AMD Ryzen 1700X CPU Review @ [H]

It's interesting that AMD targeted the low-end GPU market with Polaris and the high-end CPU market with Zen. You'd think they would have released a quad core to target the low-end gaming market that would be competitive in price and performance with the i5.

PS: Does anyone else find it funny that they're using 3,5, and 7 to denote their different skus of CPUs? Trying to confuse the normies into buying their stuff instead of Intel?
 
I wrote about performance inconsistencies a while ago in another thread, another er... life.
Since then AMD was making rapid progress in making the CPU market, ready and they did come a long way. However they probably would have liked to have a couple of months or even better 6 months to nail it down and iron out all the issues. At the pace they were going, it was going to be perfected or at least not as rough around the edges as it is right now.

A lot of these can and will be fixed via the uCode patches and the retail samples will get better going forward. They won't magically achieve super overclocks but they may have an easier time reaching these same clocks. The boards will also improve by some margin. A year or even 6 months from now Ryzen won't necessarily look the way it does at present. The performance is there, just AMD needed more time it seems to me. Anyway, even with what they've presented, it should be a headache for INTEL.
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Pusher of Buttons said:
And note...I'm a little bummed it's not better in gaming, but I'm also not shocked, because I watched all their benchmark releases and it was painfully obvious they were targeting the workstation market with this release.
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This is the hype train that screws them up every time lol.

And why I have stated take anything they say with both eyes open, if they match up with Intel that means they are slower, if they are faster then Intel, they are the same performance. yada yada yada.

The reason why they only showed blender and hand brake vs Intel and showed us what both chips could do (they did show games, many of them but without direct comparisons) is because they wanted the fuel for the hype train.
 
Dan_D said:
I definitely have a lot more work to look forward to. The variety and learning a new platform increases the difficulty but it definitely increases the amount of enjoyment I'll get from it. I'm very excited to get ahold of some AM4 motherboards. You can only look at so many X99 or Z270 motherboards before they blur together and before it becomes very difficult to write that 20th motherboard review and make it sound like something other than a total cut and paste job of previous articles.

The typing part takes me about 4 to 5 hours on a newer platform for a long winded article. As time goes by the time it takes to write them goes up and the amount of text goes down. You can only say certain things so many times. I try to approach each article as though each one could serve as a first article for anyone new to our coverage but that's harder than it sounds to actually accomplish.
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That is probably why I read most of your reviews from start to finish because you do notice the fine detail that is different from one to the next and it is not cut and paste. I also think you may have to write some nasty stuff dealing with AM4 platform as well :LOL: but it will be accurate. It is what it is. Keep up the great work!
 
razor1 said:
This is the hype train that screws them up every time lol.

And why I have stated take anything they say with both eyes open, if they match up with Intel that means they are slower, if they are faster then Intel, they are the same performance. yada yada yada.
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I'm a AMD homer but I'm also not stupid....I don't do any rendering so I'm probably not going to be a customer for this first Ryzen release....but it's still an impressive product that met the performance goals I was expecting it to. I'll probably hold on to my Haswell and wait and see if optimization helps at all and order accordingly. But...I don't feel like I was sold a bill of goods, here. I, personally, never got the impression this was going to be a beast for gaming. Now, if they screw up Vega I'll be pissed.
 
Thanks for the review, Kyle!

I wish there were more server based benchmarks to run. It would be interesting to see these doing SQL, etc. Server market is where the money is anyway.... PC gamer market is basically a market/product test.
 
Pusher of Buttons said:
I'm a AMD homer but I'm also not stupid....I don't do any rendering so I'm probably not going to be a customer for this first Ryzen release....but it's still an impressive product that met the performance goals I was expecting it to. I'll probably hold on to my Haswell and wait and see if optimization helps at all and order accordingly. But...I don't feel like I was sold a bill of goods, here. I, personally, never got the impression this was going to be a beast for gaming. Now, if they screw up Vega I'll be pissed.
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Well you already have haswell, think about the people that have old AMD CPU's and thinking they were going to get something that would overclock and match Intel CPU's in gaming? Had a few of them last week, they aren't speaking up now lol.
 
