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Ryzen-Launch

Subsequently years of waiting, AMD'due south Ryzen has finally arrived. The company has spent years in the proverbial desert, struggling with Bulldozer improvements while simultaneously designing its new Zen architecture. It's no exaggeration to say AMD's future every bit a PC company literally depends on Ryzen's success.

AMD has positioned Ryzen aggressively with price points that match extremely favorably with Intel'due south Core i7 family and HEDT desktop parts, just there take always been questions about how well Ryzen would perform. It's been years since AMD fielded a high operation CPU pattern and the company doesn't have the aforementioned market share information technology in one case commanded. If the company is serious about pushing Ryzen into workstations, consumer PCs, and servers, it's got a very loftier bar to clear.

Today's review will focus on the Ryzen 7 1800X's performance, rather than rehashing Ryzen'south design or architecture. Anyone with questions is invited to peruse those manufactures or enquire in comments beneath. Before discussing Ryzen'south performance, withal, we need to talk about its launch. Normally, a manufacturer gives u.s. 7-10 days at minimum; the more meaning the product, the longer the review window. AMD bucked this trend past launching Ryzen less than a week after we received our hardware kits. Considering I'd previously committed to attend Nvidia'south GTX 1080 Ti launch at GDC, I only had sixty hours to test the Ryzen 7 1800X.

AMD plans to hit Intel where it hurts — its wallet.

As short as our review window was, I may have gotten lucky. In at least a few cases, reviewers didn't receive their kits until 24-48 hours before the launch. I've run enough benchmarks on the Ryzen 7 1800X to feel comfy characterizing this article equally a review, but information technology's likewise something of a hot mess. I doubtable you'll run across broad variation in reported benchmarks and experiences; don't be surprised if different people have unlike results.

The limited testing time was exacerbated by the motherboard AMD shipped us for testing. Asus has a well-deserved reputation for quality, but my Crosshair VI Hero threw so many errors, AMD ultimately concluded I might take a bad lath, not just a wonky BIOS. To exist clear: I was scarcely the only reporter to experience problems or see odd performance, merely our board seems to have been at the low end of the bell curve. Both Asus and AMD helped troubleshoot our issues, just the hours we devoted to this cut deeply into test fourth dimension and required the states to repeatedly benchmark certain tests rather than moving on to other hardware. Subsequently switching to a Gigabyte Aorus X370 motherboard I retested our game benchmarks, beginning around 12 AM this morning. While the Gigabyte motherboard did improve the situation slightly and was markedly more than stable, it didn't resolve the gaming Achilles heel I referred to in the title (nosotros'll be exploring that issue in greater detail below).

Ryzen-Die-Shot-1

Equally a issue, our tests are not equally thorough as we would have liked. We redesigned our CPU benchmark suite in preparation for Ryzen, but didn't take time to run every CPU through every new test. Because we needed to examination in parallel, not every CPU could be benchmarked with the same cooler or the same SSD. We chose the tests we did partly to ensure that these differences would non meaningfully impact our results, and our future deep dives into the bit will standardize on common hardware over again.

With those caveats in mind, let'south cheque the numbers.

Test setup:

We've expanded our CPU examination suite since the Core i7-7700K launched. Our Intel Cadre i7-6700K, 7700K, 6900K, and 6950X all used 32GB of G-Skill DDR4-3200 (F4-3200C14Q-32GTZ) clocked at that frequency. Neither of the Ryzen testbeds nosotros tested, even so, was capable of running iv DIMMs at these clocks. Since we'd already tested the Intel systems, we had to brand a pick: 16GB of DDR4-3200 or 32GB of DDR4-2133. Since none of our benchmarks require >16GB of RAM and AMD isn't using quad-channel retention for Ryzen, we opted for 16GB.

All of our GPU and 3D benchmarks were run using a GeForce GTX 1070. All of our game benchmarks are run at 1920×1080. While this isn't considered an enthusiast resolution anymore, the point of these tests is to stress the CPU, non the GPU. All of our testbeds ran Windows 10 with the latest patches and updates installed. All of our GPU benchmarks were performed with Nvidia's ForceWare 376.88.

Nosotros're going to split our benchmark results between workstation and application tests and 3D benchmarks with workstation and content creation tests up first. Our test results and assay are in the slideshow beneath. As always, you lot tin can click on whatever slide to expand information technology in a new window.

