AMD Ryzen (I for one welcome the [potential] return of our old new old CPU overlords)

[Hellfury]

Skimming reviews now, going to shamelessly steal a list of summaries from wccftech (they steal from everywhere all the time anyway)

Reviewer’s Remarks on AMD Ryzen Processors:

Ryan Shrout – PCPerspective:

We still have questions and not everything is perfect. The single threaded performance between the Ryzen 7 1800X and the Core i7-7700K leans in Intel’s favor across the board, with that advantage moving from mid-single digits to 25%+ depending on the application. Gaming results are particularly concerning as AMD has been pushing Ryzen as a gamers and enthusiasts dream solution, combining “good enough” gaming ability with amazing multi-threaded capability.
It’s hard to argue with what we see today though and I’ll be awarding the Ryzen 7 1800X with our Gold Award, offering the performance of a Core i7-6900K for half the price!

Mark Walton – Arstechnica:

AMD Ryzen 7 1800X review: Good, but not for gamers
Gaming isn’t a strong point for AMD’s fledgling architecture. For many, myself included, that is a massive disappointment. AMD clearly sees an eight-core future, just as it did with Bulldozer. But developers still aren’t there yet. For all the fuss made about DX12 and the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One ushering in a new era of multicore-optimised games, a 4C/8T CPU continues to be the best way to shovel data over to a graphics card.
The Ryzen 7 1800X, then, is a tale of two chips. One is a disruptive, market changing, eight-core workstation powerhouse; the other is a competent, if wholly unsatisfying gaming CPU.
Intel has certainly been given a kick—I’m just not sure it was hard enough.

Gordon Mah Ung – PCWorld:

AMD’s Ryzen is arguably the most disruptive CPU we’ve seen in a long time for those who need more cores. The CPU basically sells itself when you consider that for the same price as an Intel 8-core Core i7-6900K, you can have an 8-core Ryzen 7 1800X and a GeForce GTX 1080. Hell, you can go a step further and give up a little performance with the Ryzen 7 1700 but step up to a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti—for the same price as that Intel chip. Damn.
But that’s the world Intel has wrought by keeping 8-core CPUs at what many would say are artificially high prices for so long.
Ryzen, however, isn’t a knockout. The gaming disparities at 1080p are sure to spook some buyers. In fact, if you read our Ryzen 7 1700 build against a 5-year-old Core i5 Intel box, you’ll likely be filled with fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Is this really just a game optimization problem as AMD says, or is it some deeper flaw that can’t be corrected?
Still, let’s give AMD credit for what it has pulled off today in essentially democratizing CPU core counts.

SKYMTL – HardwareCanucks:

In-game performance is just about the only performance-driven metric that doesn’t fall into AMD’s happy Ryzen narrative. In titles that weren’t capped by the game engine or bottlenecked by the TITAN X, Ryzen’s winning streak came to an end. The 1800X still provided highly competitive results but in many situations it fell behind the less expensive 7700K and 7600K. This issue isn’t unique to Ryzen since even the once-mighty Broadwell-E processors had problems keeping up as well. As I said when Broadwell-E was launched, mammoth 8-core, 16-thread CPUs are great for people who need that excess horsepower but they go largely underutilized in gaming rigs.
For an immature platform still in its infancy, Summit Ridge and by extension Ryzen is a remarkably well rounded solution and like any fine wine, it will only get better with age. While the 16-thread parts are just now blazing a trail that will ultimately shake the CPU industry’s pricing foundations, they won’t be right for everyone. However, after seeing what the 1800X can accomplish excitement for those six and four core derivatives. But what is clear right now is that Ryzen is indeed the real deal and Intel has been put on notice that AMD is back in the game.

Paul Alcorn – Tomshardware

It’s hard to recommend the Ryzen 7 1800X over Intel’s lower-cost quad-core chips for gaming, especially given the Core i7-7700K’s impressive performance. That’s not a knock against AMD, specifically. After all, we say the same thing about Intel’s own Broadwell-E CPUs. High-end Kaby Lake processors constantly challenge pricier competitors, and the flagship -7700K sells for $350. Even after down-clocking the -7700K to 3.8 GHz, it still beats Ryzen 7 1800X in nearly every game in our suite. Those issues would only be exacerbated on a Ryzen 7 1700X, which operates at lower clock rates.
Conversely, the Ryzen 7 1800X is in its element when you throw professional and scientific workloads at it. It isn’t the fastest in every high-end benchmark, but any calculation that factors in value almost assuredly goes AMD’s way.
It’s a bummer the Ryzen launch was so clearly rushed. We expected AMD to have a better explanation for its gaming performance, but all of the feedback we received from the company came very last-minute. It’s hard to imagine these shortcomings weren’t discovered previously and diagnosed more thoroughly. We’re happy to put in the time and effort, though. Expect more information as it becomes available.
In the meantime, we would recommend Ryzen 7 1800X for heavily-threaded workloads like rendering and content creation. And while we won’t judge a processor on its gaming performance alone, current indications suggest AMD’s $500 flagship doesn’t beat Core i7-7700K for value in that specific segment.