Dan_D said:
I would be surprised if a whole lot changed through updates besides memory clocks. BIOS updates don't normally lead to higher performance, OS updates could but I'm not convinced. Even if an update makes a difference I don't think it will close the gap completely, if much at all. Time will tell though.
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Yeah, I'm not expecting a ton improvement from BIOS updates alone. As you say, Memory clocks will likely improve, but that will be about it.

I'm thinking from the combination of things though:
  • Memory clocks due to BIOS improvements
  • Possibly slightly better overclocks as BIOS/VRM tweaks come into place
  • Windows scheduler improvement patches. I'd be curious to see if the upcoming "Creators Update" will have any impact.
  • Driver improvements, not just for the CPU itself, but for GPU's, etc. so they better utilize the CPU
  • Game engine optimizations. This will probably be the biggest of the bunch.

I'm not expecting anything HUGE from these, but even small improvements add up.

Let's just make up some completely random BS numbers.

- Memory clocks 1% improvement
- Better overclocks 3% improvement
- Scheduler improvements 3%
- Driver improvements 2%
- Game engine optimizations 5%

Multiply all of those improvements up and you are at ~15%

Now my numbers above are likely complete bull, but what I am trying to illustrate is that a few small changes can add up once compounded.
 
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A very nice upgrade for all those who bought into the gaming revolution and are still sitting on their FX8350's. For the rest of us who value actual gaming performance, theres nothing much to see here


Snarky responses aside, I think its a nice result, just not a grand slam. Its a massive boon for anyone who *needs* 8 cores and can't shell out for intel's HEDT platform... unfortunately thats probably not a massive market. At least there are reasons to actually recommend the platform to people now... I haven't been able to recommend an AMD CPU product to anyone in years, and the last one I considered myself was the Phenom X6. I just wish gaming performance was better or I'd be looking at it to replace the 4770K just out of boredom.
 
Bankie said:
PS: Does anyone else find it funny that they're using 3,5, and 7 to denote their different skus of CPUs? Trying to confuse the normies into buying their stuff instead of Intel?
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I think they just want to make it easy for consumers to tell which part is 'comparable' (or competitive) to the Intel equivalent. Like the Athlon days and their part number=Mhz naming scheme.
 
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noko said:
That is probably why I read most of your reviews from start to finish because you do notice the fine detail that is different from one to the next and it is not cut and paste. I also think you may have to write some nasty stuff dealing with AM4 platform as well :LOL: but it will be accurate. It is what it is. Keep up the great work!
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Thanks. Because AMD doesn't have the stringent control over the motherboard manufacturers Intel does, I suspect we'll see some shenanigans with regard to VRM implementation. I think this is the main thing that we need to watch for. I'm also concerned about firmware and BIOS problems because the 990FX launch was a disaster and the motherboard manufacturers simply don't have that much experience with the new platform. Granted, 990FX and AM3 / AM3+ were more problematic because of the required backwards compatibility which could smooth things out quite a bit for them. I hope it does. I want to experience AM4 in the way it was intended rather than fight every damn motherboard's potential quirks. That stuff keeps things interesting but it can make my job a lot harder. While "bad" motherboard reviews can be entertaining, they are much more difficult to write than good ones. The testing isn't fun and there is a lot of back and fourth with the manufacturers that adds to the time it takes to produce an article.

Ultimately time will tell how these offerings shape up but there is more incentive for cost cutting and less oversight from the CPU manufacturer to prevent it on AM4 than LGA1151/LGA2011v3 motherboards.
 
Well I game at 1440p. Guess i might as well go with a 7700k. I was really hoping for more cores though.
 
All the sudden we all became 1080p gamers. Lol. Whatever fits your boat. You all game at 1080p al of sudden with 8 core chip? Lol.

I can't believe how people change gears just cuz.
 
