The AMD Zen and Ryzen 7 Review: A Deep Dive on 1800X, 1700X and 1700
by Ian Cutress on March 2, 2017 9:00 AM ESTTest Bed Setup and Hardware
As always, defining a regular test bed is key to these tests. At a CPU launch, with a new chipset, new socket, and almost new everything, that can be difficult. It’s also worth noting that our testing suite is currently in a state of flux as well, as we migrate testing to Windows 10. For the most part, our test beds use off-the-shelf components, sometimes supplied by vendors for the purpose of being in our test bed. For the Ryzen review, our AMD Test bed is as follows:
- AMD Ryzen 7 1800X (8C/16T, 3.6-4.0 GHz, 95W, $499)
- AMD Ryzen 7 1700X (8C/16T, , 95W, $399)
- AMD Ryzen 7 1700 (8C/16T, 3.0-3.7 GHz, 65W, $329)
- ASUS Crosshair VI Hero Motherboard
- Corsair Vengeance 2x8GB DDR4-3000 C16 running at DDR4-2400 C15
- Crucial MX200 1TB SSD
- Rosewill SilentNight 500W Platinum PSU
- ASUS GTX 950 Ti (95W)
- MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8GB
- Windows 10 Pro
Of course, many thanks to all our partners who supplied equipment for our test beds.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
574 Comments
View All Comments
EchoWars - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
No, apparently the failure was in your education, since it's obvious you did not read the article.Notmyusualid - Friday, March 3, 2017 - link
Ha...sharath.naik - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
I think you missed the biggest news in this information dump. The TDP is the biggest advantage amd has. Which means that for 150watt server cpu. they should be able to cram a lot more cores than intel will be able to.Meteor2 - Friday, March 3, 2017 - link
^^^This. I think AMD's strength with Zen is going to be in servers.Sttm - Friday, March 3, 2017 - link
Yeah I can see that.UpSpin - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
According to a german site, in games, Ryzen is equal (sometimes higher, sometimes lower) to the Intel i7-6900K in high resolution games (WQHD). Once the resolution is set very low (720p) the Ryzen gets beaten by the Intel processor, but honestly, who cares about low resolution? For games, the probably best bet would be the i7-7700K, mainly because of the higher clock rate, for now. Once the games get better optimized for 8 cores, the 4-core i7-7700K will be beaten for sure, because in multi-threaded applications Ryzen is on par with the twice expensive Intel processor.I doubt it makes sense to buy the Core i7-6850K, it has the same low turbo boost frequency the 6900K has, thus low single threaded performance, but at only 6 cores. So I expect that it's the worst from both worlds. Poor multi-threaded performance compared to Ryzen, poor single threaded performance compared to i7-7700K.
We also have to see how well Ryzen can get overclocked, thus improving single core performance.
fanofanand - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
That is a well reasoned comment. Kudos!ShieTar - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
Well, the point of low-resolution testing is, that at normal resolutions you will always be GPU-restricted. So not only Ryzen and the i7-6900K are equal in this test, but so are all other modern and half-modern CPUs including any old FX-8...The most interesting question will be how Ryzen performs on those few modern games which manage to be CPU-restricted even in relevant resolutions, e.g. Battlefield 1 Multiplayer. But I think it will be a few more days, if not weeks, until we get that kind of in-depth review.
FriendlyUser - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
This is true, but at the same time this artificially magnifies the differences one is going to notice in a real-world scenario. I saw reviews with a Titan X at 1080p, while many will be playing 1440p with a 1060 or RX480.The test case must also approximate real life.
khanikun - Friday, March 3, 2017 - link
They aren't testing to show what it's like in real life though. The point of testing is to show the difference between the CPUs. Hence why they are gearing their benchmarking to stress the CPU, not other portions of the system.