Jarred Walton – PCGamer

The AMD Ryzen 7: plenty of power, but underwhelming gaming performance
With the huge strides in performance relative to the archaic (in CPU terms) FX-8370 Vishera chip, I expected Ryzen to achieve parity with Intel’s X99 processors. It gets there in the CPU-centric tests, but falls well short on gaming performance. And I don’t really have a good explanation, other than the feeling I keep getting that Ryzen was pushed out the door before it was truly ready.
Ryzen may not be perfect, but it’s so much better than the FX-series processors that I’m almost willing to overlook some of the current warts. Besides, Intel is desperately in need of some competition in the CPU arena, and ARM SOCs just aren’t going to cut it. Hopefully by the time the Ryzen 5 and 3 parts start shipping, all the gaming performance issues will have been fixed. If not, I worry about the long-term prospects for Zen, because Intel isn’t standing still.


Hellfury:
I wanted to believe so badly they'd get gaming right too

[Jamison]

Reviews are out. At an extremely quick glance:

• Multithreaded performance is quite good, and generally equals or wins out.
• Singlethreaded is generally a step behind. Occasional equals, but also sometimes two steps behind.
• Gaming performance is a weak point. As a new architecture it's still quite possible there are SMT issues or other microcode adjustments needed; or BIOS updates that will help mitigate this. Also memory speed seems to be more important to Ryzen than to Core.
• I've seen several sites say the 1700 gets up to 3.8-4.1 overclock without issue.

[Zetanio]

So the verdict is generally bad for gaming?

[Hellfury]

So the verdict is generally bad for gaming?

not bad bad, just not quite good :/ falls behind the cheaper i7700 on most gaming and other similiar Intel offerings :/
But yes, as much as it pains me, as I was hopeful, in its current state, it's bad for gaming.

[Zetanio]

not bad bad, just not quite good :/ falls behind the cheaper i7700 on most gaming and other similiar Intel offerings :/

That's terrible news. Could have done with another 6 months of work judging from the other reviews I'm reading now.

[Jamison]

"In its current state" is a perfect way to frame it. All new architectures need a little time to hit their potential. There will be microcode fixed and it looks like they need some work on SMT efficiency (hyperthreading). Motherboards still need updated BIOS's to support faster memory speeds. IMO 4-6 months from now may paint a better picture. I'm not saying Ryzen will suddenly overtake Intel, but performance *should* tick upwards.

I think I'll stick with the 1700 I ordered. Still a major improvement from what I have now, and I'm investing in a platform where I should be able to swap the CPU out 3-5 years down the road on the same chipset. Ryzen should do well for my other non-gaming workloads.

EDIT:

A few other things I'm seeing. Reviews saying the hit to gaming performance is a bit of a mystery (the chip is "fast enough") and something to be looked at. 1700x doesn't really offer anything the 1700 doesn't for overclockers. Memory bandwidth is very impressive. Above 1080p resolutions the gaming delta is likely less of a factor.

[Zetanio]

I'm probably going to buy in to a 1700 for my new work computer.

[Salodin]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/31761...-preorder.html

This article is everything I wanted and more. Really hope some of this can be updated away, but if not I'll build a new rig using the-now-cheaper Intel parts which is still a win imo.

Actually, the more I read, the more it seems like at the mid-range, things aren't great right now. Not terrible, but not great for gaming. At the higher end of the market, the 1800x with a GTX 1080, the performance difference is very competitive at 1440 and 4k, and that's without any additional optimization from developers or AMD. Apparently you just can't go easy on this CPU, the harder you make it work the better it is. Maybe I should just go balls to the wall with this CPU/GPU instead of trying to budget with it...

[Arkanna]

In regards to gaming, I'm disappointed by the lack of parity between Ryzen and Intel's CPU's, but as others have said, "something weird is going on there" that could be fixed as time progresses. I was highly considering parting out my Core i7 6700k/Z170/32GB/GTX1070 setup and rebuilding using a Ryzen, ONLY to support AMD, but there's really no value in that for me at all. I would be spending at a minimum, around $550 to $600 for a Ryzen 1700X and motherboard combo, while recouping a lot less than that for my current CPU/board, for gaming performance that could be a lot lower.

