AMD Ryzen 7 1800X (14nm Zen)

[watercooled]

Dude - multiple websites have shown regressions with SMT enabled.

I was replying to your 28% IPC increase claim - I'm just not seeing that; many of the regressions are, let's be honest, negligible. As I said, if you think (I'm not suggesting one way or another here, it really depends what you're after) that a Ryzen CPU would be a good purchase if it simply didn't have SMT - just disable it temporarily? And WRT my point about SMT efficiency - it is indeed very efficient outside of gaming, often exceeding Intel's SMT efficiency, we can't simply ignore that or claim it's all bad.

Intel CPUs regress in performance with SMT on too in many games, usually not enough to care about outside of hair-splitting, but it's a fact nonetheless. I was aware of what AMD posted on Reddit but despite that I stand by what I said as I don't think that's the whole story.

The AMD AMA was saying it needed to be patched by devs on a case by case basis - can you guaranteed every game made in the last three years which has issues will be patched? You can't.

Lots of the 'issues' are hair-splitting (not all, obviously), and given the more challenging Bulldozer issues were largely resolved by Windows scheduler updates, I fail to see why expecting something similar for Ryzen is unreasonable. Techspot also said that they subjectively experienced smoother gaming with Ryzen despite the numbers: http://www.techspot.com/review/1345-...00x/page7.html

It's not like future games will have to be 'patched' on a case-by-case basis at all, even if Windows do nothing - they just treat Ryzen like they currently treat Intel's SMT. This is *exactly* the sort of problems we saw with SMT enabled on Intel CPUs a few years back, one which has ceased to be a big deal, even for the majority of older games.

You're irritated that AMD didn't manage to portray Ryzen in the best possible light by avoiding stories like this, I get it, and I agree with that part. But it's a brand new platform - just give it a chance!

Then somebody asked if a windows patch would help - they said no.

That's not how I read it, and pay attention to who's posting what - that reply was made by a marketing guy, not an engineer. Regardless of what is being said on reddit, CPU scheduling is largely down to Windows.

And I'm still waiting for *official* word on the ECC capabilities of Ryzen, preferably for the desktop version.

On Reddit, as I understand it they said it supports it, it works fine, but it's not validated in the same way it would be on their Opteron processors. You might still want to double-check the motherboards are happy with it though.

Random question, so the chip has 24 PCI-E lanes, and appears to be two quad core units looking at the de lidding.
Does this mean that either the quad core versions will only come with 12 PCI-E lanes or there are PCI-E lanes not in use on the 8 core versions?

What you're seeing on the de-lidding is two solder squares - it's a single die, not an MCM.

Edit: just noticed your latest post CAT (won't get time to fully catch up on this thread as I'm off out in a mo): That looks promising. But I fully agree that it would make yet another AMD facepalm moment that they're a BIOS patch off a far better reception!

Edit2: Just realised that I've completed skipped over an important bit of the thread, sorry about that! Seems I might have been right to not fully rely on what AMD marketing were saying.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The thing is look at how the R7 1800X looks with SMT off now.



So this is the issue - with SMT on it looks more like a Core i7 3770K. With it off,more like a Core i7 4790K.

At Haswell level it looks like AMD has caught up to a generation before Intel which is what many of us expected.

Many of the worst reviews had it at Ivy Bridge level which is a Piledriver era Intel design.

Add to that the motherboards are regressing performance too,now you are starting to see why some reviews looked much better and others terribad.

Add to that that the chap on Reddit was the Technical Marketing guy,and he blatantly was saying it was not a windows issue,which was not entirely true as BD had improvements in games with windows patches.

Combine all this together and AMD really has made Ryzen look worse for gaming then it really is.

Its death by a 1000 cuts most of which AMD might have quietly avoided or negated to some degree.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

First picture of an AM4 mini-ITX motherboard leaked:

https://www.techpowerup.com/231205/b...m4-motherboard

It uses the X370 chipset.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

https://youtu.be/P1dhYDm7SLw?t=2543

Some comments from JayzTwoCents - looks like the launch was utterly rushed for GDC.