In workstation and computation tests, Ryzen is a fauna to be reckoned with. Even when information technology doesn't match Intel in raw performance, its performance-per-dollar gives it a huge advantage over its much larger, more expensive, rival. That said, there'south a narrow case to be made for fries like the Core i7-7700K, particularly in lightly threaded workloads. If you're however dealing with single-thread or dual-threaded applications, the Cadre i7-7700K tin all the same deliver the best performance per dollar. In most cases, however, the Ryzen 7 1800X is in a class of its ain. That'due south likewise truthful for gaming — just in very different contexts.

Results like these are guaranteed to heighten questions, and we've spoken to AMD extensively over the by few days to explore the issue. According to AMD, in that location are three bug collectively contributing to these problems. Start, Ryzen's SenseMi engineering and Precision Boost are extremely fine-grained controls that offer significantly effectively granularity than any previous AMD solution, which means BIOS implementations of these features are new and not necessarily working at 100% efficiency even so. Second, AMD has been out of the high-performance market place for and so long, virtually no software is written explicitly for or optimized to perform well on AMD CPUs. Ryzen puts AMD on a far improve footing, just software patches don't arrive overnight. Third, there are some games that are far more sensitive to the differences betwixt AMD and Intel CPUs than others. Nosotros happened to pick a test suite that had more than of these slowdowns in it than others, and even we don't see it every exam (Vulkan, for example, runs quite well).

The other reason AMD missed it is considering they chose 1440p for a minimum resolution, figuring that no one with a $500 CPU would still exist gaming in 1080p. I can sympathise that argument even if I don't commonly detect information technology persuasive (I adopt to keep a lower resolution to allow CPU performance to smooth through). According to AMD, the difference in performance between itself and Intel is much reduced at 1440p and completely eliminated in 4K. I haven't had the opportunity to verify those figures yet, only it does brand sense — as resolution rises, the bottleneck in the organization moves from the CPU to the GPU. If y'all game at 1440p or above, these results may not have much bearing on your experience.

I had a number of conversations with AMD on the game performance question likewise equally discussions of board stability in general. Having tested a second motherboard, I retrieve many of my stability and performance concerns were driven, at least in part, by faulty hardware. That said, Ryzen'due south relative weakness in gaming while existence such a vast improvement over the FX-9590 and offering extremely strong application/workstation functioning is a bit odd. Information technology's possible that AMD's heavy reliance on multi-threading, while effective in non-gaming tests, made it take a whack in game tests. This terminal, nonetheless, is merely speculation on my office.

Concluding merely not to the lowest degree, here's a touch of icing for the proverbial block.

Prime95

In that location is 1 caveat to be aware of. Recall, all of our Intel rigs used 32GB of DDR4-3200, while the AMD systems could only use 16GB of the aforementioned RAM. While this is undoubtedly having an touch on the results, information technology'southward not going to tilt them in some crazy management; 16GB of RAM doesn't swallow 42W of power, and that'due south how much it would have to draw to bring the 1800X and 6900K into line with one another. Even with this caveat in heed, when was the terminal time y'all saw AMD hitting lower ability consumption figures than Intel?

Conclusions

Nosotros nonetheless have plenty of questions well-nigh Ryzen and its performance, and we'll be revisiting these topics in days to come. How stiff Ryzen is, in an absolute sense, depends on where your interests lie. Evaluated strictly as a gaming chip, Ryzen is a skilful (but not great) option, due to its pregnant deficits against Intel. Evaluated equally a workstation processor or 3D rendering solution, it's extraordinary. The formal list price on the Core i7-6900K is $1089 – $1109. Listing price on the Ryzen R7 1800X is $500 bucks. I still think AMD should've held off launching until its partners had a bit more time to improve their boards, simply that's not my conclusion.

If you're unhappy well-nigh Ryzen's gaming weaknesses relative to Intel, I'd suggest taking a walk down memory lane. When AMD began to gain basis on Intel in the late 1990s, it didn't leap from budget chip manufacturing to the Athlon 64 X2 in a single jump. The K6 and K6-2 were acceptable chips for upkeep-conscious gamers and Windows desktop software, but they weren't going head-to-head with Intel's Pentium II'south and winning the competition. It took years, and multiple product iterations, earlier the Athlon 64 was ready to tackle Intel in the server room. Given how far AMD's market share has fallen, it's going to take the company at least a year to build up any serious marketplace share.

I've said for years that Ryzen didn't need to beat Intel in every item, it just needed to offering a viable alternative at a proficient cost. Ryzen more than than does that. It may not be the best chip at everything, only it's more than expert enough to help AMD win back some badly-needed market share. Fifty-fifty more importantly, this is a CPU cadre that AMD tin scale upward and out every bit the need arises. It's slap-up to have contest back in the CPU market.