QOTW: Has AMD Ryzen lived up to your expectations?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

yes for the most part, my biggest concern is power consumption although it's not a deal breaker. Looking forward to the release of their server CPUs

Power consumption isn't really any worse for most parts - the 1700 is lower leakage and the other parts higher leakage anyway.

At the same voltage the 1700 consumes less power than the X versions even at 4GHZ!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Keep in mind that the Windows/Linux Kennel Drivers well need to be update in order to make better use of this newer hardware and same apply to any game they to will also have up date in order to make better use of the new hardware.
The only disappoints I see is lack PCIe 3.0 and Quad Channel Memory support
Over all it step in right direction

Some reviewers are now saying it might have been rushed out for GDC - AMD seems to have mentioned the first Windows patches would only be out in a month and motherboard companies had mere weeks to get BIOSes ready.

Apparently according to JayTwoCents there were almost daily updates by AMD on how to tweak performance and repeated BIOS updates to improve performance and reviewers hitting all sorts of unexpected issues. I mean apparently some of the review motherboards have such rushed BIOSes newer ones have yielded decent performance gains in gaming. This is also probably why some reviews seem more positive in gaming than others.

ATM,gaming performance is hard to judge for me - the issue is if you have an SB or IB Core i7 is it really going to improve gaming for me IN ITS CURRENT STATE?

I don't need 8 cores and I need a mini- ITX motherboard too,so for me more cores is nice but it has to improve in less cores scenarios too since plenty of games do not use 8 cores. The same goes with the image editing stuff I use - not all is more cores.

The 4C/8T and 6C/12T versions need to be able to stand on their own against Core i5 and consumer Core i7 CPUs since only small price drops by Intel will push them down to direct competitors and since SMT might be a bit hit and miss for the initial period it's going to be core for core performance.

ATM,it's hard to judge due to the rushed nature of the launch. I think with some fixes gaming performance will have to be re-visited and might be worth it for me to upgrade,but ATM I think Ryzen needs a few months for the software and BIOSes to catch up to it for gaming.

But the issue a degree of this could have been avoided by AMD too - even if they waited a few weeks,motherboard BIOSes and RAM support would have been far better,and MS might have the patches in place.

Its like so many other AMD launches - they rush it out,and then you wait a few weeks or a few months and the performance is there. But OTH,for all the people who know this and will buy the product on the promise of future performance loads more will just get an Intel or Nvidia product since they CBA waiting for future performance or just read DAY ONE reviews and remember those only.

On other tech forums its fast becoming a bit of a joke on how AMD tends to push products out at every launch with some major issue. Yes competitors too also have problems,but not nearly at every launch to the degree AMD has,and they are far better at hiding them too.

[Stuen4y]

Wish they released the 6 core one too. And they overclocked better. The 7 series chips they released are server chips. Not the most interesting thing for the average consumer. They need 4.5GHz frequencies on the i5 equivalents to win significant market share from Intel or significantly lower pricing (which I don't see coming). We all know that the most money is made in the mainstream as the quantities are the highest so this will make or break AMD's success.

[anselhelm]

It's exceeded what I reasonably expected AMD could achieve, but understandably there are issues which AMD will need to resolve re: software coding and updates to motherboards.

As others above have pointed out, the SMT issue needs to be resolved ASAP. I seem to recall similar hiccups with Bulldozer, so I imagine this will be sorted out within a month or two. Hopefully AMD will be open about the issue and vocal about investigating issues surrounding it.

I was glad to see that AMD are aware of some of the shortcomings of the current "Zen" architecture that they couldn't fit into the silicon for the first round of chips and which they're already working on fixing for the Zen+ chips:

"...Senior Engineer Mike Clark says he knows where the easy gains are for Zen 2, and they're already working through the list..."
- http://www.anandtech.com/show/11170/the-amd-zen-and-ryzen-7-review-a-deep-dive-on-1800x-1700x-and-1700/23

In any event, upgrading to something like an R7 1700 or 1700X would be a massive upgrade to my ageing FX 8320 system, especially for video encoding.

[SHSPVR]

Keep in mind that the Windows/Linux Kennel Drivers well need to be update in order to make better use of this newer hardware and same apply to any game they to will also have up date in order to make better use of the new hardware.
The only disappoints I see is lack PCIe 3.0 and Quad Channel Memory support
Over all it step in right direction

Assuming you meant PCIe 4? Pretty sure I saw PCIe 3x support on the Crosshair Asus boards.

