Hardware & Technical Ryzen Pricing looks promising ...

[samuelb]

Pricing looks good - if you want a poor facsimile of an Intel chip.

Already there are benchmark figures showing the £330 Ryzen losing just over 10% on benchmarks over the £320 i7 7700k.

Granted these are benchmarks but they reflect an issue - an 8/16 core CPU vs a 4/8 core CPU losing 10% on multicore benchmarks? We will see.

And, I am not an Intel fanboi and would love to see AMD compete so we can finally start to see some benefit as consumers.

Fly safe CMDRs.

 

[Morbad]

Sure it's going to be better (probably)

That depends entirely on what you are going to use it for.

Usually (not always) AMD end up providing the best bang-for-buck - especially in CPUs.

With a small handful of exceptions, this has generally not been the case from mid-2006 until the launch of Ryzen.

AMD had a few compelling APUs, and one or two parts that were eventually discounted enough to be good values for certain niches, but the bulk of their AM2(+) and AM3(+) parts weren't at all appealing, especially when the platform was looked at as a whole. Only the hex core Thubans had a real niche and that was pretty short lived.

Maybe it's a difference in pricing where I'm from, but AMD GPUs have generally been much more competitive than AMD CPUs, over most of the past decade.

Already there are benchmark figures showing the £330 Ryzen losing just over 10% on benchmarks over the £320 i7 7700k.

Granted these are benchmarks but they reflect an issue - an 8/16 core CPU vs a 4/8 core CPU losing 10% on multicore benchmarks? We will see.

For every test where a 7700K out performs an R7 in well-threaded tasks, there are going to be a dozen where the R7 outperforms the 7700K by a wider margin. The 7700K is clocked higher and Kaby Lake cores generally have better IPC on top of that, but this is no where near enough to overcome the advantage of a 100% increase in core count...except in a handful of niche scenarios that AMD's Zen architecture is ill suited to (most notably AVX256).

Anyway, no one should be buying an R7 unless they have a use for those cores. There are plenty of lightly threaded tests where an i3-7350K will mop the floor with an R7 1800X, an i7 6950X, or anything else that isn't another Skylake or Kabylake with equal or greater clock speed and if that's all you need to do, and the 7700K can do the same with moderately well threaded tasks. Blindly purchasing any CPU will either waste your money, cost you performance, or both. The right tool for the right job.

 

[Thalion Solarstorm]

R5 may be intersting for simple Gamers. But the first Gen seems truly just rebadget R7s. If they fix the Core Distribution on 4 Core's on later Versions removing the CCX Bridge or adding a Cache in there, things could get better.

Lets see how the R5 Overclock, depending on Powergating they used, there is a Chance it clocks better than the R7s.

Ill be probably getting a R7 1700 too. Superb TDP for the Power + i do Blender / Videostuff + compiling. Moar Cores fits me perfect
The only concern atm is the right Memory but seeing the Mainboard Vendors ( especially ASUS ) updates almost weekly with new Supports for Highspeed Memory i am not too worried.

Cheers!

 

[The Chairmaker]

Adored TV found something interesting re NVidia graphics performance using RYzen that has been been tested and backed up by Hardware Unboxed.

[video=youtube;0tfTZjugDeg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tfTZjugDeg[/video]

It looks like the Nvidia drivers are not best optimised for use with Ryzen, hence when benchmark comparisons have been done between 7700ks and Ryzen7 cards the Nvidia cards have not been performing in some games at their optimal level.

This therefore throws into question many of the assumptions for gaming that have so far been made re Ryzen when compared to the top line Intel I7's.

This has in part come about because AMD has not currently got any top line enthusiast level cards to compare with Nvidia. As a consequence the vast majority of the Ryzen gaming tests were done with the flagship Nvidia cards.

 

[jmg]

Lets see how the R5 Overclock, depending on Powergating they used, there is a Chance it clocks better than the R7s.

Cheers!

