Ryzen 7 1700 vs. Core i7-7820X, 8-Core Royal Rumble!

[Blindchance]

A great review. It shows nice Ryzen performance gains thanks to higher frequency RAM:

It looks like my decision to get Ryzen was a sound one. I was extravagant and bought more expensive Ryzen 1800x, yet I still saved 300 quid over Intel 7820x. If Zen2 delivers some amazing performance in 2018/19 I might upgrade the CPU to 7nm.

In case you have missed it the reviewer did a similar review comparing AMD Ryzen 1600 with Intel i7-7800x:

 

[Blindchance]

Yes, it was a sarcasm. I don't blame you Blindchance for your decision, I went for R5 1600 myslef After having Intel for numbers of years.

I don't particularly care about the brand. My old rig was built around 3570k, two before that around AMD CPUs.

I didn't want a 4 core CPU this time around, despite OCe'd Intel's 7700k still delivering the highest possible performance in games. You can see in quite a few games that 7700k is reaching its limits, reaching 100 % utilisation on multiple cores. Another thing is that I don't use my PC only for gaming. On other hand Intel's X299 platform looks like an overpriced disappointment. I was tempted by 7820x as it has the best performance vs price ratio and slightly less problems with temperatures unlike 7900x. In the end I went for Ryzen, the performance gap is fairly small with few exceptions which mainly use game engines stuck in the past. Also I'm hoping that the new Zen2 7nm CPUs will use the same AM4 socket. That should allow for an easy upgrade, if the new CPU lined up in late 2018/2019 really blows Ryzen out of the water.

 

[Blindchance]

as with anything its what your view is on cpus.are you after value or do you want the best performance available.some people dont mind paying more if its faster.

for eg i benched a 7900x the other day in pubg against my 5820k @4.6 the 7900x was 30 fps up on it.that isnt a small jump.thats massive.ryzen chips is either same as mine fps wize or so close in pubg or slower.so while the value isnt there for intel chips.the fastest chips you can buy are still intel for most things.

Personally I would go for 7820x over 7900x. I had no problem with spending extra money on 7820x, however in the case of 7900x the performance to price ratio is even more out of whack when you compare against Ryzen. I simply don't need that extra multicore performance for double price.

My decision was based on as much on benchmarks of X299 and AM4 platforms as a roll of a dice. The gap is so small, that I simply felt like AM4 being more future-proof thanks to Zen2/Zen3 compatibility is a good choice as any to go for AMD again.

The small performance gap between AMD and Intel is good for all of us. AMD competitive pricing keeps Intel in check, just compare Intel 8 core CPUs pricing from the last generation to the new offering! This also means both companies will try harder to deliver higher performance and push for more innovation

 

[Blindchance]

PUBG is still an optimized mess of a game though and not one I'd personally use as a decent benchmarking figure.

It is, both Ryzen and 7820x were shown to deliver average performance at best:

 

[Blindchance]

doesnt matter if its unoptimized or not.its the same for all cpus.the funny thing is a 7600k is probably one of the best bang for buck performance chips but it doesnt get mentioned much.it actually beats ryzen chips in most games across the board.i wouldnt by one myself though.if on a budget id get a ryzen chip until coffee lake chips are out soon.

Actually this is not true. "It might be the same for all CPUs" would be closer to the truth. As the case of Rise of the Tomb Raider and Ryzen shown, there are platform specific optimisation developers can implement when compiling the binary:

 

[Blindchance]

yes specially amd titles with amd hardware

but kidding aside pubg wont be optimized that much.it will a little but basically whatever is the quickest now will be the quickest forever in it.

Err, how this makes Rise of The Tomb Raider an AMD title? The benchmark was run with a Geforce card and the game was tragically unoptimised for Ryzen at the start.

I don't have deep enough knowledge of programming and compilers to even question if this division between AMD and Intel titles would make sense beyond issues with single core/multi core performance, scheduling problems and using virtual cores over real ones. I think this is a matter of pure luck and the fact games don't often take advantage of multiple threads as it is a difficult / often impossible to code.

