the lower end ones... but I did go with a budget X370 board (the Asus X370 Prime) and not one of the overpriced monstrosities.

Of course, it's getting a Geforce 1080 Ti. Any loss in gaming performance with Ryzen should be adequately rectified with a fat GPU.

Nice choice. I want a Ryzen rig bad but, I can't justify replacing my 880K. Does everything I need.

 

[mlcarson]

I just hopped on the Ryzen bandwagon.
I went the budget route since I think overclocking is a gamble either way.
Ryzen 1700
Gigabyte GA-AB350-Gaming 3
G.skill Flare X DDR4-3200 (2x8GB)
Noctua NH-D15 cooler
Total: $805 after tax/shipping to CA

Doesn't sound like such a budget system after adding up the costs. The motherboard selection was pretty limited due to everything being out of stock -- I would have preferred the GA-AX370-Gaming 5 or K7.
I've got a GTX 980 currently and plan on upgrading it to a 1080ti but will wait for more to come in stock rather than being gouged now on the founder editions. Even at MSRP of $699, the 1080 TI is expensive and at current pricing would be as much as the total cost of my Ryzen upgrade.