We aren't all 100% gamers obviously, and Ryzen is an excellent workstation CPU. But, the only "work" I do on the rig in question is some light audio/video encoding.

I may still rebuild in the future with a Ryzen CPU but the value is just not there right this moment. I'll revisit once there's a few mITX motherboards out there for Ryzen.

[Hellfury]

What I would really like to know at this point, is if any "fixes" they make might be patchable or if it'll be hardware revisions later, I'm a bit tempted to root for the underdog and go for the 1800X anyway, I get GPU throttled most of the time anyway (3840x2160), so, maybe..?

[Arkanna]

What I would really like to know at this point, is if any "fixes" they make might be patchable or if it'll be hardware revisions later, I'm a bit tempted to root for the underdog and go for the 1800X anyway, I get GPU throttled most of the time anyway (3840x2160), so, maybe..?

At this point I would not do it, personally. If you're not worried about value, or losing out a little on performance, etc... then by all means, pull the trigger and let us know how it works out for you.

[Hellfury]

At this point I would not do it, personally. If you're not worried about value, or losing out a little on performance, etc... then by all means, pull the trigger and let us know how it works out for you.

Need to sleep on it a little, torn between "we need the underdog and this is enough" and "I want the crazy shiney"

My 3970x is starting to show its age :/ USB ports started failing, need to change several fans, assorted other errors that pop up that i use to justify changing it up

[Zetanio]

CEO and some other people are doing an AMA on /r/AMD right now for those interested.

[Salodin]

Ty

[Gryffes]

I'm seeing a ton of intel fud in general.

The tldr is at 1080p the ipc from intel wins out, once you go past 1080p they basically are GPU bound and it doesn't matter and anything that then benefits from multicore tilts in amds favour, especially if you want to use cpu x264 encoding to stream with, or do any workstation load besides gaming whatsoever.

If you run 1440p, multi screen, vr, ultrawide, etc etc then the IPC lead from intel means nothing because you're GPU bound - and keep in mind 99% of these benchmarks are gpu bound with 1080s.......

[Kalmado]

Just got home from work and skimmed [H] review. I wasn't planning on rebuilding immediately anyways, but I do hope there are improvements for gaming. The cpu is the least of my worries at the moment because I may have bought a $300 paperweight in a R9 295x2.

[Arkanna]

The [H] review was disappointing to me, tbh. Not as much info as I am used to, especially for such an important product.

Regardless, I will likely build a Ryzen box because the 1080p thing doesn't really bother me. I'm forced to wait either way because I need a mITX motherboard and there does not seem to be any at this point in time.

[orinthia]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBf0lwikXyU

Some interesting info from this guy. He does a bit of analysis on how different reviewers had slightly different results (ram mhz differences, old mobo bios versions, etc), though it ultimately doesn't change the fact that the r7s are aimed at the same market as intel's 68xxk/69xxk, which are also sometimes bested by the 7700k (especially in gaming). Though there's not much benefit if the program can use cuda cores for processing anyway.

Regardless, this is an awesome showing from amd given how huge the jump in performance this is over their last gen cpus; it just took too damn long lol. AMD has to get back in the game with game devs on the cpu side to get better use out of these high-core counts, but that'll also help intel. Probably won't be seeing much any time soon, though it could mean the r5's performance will be better in gaming if they can overclock higher (doubtful).

And looking forward to how they handle laptop cpus or similar much lower power ones. The 1700 part being 65w rated is interesting; hope their ULV parts are just as strong vs intel's when they get released.

[Salodin]

Think I'm gonna pull the trigger on the 1700. I don't think I'll ever want to do crossfire/sli, so I'm leaning towards the b350 mobos with 8gb of ram. The savings in the mobo and ram (from x370 and 16gb) I'm gonna put towards a GTX 1060, as opposed to the RX 480 that I would crossfire in the future. Reusing my old psu and SSD/HDD, I can get away for $832. My budget is $1k on the dot, so I'm looking for ways to squeeze a little more into this. I'd bump up the ram, but the ram is part of a 3-way combo with the Ryzen 7, ram, and mobo. I don't see a need to liquid cooling in this setup right now, unless you guys could convince me otherwise.

[Hellfury]

I think I am going to sit on the fence for a few months and see what they manage to iron out, while single game performance is stronger on the intel series (at least for the foreseeable future), the next few months will show us what they manage to do to assorted motherboard issues and SMT issues. I often run 2x XIV instances simultaneously, and if I start playing a video as well then, it starts stuttering, need a good cpu load monitoring solution to see if it's the CPU or the GPU that is mean to me there.
My rig is pretty old (3970x on x79 chipset), and a lot of parts are 4-5 years old, it still moves on, I just miss having a "top of the line" solution.