[stevie lee]

https://youtu.be/P1dhYDm7SLw?t=2543

Some comments from JayzTwoCents - looks like the launch was utterly rushed for GDC.

(I have very limited knowledge on this subject)
they also said that windows 8 and above needs CPU drivers loaded.
what about windows 7? does that need one?
anyone tested win 7 too see if the SMT thing affects the results there?
clicked through a few tests in that http://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware-...ew-thread.html and they're testing on windows 10.

theres already links to Linux showing the ryzens are stonkingly good

despite AMD dumping support for windows 7 https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/ryzen-windows-7-drivers they might actually not have the SMT problem.

what I'm asking is. has anyone tested ryzens on win 7 to see if SMT is a problem there or not?
it could narrow down whether its a driver problem for windows 10 or its the ryzen chip itself at fault

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

People are starting to do their own tests now:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comment...s_found_to_be/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comment...games/defc6un/

The problem is currently under Windows the physical cores and the logical cores are being treated the same by the Windows scheduler which also does not seem to recognise the cache size properly.

(I have very limited knowledge on this subject)
they also said that windows 8 and above needs CPU drivers loaded.
what about windows 7? does that need one?
anyone tested win 7 too see if the SMT thing affects the results there?
clicked through a few tests in that http://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware-...ew-thread.html and they're testing on windows 10.

theres already links to Linux showing the ryzens are stonkingly good

despite AMD dumping support for windows 7 https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/ryzen-windows-7-drivers they might actually not have the SMT problem.

what I'm asking is. has anyone tested ryzens on win 7 to see if SMT is a problem there or not?
it could narrow down whether its a driver problem for windows 10 or its the ryzen chip itself at fault

The Linux kernel already has had a whole host of Ryzen specific updates,so it means currently it is better supported under Linux under Windows.

So combine that with the fact the motherboard companies only had three weeks to get the BIOSes out,there is most likely performance being left on the table for gaming.

Another issue,is Ryzen is not fully optimised for since its new and most games apparently(according to AMD) are more optimised out of the box on Intel.

The last issue might take more time as a whole to get over,but the first two are more dependent on MS pushing updates out(apparently first in a month) and the second is motherboard companies simply needing more time.

[DanceswithUnix]

I thought the advice for buying Intel for years was to get an i5 not an i7 if you are gaming, from what people are complaining about here has that changed and we expect an i7 to be the best now? Or was that purely that the i7 is such poor value for money you are better off putting the funds into the graphics card (which is certainly true for the budgets I play around with).

[stevie lee]

theres still going to be millions of people who get ryzen, stick with win 7 for many reasons, what performance are they going to get?

they'll read about the SMT driver, and be forever waiting for it because it will never come.
but does win 7 need the driver? or is it entirely BIOS?
if its chipset drivers, will AMD/mobo company bother with win 7 drivers?

ryzen may be forever crippled on win 7. just need someone to test it on win 7 to see.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I thought the advice for buying Intel for years was to get an i5 not an i7 if you are gaming, from what people are complaining about here has that changed and we expect an i7 to be the best now? Or was that purely that the i7 is such poor value for money you are better off putting the funds into the graphics card (which is certainly true for the budgets I play around with).

Its been heading towards the Core i7 for a while on enthusiast forums and I think you are not looking at this correctly.

This is not a £200 CPU. It starts at £320+ which is Core i7 money and its the type of money people buying £600 GTX1080s(or £350 to £450 GTX1070s) and the like will be looking at,not somebody buying a £200 RX480 or GTX1060.

Moreover,AMD several times compared Ryzen to the Core i7 6900K,so the gamers who would spend £300+ on a CPU expected it would be more or less a Core i7 6900K,which for gaming it isn't. They are the ones who overhyped the gaming abilities of the CPU,not Intel.