Pusher of Buttons said:
I'm a AMD homer but I'm also not stupid....I don't do any rendering so I'm probably not going to be a customer for this first Ryzen release....but it's still an impressive product that met the performance goals I was expecting it to. I'll probably hold on to my Haswell and wait and see if optimization helps at all and order accordingly. But...I don't feel like I was sold a bill of goods, here. I, personally, never got the impression this was going to be a beast for gaming. Now, if they screw up Vega I'll be pissed.
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I'd agree not thinking it was going to be a beast for gaming as well... But the benches running a damned 2600k - which actually beat Ryzen quite a bit in gaming - I was legitimately surprised/let down by that. Just as much as I was surprised how well it ran in multi-threaded apps.

I'd like to move back over to AMD but also having Haswell, I see no point if this is the kind of IPC we're going to get from AMD. At least not with what I do on the PC. And it's not so much a point in doing it now as it is the future. Hopefully this being the very early stages in Ryzen there will be some changes in performance. But I also think Dan D also cleared that up pretty well. Basically we've got what we've got with Ryzen.
 
xTrident said:
And I literally just got an email from "AMD" touting the gaming performance.
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Well, to be fair, it's a huge leap forward in gaming performance for them.

Twitchy CSGO kiddies with 144hz screens may not be overjoyed, but for everyone else, I think the Ryzen numbers I've seen today were pretty OK. I wouldn't have a problem gaming on one. That being said, I target 60fps at 4K.
 
razor1 said:
Well you already have haswell, think about the people that have old AMD CPU's and thinking they were going to get something that would overclock and match Intel CPU's in gaming? Had a few of them last week, they aren't speaking up now lol.
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Don't understand your point? Here Intel 8 core (10 core - 2 core) clocked at 4.3ghz - AMD first new generation in a rather long time 4.1ghz. So if it doesn't clock to a 4 core cpu it is falling way short? I still think it is too early yet to determine max usable OC until it gets refined more - firmware, bios, OS etc. The increase voltage and little OC overhead beyond 4.0ghz does look not much more can be had over that but how much is not set in stone either. Kyle indicated basically a wall beyond 4.1ghz.
 
NKD said:
All the sudden we all became 1080p gamers. Lol. Whatever fits your boat. You all game at 1080p al of sudden with 8 core chip? Lol.

I can't believe how people change gears just cuz.
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It's relevant enough. There's still a lot of people, enthusiasts included that game at 1080p. I just recently jumped up to 4k myself.
 
razor1 said:
It doesn't matter, that is not how they showed it, they showed it in game tests going toe for toe with Broadwell e and it doesn't, it can do it in specific games but gets trounced in others!

All Intel has to do is here, you want the best you still have to pay us more. Ok we will cut our prices down just a hair to keep status quo.
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Yea. You started gaming at 1080p now or lower?
 
xTrident said:
It's relevant enough. There's still a lot of people, enthusiasts included that game at 1080p. I just recently jumped up to 4k myself.
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True but it's not unplayable at 1080p. Far from it.
 
razor1 said:
good song, reminds me of the movie Fallen. But no, if what nV's been saying about their next set of drivers, nada on Polaris catching up, and CPU's are a different beast.
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thats exactly what i think about when i here that song too.. haha
 
noko said:
Don't understand your point? Here Intel 8 core (10 core - 2 core) clocked at 4.3ghz - AMD first new generation in a rather long time 4.1ghz. So if it doesn't clock to a 4 core cpu it is falling way short? I still think it is too early yet to determine max usable OC until it gets refined more - firmware, bios, OS etc. The increase voltage and little OC overhead beyond 4.0ghz does look not much more can be had over that but how much is not set in stone either. Kyle indicated basically a wall beyond 4.1ghz.
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You will still need to pay 350 bucks to get 350 bucks Intel 4 core performance in games.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Well, to be fair, it's a huge leap forward in gaming performance for them.

Twitchy CSGO kiddies with 144hz screens may not be overjoyed, but for everyone else, I think the Ryzen numbers I've seen today were pretty OK. I wouldn't have a problem gaming on one. That being said, I target 60fps at 4K.
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I think they're more than okay.... Just Ryzen being compared to Intel makes it look worse than it is. Doesn't change my feeling of being let down by the gaming results because of the comparison, but yes I agree Ryzen will game just fine.
 
