Ryzen 1700 - Worth purchasing?

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darylblake

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#210418 26-Mar-2017 18:51

This is really cheap. Its cheaper than a 7700K. I think I found a 7700K for $529 and Computer Lounge and this is only $498.

I also found an x370 motherboard, only a bit more expensive @ $289.

But....

This only has a 65w TDP and overclocks to 4Ghz. People are having trouble clocking the Ryzen 7 1800x to 4.1 Ghz.

In some synthetic benchmarks this chips is faster than the 6900K when its overclocked. But in 1080p gaming the FPS is a bit less. I don't care TBH because I game at 1440p.

Theres been a load of bios fixes released by ASUS and Gigabyte already. What are your thoughts? It doesnt look like a bad deal.

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#1748249 26-Mar-2017 19:02

Over Intel hell yes it's worth it but I'd wait a couple of months if your not in a hurry to let things settle BIOS and software wise though aswell as more choice of mobo's

darylblake

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#1748254 26-Mar-2017 19:08

Yeh thats what I was thinking. Im currently running an i5, and looking for something a bit better. Because its fine for games now, but if it has to do any additional work, (esp when I am playing games) my framerates get smashed. + I would like to run some VM's in the background and not have to bother shutting them down when I want to play a game.

Athlonite

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#1748506 27-Mar-2017 09:12

anything CPU heavy will benefit from a RyZen r7 1700 1700x or 1800x whether that be video audio F@H virtual machines pretty much anything that likes a lot of threads works well on RyZen

Andib

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#1748518 27-Mar-2017 09:27

If your main use will be gaming, Go for the 7700K. They overclock like mad and you can expect high 4's all day with a decent cooler.

IMO Ryzen while good is too infant for my liking. Most games will still be optimized for Intel for at least the next year or so. If you're main use is going to be productivity over gaming then Ryzen would be a smart choice.

It's a shame the pricing of Ryzen in NZ has been inflated so we don't get the same performance per dollar as other countries when compared to other Intel chips.

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Athlonite

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#1749130 28-Mar-2017 02:23

$528.00 for the 7700K vs $483.00 for the R7 1700 the increase in FPS over 60fps isn't going to be noticeable unless you own an uber monitor doing 144Hz or more so it's a waste of money going down the i7 path

surfisup1000

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#1749163 28-Mar-2017 08:23

Ha, intel will lower prices and make the ryzen irrelevant.

I hope not though, AMD successfully changed the direction of chip design a few years back by concentrating on efficiency per instruction than raw mhz.

Intel took note of AMD's success , copied them and undercut them. Unfortunately AMD has been mostly on the backfoot since then, simply unable to compete on price.

darylblake

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#1749174 28-Mar-2017 09:08

surfisup1000:

Ha, intel will lower prices and make the ryzen irrelevant.

I hope not though, AMD successfully changed the direction of chip design a few years back by concentrating on efficiency per instruction than raw mhz.

Intel took note of AMD's success , copied them and undercut them. Unfortunately AMD has been mostly on the backfoot since then, simply unable to compete on price.

So for 1080p gaming an i7-7700K is still marginally better in most titles. But the point I am getting at is:

If you want a 7700K and a z270 board with Crossfire/SLI support it will be roughly the same if not slightly more expensive than buying a Ryzen 1700 and an x370 board with Crossfire/SLI support.

The benchmarks are only a few FPS better on the i7.

Also if you want to render videos or do full multi-threaded workload, the Ryzen is performing at the level of at least a Broadwell E 6850 and in some cases pipping a 6900. Which is a $1200 chip.

The TDP on the Ryzen 1700 is 65w as opposed to ~90watt on the i7 7700k/Ryzen 1700x/Ryzen 1800x.

And its overclocking to 3.9 Ghz and 4 Ghz in some cases. Which puts it as fast as the 1800x (non-overclocked). (and the overclocking on the 1800x is not that good either).

Dont get me wrong, I have owned Intel Pentiums / AMD Athlons/Durons and I7's/I5's and this chip while they are still ironing out some of the finer details is actually a really good deal. Intels last refresh of Skylake to Kabylake virtually added a Ghz Boost, practically nothing more. So from a $ per performance point of view the Ryzen 1700 looks like a great buy. I bet you it idles low as well, so leaving the PC idle means its going to cost maybe ~$5 less to run per month on power.

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Aborto

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#1749322 28-Mar-2017 12:00

I would recommend them, although I agree it might be a good idea to wait a month or two if you aren't keen on the early adopter problems. I'm running a 1700x and an Asus X370-pro and love it. Here's my CPU-z score with a 3.9ghz overclock (and crappy 2400mhz ram), significantly faster than a 6950X http://valid.x86.fr/cwa029

I have moved from a i7-3770, and realistically the single thread performance is only a little better at stock settings, but it is well over double the multi-threaded performance. Overclocked it nears a stock 7700k for single-thread and doubles it for multi-thread.

Just be aware of some of the issues if you get in now. Ryzen likes fast ram, you get significant performance increases even above 3200mhz, but the state of BIOS at present means you are likely to be stuck much lower. The latest BIOS for my board has finally let me run at 2666 and improved the stability significantly, but there's a lot of work to be done still.

Next, these chips don't overclock well, you would be very lucky to reach 4.0 on a 1700, 2/3rds cant hit 3.9 but you should almost always reach 3.8 with no problems. My 1700x reaches 3.8 easily, but requires more voltage than I am comfortable with to reach 3.9, 4.0 would be out of the question without water cooling. The thing is the all-core clock for the 1700 is only 3.2, so an overclock to 3.8 on all cores is significant and is still an improvement over the 3.7 single-core boost.