In the end at £320 to £500,Ryzen 7 is fighting the Core i7 7700K and Core i7 6800K in its price-range for high-end gaming,and if AMD knew it had general issues with SMT in gaming under Windows due to lack of both Windows and game support,its their problem. The fact that they themselves within a day or two were saying games had better Intel optimisations and the first Windows drivers would be out in 30 days,is indicative they knew about the issue and yet despite this tried to hint it matched a Core i7 6900K in gaming which it didn't.

The worse thing is that in non-gaming cases,it actually did live up to what they said,ie,it is a Core i7 6900K competitor,so I honestly don't know what they were thinking?? They did the same with the Fury X which was solid once its cooler issues were fixed,but positioned it as a GTX980TI beater which it wasn't at launch,and it is why you did get a degree of backlash towards it.

Edit!!

This is by far the most expensive range of CPUs has made since probably the Phenom or Athlon X2 days,so again its competing with some very expensive high end Intel CPUs.

theres still going to be millions of people who get ryzen, stick with win 7 for many reasons, what performance are they going to get?

they'll read about the SMT driver, and be forever waiting for it because it will never come.
but does win 7 need the driver? or is it entirely BIOS?
if its chipset drivers, will AMD/mobo company bother with win 7 drivers?

ryzen may be forever crippled on win 7. just need someone to test it on win 7 to see.

I think MS will be the ones who might need to be asked about that - its interesting how both AMD and Intel both magically decided to not support Windows 7!

[kalniel]

This is not a £200 CPU. It starts at £320+ which is Core i7 money and its the type of money people buying £600 GTX1080s and the like will be looking at,not somebody buying a £200 RX480 or GTX1060.

Disagree there Cat - I'll buy a CPU to last over 5 years, during which time I expect to buy two or three GPUs. Consequently my budget for my next CPU is up to £400, while I'll try and keep GPUs to less than half that.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Disagree there Cat - I'll buy a CPU to last over 5 years, during which time I expect to buy two or three GPUs. Consequently my budget for my next CPU is up to £400, while I'll try and keep GPUs to less than half that.

Well you are not a common case,and even then you went with a Core i7 950 on an expensive socket 1366 platform which was one of the fastest CPUs for gaming out there which had some of the best single core and MT performance at the time for gaming. It was third but the highest socket 1366 chip,until the Core i7 980X came along.

It would be an equivalent of a Core i7 6850K in todays HEDT line-up.

You didn't buy a Phenom II X4 or a Core2 quad which many people were suggesting to get at the time for a normal PC,or even a Core i5 750(depending on when you got your CPU).

Plus did you buy your CPU just for gaming or for more than one purpose?? I will suggest to one of my mates to get an R7 1700,since he only casually games,but actually needs those extra threads under Linux for work related stuff. I know people who have HEDT rigs and higher end CPUs who don't really game,ie,will have a £100 card in one,but this is not the crowd I am talking about.

You need to realise AMD compared this directly to a Core i7 6900K for gaming - they were the ones hyping it. This is with all the motherboard BIOS issues,SMT issues,windows issues,games optimisation,issues,etc.

Yet,look at the sigs of many people who do buy such CPUs for gaming - many are rocking £400 to £600 CPUs on there. I know people in real-life who spend that much on CPUs and GPUs. Not all are running 4K screens - I know people who have 1080P screens running such hardware,since they want very high framerates for 120HZ screens,or VR headsets.

This is why saying it has "good enough performance for gaming" seems rather disingenuous when I hear it at times(you hear it being said on a few forums),which is great if you buy this and won't ever push it for gaming.

Unless you cherry pick reviews the Core i7 7700K is generally ahead and even the Core i7 6800K which should be given a good beating holds it own.

Imagine all those people who jumped on the Core i7 5820K when it dropped to well under £300,the year before last?? They seemed to have done very well for themselves.

Edit!!

I also don't understand why people are trying to be annoyed with me pointing out what independent reviews have shown and what reviewers have said??

If you have an issue with what I have said you need to have a go at reviewers showing that data,not me. You need to be annoyed at AMD for rushing it out - that is what people like JayzTwoCents have been saying amongst other things.

