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Ryzen 7 1700 vs i7 7700k for gaming

Soldato
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Ryzen is great and all, but only buy if you like tweaking and futzing about in the BIOS, and flashing BIOS every other day.

If you want something you screw together and just use, then go for the 7700K every time.

Not entered my bios in almost a month.
If you think flashing a bios is an issue then wait for the new intel stuff, that will be exactly the same.
 
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Not entered my bios in almost a month.
If you think flashing a bios is an issue then wait for the new intel stuff, that will be exactly the same.

How long did it take to get stable, then? How many BIOS flashes did you do? I know I've had to flash my BIOS 4 times, and I still don't have my memory running at it's rated speed.

To be fair, the OP was asking about 7700K/Z270 which is stable and mature. He's not asking about any future Intel chips, because you know what? No-one knows what's happening there. Speculation and off topic ramblings on your part in this thread.


For the hard-of-thinking:

Ryzen is new and shiny. It has problems. It isn't totally stable with high memory speeds. It sometimes does the whole black screen nonsense. It sometimes doesn't cold boot. It's not as fast on single or dual core programs like games (see the thread title? Yeah..). Heck, some boards are shipping with BIOS that have totally broken temp sensors which totally screw things up. Windows still can't cope properly with all those cores.

i7-7700K has been out for ages, and the Z170/Z270 boards have been out even longer, so even the shipping BIOS is going to work first time and be stable.


You may note I have a Ryzen chip, and it hasn't been a simple job to get stable. On my i5-6600K@5GHz/Strix Z170F Gaming I used to sit down and fire up my favourite games of an evening, and they ran like a champ. For the past few months I've spent more time in EZFlash, in forums, and waiting for the PSU to discharge after another black screen that's freaked the machine out and needs a totally cold boot. Finally it's pretty happy, with compromises.
 
Soldato
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I have helped out with two Ryzen builds and they have both been fine - one was a Ryzen 5 1400 based build with an ASRock B350 motherboard and the other a Ryzen 5 1600 with a MSI B350 Tomahawk motherboard - one was specced with cheapo RAM which ran fine at 2666MHZ(think it was 2400MHZ RAM) and the other had a 3000MHZ set which was fine at 2666MHZ with one or two quick tweaks,but its not running the latest BIOS yet with memory improvements since they are still in Beta,and my mate has not really mucked around with much TBF AFAIK.

Edit!!

OFC,that is not to say that other motherboards might be more finicky OFC!
 
Soldato
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How long did it take to get stable, then? How many BIOS flashes did you do? I know I've had to flash my BIOS 4 times, and I still don't have my memory running at it's rated speed.

To be fair, the OP was asking about 7700K/Z270 which is stable and mature. He's not asking about any future Intel chips, because you know what? No-one knows what's happening there. Speculation and off topic ramblings on your part in this thread.


For the hard-of-thinking:

Ryzen is new and shiny. It has problems. It isn't totally stable with high memory speeds. It sometimes does the whole black screen nonsense. It sometimes doesn't cold boot. It's not as fast on single or dual core programs like games (see the thread title? Yeah..). Heck, some boards are shipping with BIOS that have totally broken temp sensors which totally screw things up. Windows still can't cope properly with all those cores.

i7-7700K has been out for ages, and the Z170/Z270 boards have been out even longer, so even the shipping BIOS is going to work first time and be stable.


You may note I have a Ryzen chip, and it hasn't been a simple job to get stable. On my i5-6600K@5GHz/Strix Z170F Gaming I used to sit down and fire up my favourite games of an evening, and they ran like a champ. For the past few months I've spent more time in EZFlash, in forums, and waiting for the PSU to discharge after another black screen that's freaked the machine out and needs a totally cold boot. Finally it's pretty happy, with compromises.

I'm not going to type my experiences as they are all over this forum and no it's no been excellent from day 1 but who expected it to be?
Head over to the x299 thread and look at the bios issues that has.
Windows cannot cope with those cores? Utter nonsense. The scheduler is working as intended as states by both AMD and Microsoft.
 