Yeah, I agree.
and the reliance on expensive high speed memory for Ryzen to ekk out any kind of advantage, something I had completely forgotten does seem to negate any price advantage it may have. for now anyway.

- - - Updated - - -

Anyway, no one should be buying an R7 unless they have a use for those cores. There are plenty of lightly threaded tests where an i3-7350K will mop the floor with an R7 1800X, an i7 6950X, or anything else that isn't another Skylake or Kabylake with equal or greater clock speed and if that's all you need to do, and the 7700K can do the same with moderately well threaded tasks. Blindly purchasing any CPU will either waste your money, cost you performance, or both. The right tool for the right job.

+ rep for this-- this is EXACTLY what everyone should be doing. Ryzen has some uses. It's not going to stomp any Intel chip in every application (or practically any for that matter), nor will it be stomped by every intel chip. Look at your application and decide for yourself what is best. Ryzen isn't for me, because what I have works best for me and AMD has nothing that can do better at any price-- either GPU or CPUs. But your application may dictate otherwise.

Anyway, I'm just repeating what you said, and not as well.

 

[jmg]

That looks like a system with a heavy gaming slant. No Ryzen part in existence will match the 7700K in most games. Actually, for pure gaming use, there aren't any faster processors than the 7700K, on any platform, from any manufactuer.

Very good point. At stock speeds, my 6950x will be bested (*cough* not by a wide margin, mind you) by a 7700 in just about every game (and for point of comparison, nothing AMD has can top a 6950 in any test). I need to overclock to 4.5ghz to get similar numbers as a 7700.
Bottom line, if you're running today's games, you're best bet is a highly optimized, low core, higher clocked chip, like the 7700.

- - - Updated - - -

I think what can be said with some confidence is that the i7 7700k is going to be more expensive than any R5 product. Sure it's going to be better (probably), but then again it's £340 at the moment to the R5's £170 to £250. And the 7700k is overkill for almost all gamers, so the difference in FPS (or whatever) is likely to be pretty marginal and most gamers would be better off saving the money, or putting it towards a more capable GPU, bigger SSD or whatever else takes their fancy. Which is what the original poster said, really.

THIS is where I expect the r5 will shine. It won't be a stellar performance, but it will give a gamer a large percentage of the performance of a 7700k at a fraction of the price. This is what I was referring to earlier -- if, when the r5 is actually released, it comes close to the 7700 at the prices they've already released, building a station that is going to be doing office work/web browsing/some gaming with an r5 is a complete no-brainer (unless Intel reduces the price on the 7700, which would be great for all of us).

 

[Porina]

R5 may be intersting for simple Gamers. But the first Gen seems truly just rebadget R7s. If they fix the Core Distribution on 4 Core's on later Versions removing the CCX Bridge or adding a Cache in there, things could get better.

I'm not sure how big a problem the CCX issue is for gaming. It was a significant design decision for AMD to enable ease of scaling up, so it would be no small job for them to undo that. While it may be something to optimised in some use cases, I'm not sure gaming is one that would significantly benefit from it. Personally I don't think the CCX bridge idea itself is a problem, but more the lack of bandwidth in the current implementation. It could use being faster so the L3 cache sections are more closely unified.

Lets see how the R5 Overclock, depending on Powergating they used, there is a Chance it clocks better than the R7s.

Absent info otherwise, I wouldn't expect R5 to clock up significantly differently from the R7. The R7 problem isn't running into power limitations, but to push clock you quickly hit a voltage wall around 4 GHz. Most report being able to get to 3.7 or so at a low voltage, but to push from there to beyond 4 GHz you quickly run into needing silly high voltage.

Ill be probably getting a R7 1700 too. Superb TDP for the Power + i do Blender / Videostuff + compiling. Moar Cores fits me perfect
The only concern atm is the right Memory but seeing the Mainboard Vendors ( especially ASUS ) updates almost weekly with new Supports for Highspeed Memory i am not too worried.

