Official OcUK Ryzen review thread

[Bonjour]

Give it a few months and I think these will be bang on the money, TBH.

Just a shame the launch itself has proven sub-par.

 

[TheBiznes]

@CAT-THE-FIFTH
I to add my old haunting place
Those looking for more comprehensive 1700 overclocking review.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?293130-Ryzen-Return-of-the-Jedi

 

[Bonjour]

Complete fail tbh. Getting slayed by 6 year old i5 chips in gaming isn't great is it?

Quite...

Without a shadow of doubt the Zen microarchitecture is the big winner here. In nearly every situation it proved itself to be the equal to the best Intel has to offer. It is fast, efficient and almost infinitely scalable to provide a platform upon which AMD can build a wide range of enthusiast, professional and mainstream solutions. Zen is everything that people hoped Bulldozer would be and then some. Considering where they were just two short years ago this is an achievement of monumental proportions for AMD.

 

[hardkore]

Anyone who says these chips aren't great (especially for the money) is either trolling or a wee bit slow.

 

[Mei]

looks unaffected when using vulkan tho?
techreport.com/review/31366/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-ryzen-7-1700x-and-ryzen-7-1700-cpus-reviewed/6
so could be more down to windows drivers and software than people are thinking right now? duno cant say ive studied enough compares yet

 

[koooowweeee]

I think given the excitement built up combined with the case of many stating that Intel were asleep, pushng out small improvements over the last few years, I think people did actually expect more. It's great we have other options and some of the chips are well priced but I think many expected more than just cheaper performance? If AMD took years to develop Ryzen then actually Intel have been developing well too and only fail on pricing some of their chips.The argument that Intel have not been pushing forward CPU technology due to lack of competition seems to be blown out of the water as the competition after years of R&D seems to have pushed out similar performing cheaper product.

I'd like to see how they perform more in non gaming applications too. Not read many of the reviews yet I must admit

I think this sums things up tbh

Intel just keep knocking out small upgrades as and when they can. AMD have only just got to where they are because that's as good as tech gets for them

 

[Mei]

Anyone who says these chips aren't great (especially for the money) is either trolling or a wee bit slow.

1700 clocked to 4ghz looks pretty amazing to me
im looking forward to seeing some of the cheaper chips too

 

[ljt]

Anyone who says these chips aren't great (especially for the money) is either trolling or a wee bit slow.

I don't think anyone is saying that. Everyone's needs are different though

These R7's are brilliant alternatives to intels X99 platform. Clock for clock they appear nigh on identical at a significantly lower price. For that reason they are great.

For someone like me for who the X99 platform was never even on my radar, the R7 series aren't that useful to me. My cpu budget is £250 so these R7's are still out of my budget. All I care about are gaming results, and they aren't really impressing me that much. Don't get me wrong, they aren't "bad" but although the IPC is very close to intels, the defecit in clock speed is showing a gap. Hopefully BIOS updates and chipset drivers might improve it, but I can't see it reaching parity due to lack of clock speed.

At least with the R5 Ryzens they'll at least be roughly the same performance in games as their bigger R7 brothers but be considerably cheaper than intels Z270 I7's and I5's so the slower gaming performance can at least be offset by a much lower price. These are the ones I'm still holding out hope for

 

[Doobedoo]

I think a bit of perspective is needed. AMD has released a chip that can trade blows with Intel best in a wide range of conditions, using a fraction of the r&d and marketing budget and still are able to sell them at 50% of the price of Intels offering. We haven't even seen the rest of the range yet still got the 6 core and 4 core parts to come for even less money.

I'm well impressed with AMD and depending on the outcome of the 6 core chips I may well be upgrading sometime towards the end of the year, hopefully by then all the little niggles will have been sorted out and prices a little cheaper.

Seriously guy's AMD have achieved something really good here and we should give credit where credits due.

 

[V F]

A worthy upgrade for those on Sandy Bridge .. I'll be all AMD for my next PC. Competition is important. Keeps the industry honest.

Wow people expected AMD will beat or match Intel in gaming? You guys really except too much from AMD to be honest.

I thought it was satire. What honesty was there when we had all this competition back in 2003 - 2006?

 

[Brazo]

OP updated.



AMD has launched these in a subpar condition - SMT has regressions in performance and no windows drivers too.

Even if your right and unfortunately AMD are notorious for this the slower memory speeds alone will always be a limit.

But it's not a million miles away from intel and they are massively cheaper and that's what AMD are good at.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Even if your right and unfortunately AMD are notorious for this the slower memory speeds alone will always be a limit.

But it's not a million miles away from intel and they are massively cheaper and that's what AMD are good at.

This is shocking:

http://i.imgur.com/UFaWvLe.jpg

The regressions are massive and many review sites are not aware of this.

Also here is what AMD is saying regarding the patch:

http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-1700x-and-1700-processor-review_191753/15

You hit the nail on the head on all your comments. I really wish the Windows drivers were ready before we were given the parts to review. Instead we got a statement 24 hours before launch from AMD saying that they'll be coming in 30 days if all goes well. Game optimizations will be hit or miss when they come, but they appear to be coming. That takes time though and we'll see what happens.