When the FX8350 came out,it was reasonably strong in productivity stuff.

Yet,how many times did I recommend people on here to get a Core i5(or even a Core i7) over one - it is what it is.

Maybe once we get some OS patches out,better motherboard BIOSes,games patches,etc the Ryzen 7 will decimate the Core i7 7700K and Core i7 6900K in gaming. Not denying it might happen.

But that is not the reality now and it is a weakness of the chip,which AMD needs to work on.

Edit!!

Even AMD has somewhat indicated they need to improve gaming performance FFS!!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Some good news for Stevie Lee,the SMT issue is down to Windows 10. It looks like The Stilt has done even more testing:

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads...#post-38775732

I did some 3D testing and eventhou there is not nearly enough data to confirm it, I'd say the SMT regression is infact a Windows 10 related issue.
In 3D testing I did recently on Windows 10, the title which illustrated the biggest SMT regression was Total War: Warhammer.

All of these were recorded at 3.5GHz, 2133MHz MEMCLK with R9 Nano:

Windows 10 - 1080 Ultra DX11:

8C/16T - 49.39fps (Min), 72.36fps (Avg)
8C/8T - 57.16fps (Min), 72.46fps (Avg)

Windows 7 - 1080 Ultra DX11:

8C/16T - 62.33fps (Min), 78.18fps (Avg)
8C/8T - 62.00fps (Min), 73.22fps (Avg)

At the moment this is just pure speculation as there were variables, which could not be isolated.
Windows 10 figures were recorded using PresentMon (OCAT), however with Windows 7 it was necessary to use Fraps.

[kalniel]

Well you are not a common case,and even then you went with a Core i7 950 on an expensive socket 1366 platform which was one of the fastest CPUs for gaming out there which had some of the best single core and MT performance at the time for gaming. It was third but the highest socket 1366 chip,until the Core i7 980X came along.

It would be an equivalent of a Core i7 6850K in todays HEDT line-up.

You didn't buy a Phenom II X4 or a Core2 quad which many people were suggesting to get at the time for a normal PC,or even a Core i5 750(depending on when you got your CPU).

Plus did you buy your CPU just for gaming or for more than one purpose?? I will suggest to one of my mates to get an R7 1700,since he only casually games,but actually needs those extra threads under Linux for work related stuff. I know people who have HEDT rigs and higher end CPUs who don't really game,ie,will have a £100 card in one,but this is not the crowd I am talking about.

All good points. There were several reasons I went for my chip - storage/PCI-E and memory bandwidth were among them as I was looking ahead to SSDs and the likes. And yes, I did also have some scientific and photo processing usage in mind. Spot on with the 6850K equivalent - I was actually considering a Xeon E5 1650 which is more or less the same thing.

This is why saying it has "good enough performance for gaming" seems rather disingenuous when I hear it at times(you hear it being said on a few forums),which is great if you buy this and won't ever push it for gaming.

Indeed, kind of like saying 'our CPU is fine if you don't need a CPU'

[DanceswithUnix]

Its been heading towards the Core i7 for a while on enthusiast forums and I think you are not looking at this correctly.

There is no "correctly" about it Cat, there are as many ways of looking at these things as there are users. For me gaming has always been an important secondary use of the PC, but at the time I bought my 8350 it was for work. After a change of job, I don't tend to use the home PC for compiling and simulating as much so gaming has become a bigger role for it, but I regularly get laugh out loud moments when I see how the chip I paid £125 for all those years ago is doing in modern benchmarks. It still lags the 3570K that I could have paid a lot more money for by about the same percentage, from memory I think it was 40% at the time for gaming but the graph above shows 30% so perhaps it has closed the gap a bit.

[scaryjim]

Some good news for Stevie Lee,the SMT issue is down to Windows 10. ...

Fits with what we know about the cache performance and Win 10's preference for moving threads around, and also AMD's statement here that the Win 10 scheduler is overly loading the virtual threads. Interesting that the Win 7 scheduler doesn't make the same mistake though...!