I'm still testing my 1700 on and off... when things scale, it really takes off, and it isn't a hard overclock to bump it up to 3.7 while keeping a low voltage. Bios updates on my two Asus boards haven't been that fast, if I only count official releases and not play beta tester for them. Still, there is definitely room for maturity here, and unless people have to buy a new Ryzen system now (or soon for R5), the growing pains will reduce and there will be an easier ride.



For most people, I don't think the R5 will be gunning against the 7700k, but more likely the non-OC 7400-7600, particularly the 4c8t parts. Based on what AMD have told us about R5 and actual pricing of mobos so far, I'd expect for a given system price, gaming performance will be generally comparable without OC. Where the quad core R5 would offer more value is in some uses where the extra threads actually help and it could take the lead there, and look better than the non-OC 7700 part. With OC, of course that throws everything more into AMD's favour.

The 6 core R5 parts will be an interesting area, as it may run into the more cores, less clock problem of it's R7 relatives.

 

[Morbad]

Lets see how the R5 Overclock, depending on Powergating they used, there is a Chance it clocks better than the R7s.

Since they are made from the same dies as R7s, and the R7s are not power or thermally limited on their OCs, it's highly unlikely that the R5s will clock any higher.

Fewer active cores does mean lower chance for a weak core holding things back, but the spread of stable OCs is so narrow, that I'm expecting the overwhelming majority of R5s to fall in the same 3.9-4.1GHz range that all the R7s seem to hit (assuming air or watercooling and 24/7 stability).

I'm not sure how big a problem the CCX issue is for gaming. It was a significant design decision for AMD to enable ease of scaling up, so it would be no small job for them to undo that. While it may be something to optimised in some use cases, I'm not sure gaming is one that would significantly benefit from it. Personally I don't think the CCX bridge idea itself is a problem, but more the lack of bandwidth in the current implementation. It could use being faster so the L3 cache sections are more closely unified.

The issue is both alternately overstated, and incorrectly ignored. There have been plenty of gaming tests that show that scheduling closely coupled threads across CCXes does matter, but it's almost never a huge deal, even with a sub-optimal data fabric clock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhj6CvBnwNk

While this review makes some mistakes (he refers to CCXes being separate dies...they aren't) the methodology and results are largely sound, and the other reviews he references show essentially the same thing.

AMD's universal interconnect is lower performance than the various custom interconnects Intel has been using, but there generally aren't than many intimately related threads for AMD's approach to be significantly handicapped. It's not an issue that can always be ignored, but it's one that is frequently overstated.

 

[Straha Yeagar]

Pricing looks good - if you want a poor facsimile of an Intel chip.

Already there are benchmark figures showing the £330 Ryzen losing just over 10% on benchmarks over the £320 i7 7700k.

Granted these are benchmarks but they reflect an issue - an 8/16 core CPU vs a 4/8 core CPU losing 10% on multicore benchmarks? We will see.

And, I am not an Intel fanboi and would love to see AMD compete so we can finally start to see some benefit as consumers.

Fly safe CMDRs.

And to think...the $1000 + Intel 6/12, 8/16 CPU's lose in those same benchmarks against the 7700k too, but the Ryzen beats the equivalent cored Intel chip for 1/2 the price...

 

[Morbad]

And to think...the $1000 + Intel 6/12, 8/16 CPU's lose in those same benchmarks against the 7700k too, but the Ryzen beats the equivalent cored Intel chip for 1/2 the price...

Yep, Ryzen is pretty impressive for the price in most areas.

These are the processors I have in my currently active desktops:

i7 6800K
i7 5820K
i7 4930K
Xeon X5670
i7 2700K
i5 3570K

Were I building new systems, today, for the same purposes I originally built, or currently use, these systems for, five of the the seven would be replaced with R7 1700s. They are 330-340 dollars here, have good enough lightly threaded performance, and the next significant jump in well-threaded performance, that doesn't sacrifice even more lightly-threaded performance is a 6950X, for roughly five times the price.