Soldato
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I think gavinh87 is running the MSI B350 Tomahawk which my mate is also running with his Ryzen 5 1600 - it seems to have been relatively issue free from what I gather. I also tried to avoid Corsair memory - from some other comments I have seen on other forums,Corsair is very hit and miss since they have three versions of each RAM SKU,ie,one is Samsung,one is Hynix and one is Micron and ideally its the Samsung one which you want for speeds over 3000MHZ,and also you need the RAM to be single ranked.

You also need to consider anything over 2666MHZ is considered an IMC overclock just like anything over 2400MHZ on an Intel CPU is considered the same,and a lot of the current RAM kits are validated for operation on Intel systems only. You are starting to see some AMD Ryzen validated kits now - Adata has a whole range of them which should at least get you to 2666MHZ fine without much fiddling about it seems.

Ultimately looking at the options on the Intel side for those two builds,ie,a more expensive(at the time) Core i5 7400(with a worse cooler) and the more expensive Core i5 7600K(at the time) which had no cooler,you would have to play a game which really preferred Intel CPUs for me to recommend them at those price points TBH!

Edit!!

Also what games is the OP wanting to run - in the end without us knowing its hard to say which should be a better option.

I would also say a Ryzen 5 1600 would be my choice for a pure gaming rig over a Ryzen 7 1700 as more of the budget can be allocated for a better graphics card and the Ryzen 5 1600 should in theory require less of a motherboard to get a reasonable overclock too IMHO OFC!
 
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Last time I checked Ryzen's rated speed is not 3200. :rolleyes:

Guess what, neither is the i5/i7, but guess what? Works first time at 3200.


I'm flabbergasted at the fanboi-ism. I have a Ryzen. I'm happy with it. I'm just pointing out to the OP that Ryzen in general isn't a plug and play solution. A lot of people (particularly someone asking the question the OP asked) don't have the time or skill to futz about getting a Ryzen rig running stable.
 
Soldato
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Guess what, neither is the i5/i7, but guess what? Works first time at 3200.


I'm flabbergasted at the fanboi-ism. I have a Ryzen. I'm happy with it. I'm just pointing out to the OP that Ryzen in general isn't a plug and play solution. A lot of people (particularly someone asking the question the OP asked) don't have the time or skill to futz about getting a Ryzen rig running stable.

For the two builds I helped out it was more or less plug and play - one mate on launch had some issues mind you so not entirely plain sailing,but the two builds I did with B350 based motherboards in the last six weeks were up and running the same day - they just needed to do some manual tweaks to get the memory running at a reasonable speed. Sure if you are not getting Samsung B-die based kits you are less likely to be getting the overclocked IMC to run past 3000MHZ,but outside that both of those system have been solid. You need to realise gavinh87 is running one of those motherboards I mentioned and it seems perfectly fine.

Edit!!

Plus another aspect of it all - you need to consider how decent the stock coolers on the Ryzen CPUs are - my mate did a few tweaks and overclocked his Ryzen 5 1600 to almost Ryzen 5 1600X speeds using the supplied cooler,which is quite decent.

The Core i5 7600K for example was not only more expensive at the time,but lacked a cooler and if you really want to get a decentish overclock you need to delid the CPU which is the warranty down the drain.

This might all not sound much,but the money saved going for the Ryzen build meant he could get an SSD into the build.
 
Last edited:
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Guess what, neither is the i5/i7, but guess what? Works first time at 3200.
I'm flabbergasted at the fanboi-ism. I have a Ryzen. I'm happy with it. I'm just pointing out to the OP that Ryzen in general isn't a plug and play solution. A lot of people (particularly someone asking the question the OP asked) don't have the time or skill to futz about getting a Ryzen rig running stable.
But what you are stating is simply not true. OC is not guaranteed, saying that "you have to tweak for weeks" is not reality. You might want to, that's fine, to squeeze the best of it, but platform itself doesn't require it. As above examples. I also used only 2 BIOS versions since April and it was running fine on 4 sticks 2666 from the beginning. Only flashed with beta bios in May as wanted to play with it myself.

i5/i7 will run on some cases even 4000, how is that relevant to ryzen platform rated at 2666.
 
