Review: AMD Ryzen 7 1800X processor

It kinda trails back to the fact that AMD marketing department is a bit too good for its own good... Aka the hype did not deliver, and apparently it's not the first time... And since we're in March I guess it's too late to call back AMD marketing employees christmas bonus

 

It's either an IPC weakness, and/OR unoptimized code (as mentioned by the AMD Ceo Reddit AMA), or a memory latency issue...?

In general what it shows is that Ryzen has a weakness of sorts...

 

"AMD’s market cap has increased nearly sixfold in the past year. It’s going to take a lot of quarters of 30% sales growth to justify 594%"

No wonder it dipped.

 

Hmmm while interesting I doubt it'll show where or why Ryzen performs as it does, for now... But fair valid point to look into sure

 

The memory latency is extremely bad, so it probably ruins the game benchmarks. Is there a chance it can be fixed with a bios update or similar?

 

Great review Hilbert, honest pros and cons and a great suite of tests given the time constraints. The 1700 in particular looks like the go to chip for CPU-driven media creation and editing on a budget.

While none of this is new information today, I'm still disappointed in the lack of quad channel memory, the weak PCIe 2.0 x8 lane from the chipset, and how you have to pick between dropping a bunch of SATA drives or using NVME drives. While you have to do the same on Intel setups, the X370 appears to be a bit more limited than the Z270. With that said, it appears to be better than I originally thought; it looks like you can drop both SATA-Express connectors (why were these included in the first place FFS) and get a 3.0 x4 lane from the chipset in its place. If that's the case, you get one NVME x4 from the CPU and another from the SATA-Express side, and then have four more SATA drives available. Boot drive, game/scratch drive, and four media storage drives. Your GPU gets x16 3.0 from CPU and whatever else you have can use 8 lanes of PCIe 2.0, which is still pretty damn fast.

I still cannot tell if this is supposed to be competing with the regular Intel line or the Enthusiast line though; the core count and top end pricing say Enthusiast, but then most of the defining features of the Enthusiast class (other than core count) are MIA.

Overall though, I'm very impressed and happy that AMD finally has a competitive product. I'm very curious to see how well the four and six core parts overclock - I'm guessing they push closer to 4.5ghz-4.8ghz like Intel's quads do. I also hope that all of the speculation regarding updated drivers/microcode/optimizations bringing better performance pans out too. Right now those are just hopeful guesses though, so if you're on the fence and have a few weeks/months to spare I'd sit back and see how this product line develops. AMD just might count me as a customer in the coming year, after a ten+ year hiatus.

 

People keep saying "the hype didn't deliver", but it sort of did. In most cases, Ryzen is better than most reviewers expected, and its advertised performance falls directly where it's supposed to, except in some gaming benchmarks. Seeing as it's not a gamer's CPU and Intel's 8 cores aren't a whole lot better in games, I don't see what the fuss is about.

Keep in mind, most of us had a hard time believing it would fall within 5% of Skylake's performance. Many of us felt that the 1700 was going to be overall worse than an i7 6600K.

 

Well i expected it to keep up with Intel, so I may have believed some of the best case scenario hype but seeing it pretty much have the same min/avg framerate in a brand new DX12 game (GoW4) that uses a new engine was quite disappointing.

It just tends to make you want to wait for Intel to bring our their own 8/16 chip but priced instead at the masses.
That way i don't have to pick between old or new software.

 

I agree, I think it did exceptionally well for the R&D budget. I guess it has to do with AMDs marketing of this chip, and a lot of forum users here and elsewhere claiming it as the second coming of Christ.

 

For those interested , i have just updated the Ryzen tread with a whole bunch of new Bios for almost all the motherboards , and for the overclocking crowd a little gift from Asus: http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=412876

"Overclocking Bios / New Overclocking Utilities / New Overclocking Software "
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


ROG Crosshair VI series - Tread at hwbot.com by Elmor - http://forum.hwbot.org/showthread.php?t=167530

BIOS:
------
5803 Official MR BIOS
0090 Has some performance tweaks for Geekbench3, for everything else use 5803

C6H XOC Guide v0.3

C6H OC Pack

C6HOCPAK0302 content
OCPanel II firmware (wait for OC Panel I)
ROG Connect Plus
TurboV Core 1.01.15
MemTweakIt
X370 Windows 7 USB drivers
am4_pcratio_v03 - am4_pcratio_ccx sets ratio per core complex, am4_pcratio_focus sets a single core to requested ratio
zen_perfboost_v03 - Realtime tweaks for specific benchmarks including Cinebench R11.5, Cinebench R15 and Geekbench3

 

If you main purpose of yours PC is gaming or are you using yours PC for gaming get 6800k or 7700k

6800k is not bad CPU, if budget allows get 6850k or older 5820k which can be cheaper and performance is same or very similar

OC on both chips this depends on silicone lottery

And regarding the motherboard, get ASRock, these boards are most reliable boards on market, Asus boards are known for killing CPU and Gigabyte I wouldn't touch

If you are in London area I'm happy to borrow you my NH-D15 which you can try on X99, in my case this air cooler outperformed AIO

Hope this helps

Thanks, Jura

 

It ended up being pretty much exactly what I expected. I knew there'd be very little OC headroom otherwise AMD wouldn't have binned their chips the way they did and wouldn't have been so conservative with their clock speeds. Meanwhile Intel on the other hand has only artificially kept their clocks low because they were just super gouging us for over a decade.