I take back my comments before. At 1080p the gaming reviews look bad but at 1440p the difference is like 1 fps in some games plus you get the added benefit of 8 cores for other stuff. If you game at 1440p or higher, the difference won't be noticeable. We'll see if the links are worked out before I decide. Maybe sit on Zen until Zen+ then just pop in the new CPU without needing a new mobo.
 
Armenius said:
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.

Better. The i7-5775C was a 3.3 GHz chip that could overclock to 4.4-4.5 GHz.

Sounds oddly similar to the Bulldozer launch. Hmm...


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.

You mean like an i5-7600K?
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To be fair, you're comparing at 4C/8T chip to a 8C/16T chip. I would group this up with the Intel Extreme platform, just like most people have already seen, Intel 8/10 core chips are not ideal for gaming vs the 4C Chips which clock higher, Why would it be any different for AMD? These are not BD/PD lite-cores any longer.

(or 6 cores)
 
I really didn't want to go from ivy bridge -> kaby lake after all these years and end up with a 4c CPU. Having waited this long I wanted more cores.

A 6850K upgrade would've cost me another $145 for two more memory modules (quad channel), another $80 on the CPU, and a few more bucks for the motherboard. And I'd end up with less cores than the 1800X and slower results under certain scenarios.

What seems a bit disappointing to me is that in my particular situation. I was hoping that as far as games went the 1800X was going to match Broadwell-E. While they do trade blows in certain games the Ryzen does not defeat it overall in this particular application. I do run my games at 4k/60 and I understand the lack of practical relevance. However that is just masking the situation. If I had no GPU bottleneck here then the Broadwell-E would be back to pulling out ahead.

Given the extra cost of going to the 6850K I kept my pre-order. Some of the wind is definitely out my sails though. :(
 
Armenius said:
You mean like an i5-7600K?
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Yeah or the i5-6600k I already have, LOL. Let's see what happens in 6-12 months when AMD works out the kinks and releases Phenom II, eh I mean RyZen II. At least that short ride on the hype train (CHOO CHOO) didn't cost me anything. Yet.
 
NKD said:
Yea. You started gaming at 1080p now or lower?
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Its the potential of the platform, even if it does better in future games, which can utilize AMD's SMT properly, people might not hold on to their systems long enough to see that. And they are focusing on enthusiasts and gamer, that's the reason why there is no APU in these chips. These people upgrade more regularly than your typical desktop purchaser who only needs a 4 core or even a 2 core Intel.
 
bbqrooster said:
If AMD can come up with a competitive 4 core chip with higher clocks for gaming, they would have done so in their current line up. They know they can't match the IPC and the clocks, therefore they come up with this strategy of selling more cores to you at a cheaper price per core. Having said that, if AMD comes up with a 4 core chip with the same price per core, would people buy it for other purposes than gaming?
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Or maybe, they decided to lead with the 8 core chips first? It's not like Zen is out, and all available zen products are available. Why wouldn't they be able to clock up any higher with half or 2/3s of the cores :)?

or are you implying the clock speed wall is a result of the uArch and not the # of cores ?
 
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NKD said:
All the sudden we all became 1080p gamers. Lol. Whatever fits your boat. You all game at 1080p al of sudden with 8 core chip? Lol.

I can't believe how people change gears just cuz.
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it's not that we need hundreds of FPS at 1080p, but we want the best of the best for enjoying the latest games, especially if we've shelled out the big bucks on 1080's and nice monitors. I personally don't want to be enjoying a solid 60fps at 1440p, only to have my frame rates suddenly dip into the 40's at some CPU-intensive part of the game because of lack of optimization or clock speed deficiencies.
If you only compare 4K gaming you might as well end up telling everyone to buy an i5, because games are so heavily GPU bottlenecked at 4K.
 