Of the remaining two setups, I'd put an i3-7350K in my HTPC/console emulation box (which has the 3570K in it now), and I'd probably still take the 6800K system because the database work my wife does needs more memory than I can fit in an AM4 board (it's currently done on the 4930K with 64GiB of DDR3-1600, but that is proving to be at least 30GiB less than ideal, so the moment DDR4 prices fall again, 128GiB is going into one of my LGA-2011v3 setups).

 

[flimflam]

Ryzen performance will get better as they optimise the motherboards, drivers and games for it. Memory clock has a big impact on ryzen, so there will likely be headroom there for getting more performance out of it. Also games are getting better at distributing processing work over several cores so it'll be a good chip for the future.

 

[Zetta]

Ryzen 5 1600(X) is looking pretty damn fine.

http://wccftech.com/review/amd-ryzen-5-1600x-review/
https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/amd-ryzen-5-1600x-review-benchmarks
https://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2017/04/11/amd-ryzen-5-1600x-review/1
https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-5-1600-linux-benchmarks-and-review-we-like-this-one/

 

[Morbad]

Some more R5 1500X & 1600X reviews:


http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/104182-amd-ryzen-5-1500x-ryzen-5-1600x-14nm-zen/
https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Ryzen-5-Review-1600X-and-1500X-Take-Core-i5
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Ryzen_5_1500X/
http://www.techspot.com/review/1379-and-ryzen-5-1600x-1500x/ (& their simulated results from last month http://www.techspot.com/review/1360-amd-ryzen-5-1600x-1500x-gaming/)

All in all, zero surprises. Launched the day announced for the price announced. Performs exactly as expected (and as simulated). Overclocks essentially the same as the R7s.

 

[askmee]

Check this article about CPU choosing on -remove link to commercial site selling CPUs-

 

[Porina]

While we're here, Agner Fog has just released an updated architecture guide including Ryzen, if you like getting into the details of what goes on inside.

http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=838
http://www.agner.org/optimize/

Summary at 1st link, detail download item 3 on 2nd link.

 

[Necronaught]

With the price of those RX 570's and the performance of these new CPU's upgrading is gonna be a cheap splash.

 

[NascentChemist]

Hey all, I'm looking for some advice. My old CPU, a Phenom II X4 955, has finally met its end. This means that any current gen processor will be a massive improvement. Now, gaming is by far and above the most strenuous thing my PC does. I don't do video editing, and my professional software is pretty light.

I'm not devoted to AMD, and have been quite leery of their previous heat and power management. This lead me to a GTX 970 GPU when I started PC gaming (of course I got this right before the 1000 series was announced...)

When I first started looking around, I defaulted to Intel chips. As I've never over-clocked, the i5-7500 seemed about right for $200. Paying ~$40 to upgrade to an i5-7600k didn't seem worth it for a feature I'm not sure I'd ever use. The added cost of a Z270 board over a B250 didn't help either. My budget isn't great, so the ~$240 unlocked chip is already pricier than I'd like, though its got the fastest clock speeds.

Looking at Ryzen 5, the 1500X looks nice as well. $10 cheaper than the i5-7500, same number of cores, more threads, roughly equal clock speeds. And it comes unlocked, if I do decide to OC! If I spend $210, the 1600 offers 6 cores with lower (stock) clock speeds.

And with regards to the overclocking possibility, I fell down this rabbit hole when I got a great deal on an H60 cooler to quiet my old CPU's banshee howl! (Long story short, I'm not getting old CPU off the old cooler without a pry bar. And the radiator prevents the arm securing the CPU from being open to just reassemble it.) So, I've got a good cooler, case with good airflow, GTX 970, and a 750W PSU.