Overall good news, finally competition after over a decade, but not so great for those like me who rely heavily on single threaded performance. Even if Intel gave us real prices instead of a gun pointed to our heads I think I'd still buy AMD just to spite Intel. On top of all the scum everyone here thinks they are (which they 100% are, not least of all due to using illegal tactics to ruin AMD) they've done additional mostly unknown tidbits of scum****ery such as donating $300K to a feminazi fund during GamerGate then following it by cutting $300K from their budget resulting in mass firings.

 

What's there to explain. 329$ 16thread Ryzen is on par in gaming with the 7700k

Some reviewers seemed to have their settings adjusted to make sure there were no cores parked / no HPET interfering / no SMT ...etc.

AMD statement:

Spoiler

And BIOS updates seem to be on their way especially regarding this issue.

So I think one has to take the reviews into consideration that show the proper performance. I mean if one review shows equal performance on Ryzen and 7700K and the other one shows 20FPS less on Ryzen in the same game in the same 1080p settings... then there's obviously something wrong with the latter configuration.

(EDIT: more context

Spoiler

)

 

A bit off topic, but running a RMA department for 7 years... I can't confirm that

I've never seen an Asus board kill a CPU, much less Asus had the lowest RMA percentage of the brands we carried (MSI, AsRock, Gigabyte, Asus and SuperMicro(SM was most for WS and server tho')) and AsRock has the second highest... :eek3:

EDIT: Actually SM has the lowest RMA percentage, but again that was almost exclusively server and workstation boards/bb-packages

 

Yes, my main use would be gaming, I barely do anything else. If I was to maybe stream on twitch or upload the odd video, I think the 6800k would do just fine, no need for Ryzen for that.

5820k and 6800k cost the same atm, at least over here in the UK. I'm not too far from London mate, thanks for the offer, I'll think about it.

 

Totally off topic but for real dude, get a grip. Intel isn't putting a gun to your head. If you hate them so much then stop buying their products. And 300k budget cut = mass firings? What do you think Intel engineers work for minimum wage? 300k isn't even two full time engineers once you factor in the cost of salary + benefits. I wish there was a semi-common way to spell Intel like people say M$ so I could immediately identify who is 14 years old and stop reading their whiny rants about big bad Intel holding people hostage and stealing their money. Rage against the machine man! :bash:

 

Something doesn't add up, here have OC3D benching gears 4 in both a cpu bound and gpu bound,



In the cpu limited results looks as though gears 4 doesn't use more than 4 cores and the framerate scales nearly linearly with clock speed , you see a 12% difference between the 7600k and the 1800x which makes sense since the 7600k will boost up to 4-4.1ghz on all cores and the 1800x 3.6-3.8~ by default,
4.0~/3.7~ gives you between a 8-14% difference in variable clock rate which lines up pretty well which what should be expected. the 7700k does better since it can boost up to 4.4ghz on all cores .

now if you look at an older title like project cars




You can see some very odd behaviour which frankly doesn't make much sense merely setting windows to the High performance power plan makes a big difference.

Given these examples the "lowfps" problem showing up in various benches , whether it is a bug with windows power management, a bios problem or an outdated intel compiler, I think its pretty safe to say that it is a software problem not a problem with the cpu.

(my money is on windows power management)

 

That doesn't fly. Anyone remember the bulldozer launch, and the promised windows patch that would completely change the performance of bulldozer? We all know how that turned out.



This is the product offered for sale, and this is the product reviewed.

 

Yeah, I don't really dig the whole "but it'll improve with time" mentality either. Also, at this point, I'd take any AMD statements with a handfull of salt.

 

Telling people to only believe the reviews that paint Ryzen well is a bit dubious though.

If there is an issue with inconsistencies, then people need to hold off buying until it's established if it's something that can be resolved.

 

Hey spoiled Dave, I've been paying **** prices for a decade because THERE WERE NO ALTERNATIVES for a decade. And yes that pittance/nothing 300K cut which isn't even the tiniest drop in the bucket resulted in mass firings, and no obviously not of their engineers, I didn't keep an article link because I didn't think some self-rightous **** would call me out on it while calling me an angsty teen.

In conclusion, **** off and cry to someone who cares, I have no patience for morons like you sitting in a burning collapsing building saying "everything is fine quit whining".

I hope someone gets a monopoly on water where you live, charges an arm and leg per liter, and someone lectures you about how it's a luxury you don't need and that you shouldn't buy from them if hate them so much.