razor1 said:
You will still need to pay 350 bucks to get 350 bucks Intel 4 core performance in games.
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lol, that is what I paid minus $1 for I7 6700k but being held up by the GPU and not the cpu. Games = GPU when dealing with performance unless frame rates in the 300+ range at 640x480 beyond any monitor that can keep up is how game play is rated. All VR games tested in this review shows all four processors giving the exact same VR experience - 90fps. Blindfolded to what cpu was being used with a Vive reorienting your reality to a virtual universe you would have no idea what cpu, I7 2600k or the golden child 5ghz I7 7700k or Ryzen was doing the gaming code. Yet folks here talk about the poor gaming performance :ROFLMAO:. Well at least for me the gaming performance will be better what I had before and I see nothing on the market that would improve that performance with my Vive or current monitor except - A BETTER GPU and that is it.
 
bbqrooster said:
If AMD can come up with a competitive 4 core chip with higher clocks for gaming, they would have done so in their current line up. They know they can't match the IPC and the clocks, therefore they come up with this strategy of selling more cores to you at a cheaper price per core. Having said that, if AMD comes up with a 4 core chip with the same price per core, would people buy it for other purposes than gaming?
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That's what they did with their older CPU's, didn't work for them though, although Ryzen isn't like that, something has to give, and more cores means more die space, means less margins than Intel. And Intel will still have mindshare and market ownership.
 
noko said:
lol, that is what I paid minus $1 for I7 6700k but being held up by the GPU and not the cpu. Games = GPU when dealing with performance unless frame rates in the 300+ range at 640x480 beyond any monitor that can keep up is how game play is rated. All VR games tested in this review shows all four processors giving the exact same VR experience - 90fps. Blindfolded to what cpu was being used with a Vive reorienting your reality to a virtual universe you would have no idea what cpu, I7 2600k or the golden child 5ghz I7 7700k or Ryzen was doing the gaming code. Yet folks here talk about the poor gaming performance :ROFLMAO:. Well at least for me the gaming performance will be better what I had before and I see nothing on the market that would improve that performance with my Vive or current monitor except - A BETTER GPU and that is it.
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If you are spending 500 or 700 bucks on GPU would you want to get a CPU that isn't equally as good?
 
I was under the impression that Ryzwn may not be as powerful as its Intel counter park when matching the same clock speed but a slight overclock places it above the Intel chip would give it the edge.

I want to see how these overclock once the bios are properly updated. Give it time, it's definitely priced competitively either way.
 
I almost hit the pre-order button on the 1700X, im glad i waited. Most of us on sandy/ivy bridge are still waiting on that killer platform upgrade thats going to last us for the next 4 years or so. As a workstation/professional platform it looks like AMD has a success on their hands. The problem is they marketed this to the enthusiast community, and most of us are gamers. I get the argument that at high resolutions it keeps up with an intel system, but are these initial release ryzen's clocked high enough so thats still the case next year when we get the next batch of high end gpu's? Im guessing no, and thats why im keeping my 3570k until the holiday season.
 
bwang said:
it's not that we need hundreds of FPS at 1080p, but we want the best of the best for enjoying the latest games, especially if we've shelled out the big bucks on 1080's and nice monitors. I personally don't want to be enjoying a solid 60fps at 1440p, only to have my frame rates suddenly dip into the 40's at some CPU-intensive part of the game because of lack of optimization or clock speed deficiencies.
If you only compare 4K gaming you might as well end up telling everyone to buy an i5, because games are so heavily GPU bottlenecked at 4K.
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You do know some folks do game at 4K and Ryzen would be from all testing I've see - OVERKILL for that resolution just for games. Probably OVERKILL for 1440p as well with max high settings. I for one do not see the relevance of the low resolution testing but some do, I see no relationship between those test and normal enthusiast gaming habits and they are meaningless to me and have zero significance on gaming performance. They do hint at a bottleneck but that would have to pursued, like changing memory speed, cpu speed, reducing core count, pcie bus mode etc. to determine if a cpu issue or not.
 
Great review. I'm not sure why so many are quick to call it an open and shut case on gaming with these. Plus given the great lengths Kyle and other professionals have gone to explain how preliminary the gaming benches all are. The 7700k still looks to be the best bet for a dedicated gaming rig, true. I'm still very happy with mine. But the other benches show promise and perhaps indicators that we don't yet have the full story. ("Fine wine!" lol) In any case it's real nice to have some legit competition in the CPU sphere again, isn't it?
 
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