... Indeed, kind of like saying 'our CPU is fine if you don't need a CPU'

Isn't it more like "We're plenty fast enough to keep up with your GPU, even if we're not absolutely as fast as the opposition"? Case in point, many games that were CPU limited on Vishera are GPU limited on Zen with the same GPU/settings. You still need a CPU, you just don't need the absolute fastest CPU...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

There is no "correctly" about it Cat, there are as many ways of looking at these things as there are users. For me gaming has always been an important secondary use of the PC, but at the time I bought my 8350 it was for work. After a change of job, I don't tend to use the home PC for compiling and simulating as much so gaming has become a bigger role for it, but I regularly get laugh out loud moments when I see how the chip I paid £125 for all those years ago is doing in modern benchmarks. It still lags the 3570K that I could have paid a lot more money for by about the same percentage, from memory I think it was 40% at the time for gaming but the graph above shows 30% so perhaps it has closed the gap a bit.

Dude,stop trying to twist things - you know very well I am talking about people with a bias on gaming who spend this kind of money,and you talked specifically about gaming and some of you are just trying to shift my argument to say but not everyone games intensively.

Then if that is the case you can get a £65 Pentium G4560 which does perfectly well in a number of games with a £150 card. You know I made a thread about it:
http://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware-...-champion.html

You made the comment, you thought people would buy only a Core i5,and I said no its not the case - the more enthusiast end of the market has been moving towards Core i7 CPUs for years,and some of you are just trying to bury the gaming results.

Some of you need to stop drinking the kool-aid when you know I have done builds like this:
http://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware-...ild-check.html

That is a build I did in 2011 for a mate who primarily wanted a cheapo rig to so some bio-informatics work and he does coding for his projects in his lab. He does game but he is casual,and hence why I suggested he get a £100 Phenom II X6 1045T over a £150 Core i5 750 due to throughput reasons.

He is the mate who I suggested should get an R7 1700 due to his needs - he is not going to worry so much if Ryzen is not all that for gaming yet,but if he was only going to game,I know he would probably not spend more than £150 to £200 on a CPU at most.

But from the point of view from a person who is a gamer,does image editing,runs the odd VM and does some video encoding,Ryzen 7 is a disappointment for me,well actually more Ryzen itself not the SKU.

You might not have read all the reviews,but I have and in certain games I play IPC is BELOW IB level or no better.

If I buy even a Ryzen 5 and its in the same state now,I would actually REGRESS in games performance in some games I play and I am CPU limited despite people trying their best to hide that.

I am not some muppet that has an inability to see what bottlenecks I do have in my system.

I have to be objective about this and even on OcUK forums for all the fanfare of people buying Ryzen many are also realistic about the performance issues,and this whole rushed launch.

Its like at 9/10 of AMD launches,but,but if wait longer things will get better.

Yet,how many of the review sites who benchmarked the FX8150 and FX8350 benchmarked after the windows updates,etc to show performance 6 and 12 months after launch??

All good points. There were several reasons I went for my chip - storage/PCI-E and memory bandwidth were among them as I was looking ahead to SSDs and the likes. And yes, I did also have some scientific and photo processing usage in mind. Spot on with the 6850K equivalent - I was actually considering a Xeon E5 1650 which is more or less the same thing.

Indeed, kind of like saying 'our CPU is fine if you don't need a CPU'

I thought I was going slightly potty kalniel,but you get what I am saying. I am already on an IB CPU,and some of the benchmarks are not really an improvement(or a regression) over a CPU which I had for years and launched in 2012.

Is it too much for me to expect AMD to convincingly beat a 2012 CPU or even a 2013 Haswell CPU in single core performance in a number of games I play??

I am not expecting the earth from AMD,but how far can even a person who likes AMD and wants to support them,meant to temper their expectations??

Now we all need to live in hope to see if the first set of Windows patches and more mature BIOSes will turn around the results in the games I am looking at.