If you are primarily gaming at 1080p then I would wait and see what sort of prices the R5's go for. But if you can make use of 16 threads, game at QHD or 4K or just want to support AMD then they are amazing chips. As a nice bonus they have 4 pcie lanes dedicated to the M.2 slot, so go with a fast SSD, the Samsung 960 is my pick. The factory cooler with the 1700 is also rather good, and handles some light overclocking duties without being too loud.

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#1749365 28-Mar-2017 13:05

Aborto:

Just be aware of some of the issues if you get in now. Ryzen likes fast ram, you get significant performance increases even above 3200mhz, but the state of BIOS at present means you are likely to be stuck much lower. The latest BIOS for my board has finally let me run at 2666 and improved the stability significantly, but there's a lot of work to be done still.

If you are primarily gaming at 1080p then I would wait and see what sort of prices the R5's go for. But if you can make use of 16 threads, game at QHD or 4K or just want to support AMD then they are amazing chips. As a nice bonus they have 4 pcie lanes dedicated to the M.2 slot, so go with a fast SSD, the Samsung 960 is my pick. The factory cooler with the 1700 is also rather good, and handles some light overclocking duties without being too loud.

Fast ram seems to bypass the CCX coms latency problem also guru#D just put up an article that says don't bother waiting it's the same perf for the lower end R5 chips as it is for the R7

they tested 2+2smt 3+3 4+0smt and 4+4smt cores @ 4.0GHz and they pretty much performed the same at GTX1080TI driven 1080p res

darylblake

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#1749374 28-Mar-2017 13:16

Aborto:

I would recommend them, although I agree it might be a good idea to wait a month or two if you aren't keen on the early adopter problems. I'm running a 1700x and an Asus X370-pro and love it. Here's my CPU-z score with a 3.9ghz overclock (and crappy 2400mhz ram), significantly faster than a 6950X http://valid.x86.fr/cwa029

I have moved from a i7-3770, and realistically the single thread performance is only a little better at stock settings, but it is well over double the multi-threaded performance. Overclocked it nears a stock 7700k for single-thread and doubles it for multi-thread.

Just be aware of some of the issues if you get in now. Ryzen likes fast ram, you get significant performance increases even above 3200mhz, but the state of BIOS at present means you are likely to be stuck much lower. The latest BIOS for my board has finally let me run at 2666 and improved the stability significantly, but there's a lot of work to be done still.

Next, these chips don't overclock well, you would be very lucky to reach 4.0 on a 1700, 2/3rds cant hit 3.9 but you should almost always reach 3.8 with no problems. My 1700x reaches 3.8 easily, but requires more voltage than I am comfortable with to reach 3.9, 4.0 would be out of the question without water cooling. The thing is the all-core clock for the 1700 is only 3.2, so an overclock to 3.8 on all cores is significant and is still an improvement over the 3.7 single-core boost.

If you are primarily gaming at 1080p then I would wait and see what sort of prices the R5's go for. But if you can make use of 16 threads, game at QHD or 4K or just want to support AMD then they are amazing chips. As a nice bonus they have 4 pcie lanes dedicated to the M.2 slot, so go with a fast SSD, the Samsung 960 is my pick. The factory cooler with the 1700 is also rather good, and handles some light overclocking duties without being too loud.

Yeh apparently they volt really high. Like 1.5v or 1.48 or something. Overclocking the ram seems to help a lot when it comes to gaming.

Aborto

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#1749382 28-Mar-2017 13:37

darylblake:

Yeh apparently they volt really high. Like 1.5v or 1.48 or something. Overclocking the ram seems to help a lot when it comes to gaming.

Yea they hit a really steep wall around 3.9 on most chips. I can get 3.8 on 1.3v but need 1.425v to hit 3.9, I'm not going to try any higher on air.

The R5 chips wont be any faster, although the 1600x should beat the 1700 in gaming at stock clocks, but they will be cheap enough to really shake things up. They are unlikely to have any more overclocking headroom, but the 1600x at least is likely to reach 4.0 with less work than the 1700.

I think they are fantastic chips, I game at 1440p and at that level they match the Intels and tend to have better minimum framerates, I can use the multi-threaded performance, and frankly Intel has been abusing a near monopoly position for the last decade so I'm just happy to have AMD competing again. But they aren't the best choice for every person, if you are the sort who competitively games on a 1080p 144hz monitor you would without a doubt be better off with a 7700k.

dudalemon

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#1749998 29-Mar-2017 10:52

I've always followed this for CPU and GPU:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-hierarchy,4312.html

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#1750090 29-Mar-2017 13:03

dudalemon:

I've always followed this for CPU and GPU:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-hierarchy,4312.html

I wouldn't put too much stock in what's said on Toms Hardware they're always Intel biased better to go to Techpowerup or Guru3D

lagbort

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#1750155 29-Mar-2017 14:26

I really do hope this is the start of AMD being competitive at the high end again.
But I worry about their future development path, I read the other day that the head designer brought onboard for Ryzen has already left for Tesla.

I would hate to see them make a big leap like this to catch up to Intel and than not be able to sustain development year on year to keep pace with Intel.

Fingers crossed they have their pathway well sorted.

darylblake

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#1750162 29-Mar-2017 14:38

I think AMD have done very well with the "Zen" project. Its a big win for the consumers.

Ryzen 5 is out April 11.

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