OPS yup 4.0

[bsodmike]

OPS yup 4.0

That's actually a good point - strange they left that out. Others have also said that on the Intel camp there's Optane and Thunderbolt as potential 'reasons' for sticking to their platform.

It will probably be a while till we see Optane drives coming into the market, hmm maybe Q2-Q3 of 2017 as a guess.

Also, I read that the AM4/Ryzen coolers need 60-90lbft of torque (for air coolers); sounds a bit excessive?

[SHSPVR]

Keep in mind that the Windows/Linux Kennel Drivers well need to be update in order to make better use of this newer hardware and same apply to any game they to will also have up date in order to make better use of the new hardware.
The only disappoints I see is lack PCIe 3.0 and Quad Channel Memory support
Over all it step in right direction

Some reviewers are now saying it might have been rushed out for GDC - AMD seems to have mentioned the first Windows patches would only be out in a month and motherboard companies had mere weeks to get BIOSes ready.

Apparently according to JayTwoCents there were almost daily updates by AMD on how to tweak performance and repeated BIOS updates to improve performance and reviewers hitting all sorts of unexpected issues. I mean apparently some of the review motherboards have such rushed BIOSes newer ones have yielded decent performance gains in gaming. This is also probably why some reviews seem more positive in gaming than others.

ATM,gaming performance is hard to judge for me - the issue is if you have an SB or IB Core i7 is it really going to improve gaming for me IN ITS CURRENT STATE?

I don't need 8 cores and I need a mini- ITX motherboard too,so for me more cores is nice but it has to improve in less cores scenarios too since plenty of games do not use 8 cores. The same goes with the image editing stuff I use - not all is more cores.

The 4C/8T and 6C/12T versions need to be able to stand on their own against Core i5 and consumer Core i7 CPUs since only small price drops by Intel will push them down to direct competitors and since SMT might be a bit hit and miss for the initial period it's going to be core for core performance.

ATM,it's hard to judge due to the rushed nature of the launch. I think with some fixes gaming performance will have to be re-visited and might be worth it for me to upgrade,but ATM I think Ryzen needs a few months for the software and BIOSes to catch up to it for gaming.

But the issue a degree of this could have been avoided by AMD too - even if they waited a few weeks,motherboard BIOSes and RAM support would have been far better,and MS might have the patches in place.

Its like so many other AMD launches - they rush it out,and then you wait a few weeks or a few months and the performance is there. But OTH,for all the people who know this and will buy the product on the promise of future performance loads more will just get an Intel or Nvidia product since they CBA waiting for future performance or just read DAY ONE reviews and remember those only.

On other tech forums its fast becoming a bit of a joke on how AMD tends to push products out at every launch with some major issue. Yes competitors too also have problems,but not nearly at every launch to the degree AMD has,and they are far better at hiding them too.

You do Intel also have problem to on there end to some which we never heard about and some like cutting corners with thermal goo vs solder just look at diff with delidded a AMD Ryzen and Kaby Lake

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You do Intel also have problem to on there end to some which we never heard about and some like cutting corners with thermal goo vs solder just look at diff with delidded a AMD Ryzen and Kaby Lake

You think them using thermal compound is bad - they artificially locked out the Xeon E3 line when Skylake was released by inventing a "new" chipset called the C232,and artificially locking them out of socket 1151 consumer motherboards!! They had been fine with Xeon CPUs being used in consumer sockets back from the socket 775 days. You could get a Core i7 for under £200 for a few years.

Guess what CPU I am using right now??

Then Intel locking out overclocking on CPUs,and making sure they started gimping the chipsets to block overclocking.

The fact that they locked BCLK overclocking on Kaby Lake when it worked fine on Skylake.

Plus the final insult - the £175 Core i3 7350K.

Intel segments every bloody feature,even down to whether you can use AVX2.

Given a choice between them,I think most would rather give AMD the money if they could.

The issue is Intel can get away with this since AMD stopped bothering with AM3+ once they realised the FX series were a dead end. On top of this Intel can afford to have problems. Why?? They have two different platforms on the get go - HEDT and consumer which partially overlap and they also will have competition in the earlier months of each new release from the previous gen HEDT and consumer platforms which have competitive performance So,what happens if Intel has a problem,people will buy the older gen if it really worries them or wait for any issues for the new gen to be solved after a few months.