I agree that as long Intel is faster at single thread performance this will always give it an advantage over AMD CPU's with similar number of cores, even in applications which take advantage of multiple threads. I don't think AMD strategy even aims to win against Intel in that area. They were always comfortable with being a close second.

 

[Blindchance]

I'm stuck trying to decide between the two platforms. I have about 1K to spend so the price performance is not at the top of my list of considerations. However saving money is not a bad thing and going the AMD route is about £250 - £300 cheaper, depending on if I want to gamble on getting Samsung b-die memory that should fit under my large air cooler.

The confusing be it, looking at the benchmarks from different sites they seem to be all over the place. In some the 7820x hammers the 1700 whilst in others the 1700 is giving similar performance to the 7820x. Then there are the platform issues with x299 counterbalanced be the 1700 having no guarantee that it will reach to the magic 4GHz (having had a look around on various forums it seems a lot of the newer one are capping out at around 3.8) is making me hesitant to want to jump in with either one. All the while I'm sat with a 3570k getting increasingly ****** off with the CPU induced FPS drops in BF1.

Welcome on my boat two months ago. I was getting increasingly obsessed with Ryzen vs 7700k vs 7820x benchmarks. There is not hiding that 7700k gives the highest gaming performance on the market right now unless you do stuff like recording your gaming for Youtube / streaming in the background. If you use your PC exclusively for gaming I would either go for 7700k or Ryzen 1600 to save some cost.

If for some reason you need multicore performance whatever for virtualisation (Vmware/VirtualPC etc.), rendering or streaming gameplay I would consider AMD Ryzen 7 and Intel 7820x. 7820x will offer slightly better performance over Ryzen in majority of cases and much better in some edge cases. There are games which simply prefer single core performance over anything else. The worst case scenarios I have heard about are games like Arma 3 or GTA V. Both poorly optimised, but also both demanding a lot from the CPU in terms of what needs to be displayed on the screen in the same time.

The question is how much you care about squeezing as much frames as possible from the games you play. Please understand that Ryzen won't deliver a sub standard gaming performance, it simply won't be as good as 7700k, depending on a game anywhere between 10 % to 25 % behind in those edge cases.

I like the idea of an 8 core CPU as it offers me the flexibility I need and the future ability to upgrade to 7nm Zen2 and Zen3 using the same motherboard is a nice bonus for me. Also I didn't mind that free gaming chair coming from OCUK with Ryzen 1700x and 1800x

Consider also that many of those benchmarks use 7700k OC'ed up to 5 GHz, if you really want to stick to air cooling, you will see even smaller advantage over Ryzen. You probably want to confirm that with others, but at those frequencies a lot of 7700k need watercooling or even deliding to deal with the extra heat. On other hand from what I understand Ryzen can easily be OC'ed to approx. 4 GHz and cooled with the best air cooling options out there or mainstream AIOs while maintaining reasonable temps around 70 C.

I'm afraid that this is a decision you will have to make by yourself and suffer from a potential buyer's regret. I would watch the benchmarks I have linked. Consider the games you usually play an try to find some hard data from multiple sources before you make the final decision. I would also consider stuff like what FPS and resolution you play at and what GPU you want to pair your CPU with. If you are crazy at 144 Hz 1080p gaming, 7700k might be the best option. If you don't mind dipping under 144 FPS in titles which rely on high IPC consider Ryzen5/7.

 

[Blindchance]

Blindchance said: ↑
Also I didn't mind that free gaming chair coming from OCUK with Ryzen 1700x and 1800x
????

I was lazy this time around and paid to get it assembled by OCUK, they offer a "free" Nitro Concepts chair with 1700x and 1800x in their Ryzen configurator:

http://imgur.com/FbA3AQP


P.S. Is it only me or the IMG tag is broken on this forum?

When it comes to your heatsink height problems, this is the reason why I went for AIO this time around. Air cooling solutions size is getting excessive if you want to use them on even slightly OC'ed systems.