Soldato
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Guess what, neither is the i5/i7, but guess what? Works first time at 3200.


I'm flabbergasted at the fanboi-ism. I have a Ryzen. I'm happy with it. I'm just pointing out to the OP that Ryzen in general isn't a plug and play solution. A lot of people (particularly someone asking the question the OP asked) don't have the time or skill to futz about getting a Ryzen rig running stable.

Ryzen is stable when running within its limits. If you run into instabilities whilst overclocking then that's on you, the consumer to fix.
Sure Intel's memory controller is better but stop spouting crap about not being stable.
 
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If you want to squeeze every last frame out of certain games, and you can't wait - then the i7 7700k

If you want a CPU that is pretty close, and can only get better with optimising - then Ryzen

In 6-12 months time the i7 will still be performing as it does today, but in 6-12 months with Ryzen you will have a newer, more mature platform with more cores/threads that software will start to use.
This is very true as they are getting more software optimized as time goes on.
 
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The 7700k Will help keep your house warm.

That's not a bad thing in winter :D

Mine runs quite nicely on air with all cores at 4.5ghz, 25c idle and around 65c at load. Core temps are perfectly even on my 7700k though at idle and load on a non delidded chip, seems they did a good job pasting this one.
 
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From what I have read you are one of the lucky ones. Like my mate got lucky with his 6700k @ 1.35v got 4.9ghz and only hit 68c max. He got 5ghz out of it but backed it off to make sure it was extra stable.
 
Soldato
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Guess what, neither is the i5/i7, but guess what? Works first time at 3200.


I'm flabbergasted at the fanboi-ism. I have a Ryzen. I'm happy with it. I'm just pointing out to the OP that Ryzen in general isn't a plug and play solution. A lot of people (particularly someone asking the question the OP asked) don't have the time or skill to futz about getting a Ryzen rig running stable.

Who cares what speed ram is running at?

I bought a Ryzen 1700, 64Gb of ram and an asus prime pro x370, for the same cash could I have out performed my trivial overclock to 3.8, 64Gb ram at 2933 and got parity of features on the Mobo via intel?
I'm doubtful that I could.

I upgraded/flashed the bios exactly once.

Zero crashes on this overclock so far, I did choose to ditch fan profiles and run full speed to avoid any temp issues, seems pretty prime stable to me.
 
Soldato
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Ryzen is great and all, but only buy if you like tweaking and futzing about in the BIOS, and flashing BIOS every other day.

If you want something you screw together and just use, then go for the 7700K every time.

Total BS

Just built a sys last week with a gigabyte b350 gaming + a 1600x CPU

Plugged CPU RAM and powered on , went to bios, chose xpm 3200.

That was it .

How much easier do you want it?

Edit:

Admittedly the first bios's/Motherbords had issues in the first month. Some more than others.
 
Soldato
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Total BS

Just built a sys last week with a gigabyte b350 gaming + a 1600x CPU

Plugged CPU RAM and powered on , went to bios, chose xpm 3200.

That was it .

How much easier do you want it?

Edit:

Admittedly the first bios's/Motherbords had issues in the first month. Some more than others.

Not everyone has had it that easy.

And I'm not even talking overcooking here.

Plenty people still having issues with ram, I have had issues even at stock.
 
Soldato
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zornyan is this your second trolling account?
To be fair there is a huge 'Zen' thread above teaming with problems. Zen has hardly been without its issues. I'm happy that they are starting to be ironed out but let's not pretend it was a walk in the park for AMD.
 
Soldato
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OP. Ryzen is the what you want here Imo. There is no need for a 7700k if you are running 1080p with the 970 as both systems will perform more or less the same in games and almost anything non game related the Ryzen will mop the floor with the Intel.
If you decided to fit a higher end GPU I'd still recommend Ryzen as its performance is more than "good enough" for now with advantage of being more future proof as games become more multi threaded in future. Only get the 7700k if you really must have that couple of frames extra for the games you play right now but for me not worth it in the long run. You can see the 7700k is already almost maxed out and will begin bottlenecking graphics cards in a few years this is almost guaranteed.
 
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