HALP. I though I was ready to make a decision when just considering Intel chips. But the Ryzen 5 added way too many more variables. Instead of looking at apples-to-apples performance changes by price, I've got to juggle price, clock speed, # of cores, overclocking options, hyperthreading, cache size, whether to return the cursed water cooler...

 

[winterknight]

I think you should go down the Intel route if you are worried about overheating the Ryzen's look power hungary. And don't dismiss the Intel nnnnK's, you can also underclock them, if you need to get rid of heat.
And water cooling, Bleah, I wonder what some people are doing to get such high temps. My CPU (6700K) temps are ~40C, doing nothing, rising to low 60C's when at 98% utilization. And the GPU 1060 (Asus Strix) is 43C idle, and 57C with GPU at 100%. All on air, even more insulting to the overkill coolers, the CPU is using the Intel supplied heatsink and fan.

 

[MickyG1982]

Hey all, I'm looking for some advice. My old CPU, a Phenom II X4 955, has finally met its end. This means that any current gen processor will be a massive improvement. Now, gaming is by far and above the most strenuous thing my PC does. I don't do video editing, and my professional software is pretty light.

I'm not devoted to AMD, and have been quite leery of their previous heat and power management. This lead me to a GTX 970 GPU when I started PC gaming (of course I got this right before the 1000 series was announced...)

When I first started looking around, I defaulted to Intel chips. As I've never over-clocked, the i5-7500 seemed about right for $200. Paying ~$40 to upgrade to an i5-7600k didn't seem worth it for a feature I'm not sure I'd ever use. The added cost of a Z270 board over a B250 didn't help either. My budget isn't great, so the ~$240 unlocked chip is already pricier than I'd like, though its got the fastest clock speeds.

Looking at Ryzen 5, the 1500X looks nice as well. $10 cheaper than the i5-7500, same number of cores, more threads, roughly equal clock speeds. And it comes unlocked, if I do decide to OC! If I spend $210, the 1600 offers 6 cores with lower (stock) clock speeds.

And with regards to the overclocking possibility, I fell down this rabbit hole when I got a great deal on an H60 cooler to quiet my old CPU's banshee howl! (Long story short, I'm not getting old CPU off the old cooler without a pry bar. And the radiator prevents the arm securing the CPU from being open to just reassemble it.) So, I've got a good cooler, case with good airflow, GTX 970, and a 750W PSU.

HALP. I though I was ready to make a decision when just considering Intel chips. But the Ryzen 5 added way too many more variables. Instead of looking at apples-to-apples performance changes by price, I've got to juggle price, clock speed, # of cores, overclocking options, hyperthreading, cache size, whether to return the cursed water cooler...

If I were you I'd consider the Ryzen 5 1400 too, in terms of gaming you probably won't notice the difference between the 1400 & the 1500X (though if you were considerinng the 1500X you'd be as well punting the extra $30 or so for the 6 core 1600)

In any case, the 1400 overclocks just as well as the 1500X - has nearly the same performance (once overclocked) plus is another $20 cheaper than the 1500X.

http://www.techspot.com/review/1386-amd-ryzen-5-1400/

 

[Straha Yeagar]

I think you should go down the Intel route if you are worried about overheating the Ryzen's look power hungary. And don't dismiss the Intel nnnnK's, you can also underclock them, if you need to get rid of heat.
And water cooling, Bleah, I wonder what some people are doing to get such high temps. My CPU (6700K) temps are ~40C, doing nothing, rising to low 60C's when at 98% utilization. And the GPU 1060 (Asus Strix) is 43C idle, and 57C with GPU at 100%. All on air, even more insulting to the overkill coolers, the CPU is using the Intel supplied heatsink and fan.

I have two Ryzen 1700 systems. Both over clocked from 3.0 to 3.8 ghz. One on the stock air cooler, the other under a custom water loop. The one on air peaked at around 70c under Prime95, so plenty respectable, and not a concern temp wise at all. The one I have under water peaked at 40c under Prime95...