I put it in the conclusion on the last page. The quote came direct from AMD's John Taylor. There was talk of it coming with Ryzen 5 and then they said 'in the next month' in an official statement that was e-mailed out last night.

 

[Crockett]

Wow didn't realise the SMT on and off has such a difference!

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Wow didn't realise the SMT on and off has such a difference!

Yep,and this is why I know people are getting annoyed at me for mentioning it all the time,but many reviews have it on when testing gaming - it makes things look a bit better for AMD if its switched off in a number of games.

Hexus saw the same:

Total War: Warhammer is the one title that causes us some pause for thought. It's known to be driven by solid CPU performance, so seeing the Ryzen 7 1800X a fair bit behind a quartet of Intel chips, to the tune of 10fps, is not encouraging. Understanding that the AMD and Intel architectures are more similar than ever before, we're not sure how much of this gap can be bridged by forthcoming game optimisations.

However, and somewhat interesting to note, switching off the chip's SMT capability increased the average frame rate from 79fps to 85.8fps, suggesting that code is not running efficiently when there's SMT involved. Hopefully this problem will be fixed by a game-patch update.

Going back to SMT, switching it off also increases the Hitman score, from 91.4fps to 95.6fps, suggesting, once again, that having it active is definitely hindering performance. In fact, running Ryzen in non-SMT mode offers more performance in every scenario, and this is something that AMD needs to be concerned about.

It appears SMT is not properly supported under Windows for gaming yet,so is not helping.

 

[Deleted member 66701]

This is shocking:

http://i.imgur.com/UFaWvLe.jpg

So a 6900k has SMT/HT problems as well?

 

[Brazo]

What effect does disabling SMT have on those cinebench scores?

Guess what I'm saying is you can't have it both ways!

 

[Crockett]

Really looks promising then of SMT support comes with Windows in a month and bios updates improves faster memory compatibility.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I was having a discussion about why SMT might cause issues on another forum,and it is mentioned in the Hardware.fr review:

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/956-22/retour-sous-systeme-memoire.html

What someone had to say about it:

According to that, one of the biggest issues for Ryzen in gaming (and some other workoads) is actual extremely high latency and low bandwidth between the CCXes, which is exacerbated in moderately threaded situations by Windows 10 regularly moving threads between cores. If a thread gets moved and its data is now in the other CCX's L3, it'll end up with a cache miss and a huge latency penalty getting that data back in.

Assuming 4C Ryzen works by completely deactivating one CCX (which seems logical given the halving of L3 cache as well) that won't be a problem for it - there won't be another CCX for threads to get migrated to. So part of the problem may be mitigated inherently by the method of harvesting dies...!

EDIT: looking at the SMT scaling you posted, it looks like Civ and GTA V are least affected, which I believe are the most CPU intensive games in that list? That would make sense if Windows 10 only moves threads in situations where cores are lightly loaded - put lots of load on the cores and no thread movement so no cache misses; lightly load the cores, more thread movement, more cache misses. That'd be easily fixable in driver or scheduler - simply tell the scheduler not to move active threads...!

So it seems the 4C/8T models might actually less affected and it seems AMD launching this before proper Windows patches has caused the problem.

So a 6900k has SMT/HT problems as well?

Only one game it regresses by 1.9% but in EVERY game tested it regressed on the R7 1800X and sometimes upto 13% and Hexus saw the same.

Hexus saw the same. You are doing people a disservice by trying to hide it - in many games the R7 1800X will perform better with SMT disabled until the windows patches are released.

Many reviews tested with SMT on and this is why some of them seem to get very poor results.

 

[Troezar]

I was having a discussion about why SMT might cause issues on another forum,and it is mentioned in the Hardware.fr review:

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/956-22/retour-sous-systeme-memoire.html

What someone had to say about it:



So it seems the 4C/8T models might actually less affected and it seems AMD launching this before proper Windows patches has caused the problem.





Only one game it regresses by 1.9% but in EVERY game tested it regressed on the R7 1800X and sometimes upto 13% and Hexus saw the same.

Hexus saw the same. You are doing people a disservice by trying to hide it - in many games the R7 1800X will perform better with SMT disabled until the windows patches are released.

Many reviews tested with SMT on and this is why some of them seem to get very poor results.

Tl; dr Nothing to worry about, good CPU, soon sorted with a few software patches

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Tl; dr Nothing to worry about, good CPU, soon sorted with a few software patches

Its why I am frustrated with AMD - they knew this was the case,and I had to gleam it from the comments section of a review they were waiting on windows patches still.

If only they have got a lot of reviews to also test with SMT off,it would look a bit better for AMD. Places like Ars Technica didn't do that so,but even 10% on top of their results would have made the summary a tad different methinks.

I just hope when the R5 1600X is out we have some scheduler patches released.