Either way Intel has a sale - the problem here is if the issues with games on Ryzen are not negated to a large degree in a few months,Intel has CPUs like the Core i5 7600K,Core i5 7700K and Core i5 6800K which are perfectly competent gaming CPUs,which edge or bracket the Ryzen 7 series and tend to do better overall in CURRENT games. The more it takes AMD to solve the issues,the closer we get to Skylake X and Skylake-EP on the higher end,and Skylake X is basically socket 1151 Core i7s in an HEDT socket with dual channel RAM(!).

Remember Ryzen 7 is still a £300+ CPU,and this is the sort of market AMD has not been for around a decade,so expectations are going to be high.

Plus launching with obvious problems which might have been reduced somewhat if AMD waited say 30 days,really causes headlines like this:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017...yzen-review/2/

AMD has recognised that its gaming performance needs improving, and says it expects "higher performance to occur throughout Q1 and Q2" as it works with developers and engine-makers to get Ryzen up to snuff. That's not much consolation for anyone that buys a Ryzen CPU now, of course, particularly as those improvements may or may not actually surface in the future.

The bad

Gaming performance is weak compared to Intel, particularly in modern titles
Specialised AVX applications will perform better under Intel
The ugly

A higher-clocked quad-core chip like the Intel i7-7700K or 7600K is still the best choice of processor for no-compromise gamers

http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews...fps-benchmarks

But yes: The 1800X is an impressive competitor to the 6900K in production, and it’s significantly cheaper. We’d recommend the 1800X over the 6900K for folks who genuinely use software acceleration. It’s just not good for gaming, and GPUs kill both AMD and Intel CPUs in accelerated rendering.

http://www.pcgamer.com/the-amd-ryzen-7-review/

The AMD Ryzen 7: plenty of power, but underwhelming gaming performance

There are a few others like that - sadly like with the R9 290 and Fury series which were solid cards in the end first impressions stuck.

This is why I really hope that when the Ryzen 5 1600X is launched some sort of fix for SMT is there - even Hexus is testing with SMT(like many other sites) even though they mention it regresses performance in games. At least hopefully the fix means performance regression is tiny instead of the current amount and I honestly hope by then we have some solid BIOSes out for the motherboards,which will improve gaming performance.

Another 10% to 15% through better SMT scaling and BIOS fixes,would be enough to make any lead Intel has meaningless.

Three weeks for companies to get out BIOSes for a new platform is really not much time.

Its why I am somewhat concerned with Vega - it sounds very promising and a big leap forward for AMD but people will have high expectations for it since AMD has been out of the high end market for nearly a year. But if they do another Fury X launch with that,then you know what people will do.

[Percy1983]

It does seem gaming is worse than expected or what is logical when looking at other benchmarks, will be interesting how bios updates and windows scheduler updates will affect things.

For me its an R7 1700, I am looking more at video/photo editing as the primary purpose and gaming second to which over my 3570k editing will fly and gaming won't go backwards so all looks good to me.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It does seem gaming is worse than expected or what is logical when looking at other benchmarks, will be interesting how bios updates and windows scheduler updates will affect things.

For me its an R7 1700, I am looking more at video/photo editing as the primary purpose and gaming second to which over my 3570k editing will fly and gaming won't go backwards so all looks good to me.

Apparently Windows 7 does not have the SMT problems!!

[Myss_tree]

If i was in the market to build a new PC now i may wait a little longer rather than rush in as an early adopter or sticking with Intel.
Hopefully it will be a kick in the butt for Intel.
A lot of non savvy buyers will fall for the more cores/threads is better bull (i can see it now as the BS flows in PC world) rather than actually find out if they need that kind of proccessing power.

[ET3D]

Yes it has, and if it's true that an update to the Windows scheduler could improve game performance by up to 15%, then I'd say it has exceeded them.

That said, I'm not in the market for one currently. My next planned update is Pentium G4560 + low profile Radeon RX 460 for my HTPC (because AMD just doesn't want to release Bristol Ridge).

[anselhelm]

AMD has now responded to the lower-than-expected gaming performance at 1080P plus the SMT and bios bugs:
http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-launch-aftermath-gaming-performance-amd-response/

Definitely worth a read. I expect the big bugs will be sorted with some software and bios updates.

Also, for anyone who's still on a Vishera-based chip like me, you may enjoy reading this article:
http://wccftech.com/ryzen-fx-performance-gains-vishera/

[Biscuit]

AMD has now responded to the lower-than-expected gaming performance at 1080P plus the SMT and bios bugs:
http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-launch...-amd-response/

It’s important to talk about why Ryzen’s 1080p gaming performance is a fun topic to discuss but not one that should necessarily influence buying decisions. If you’re a gamer spending $330-$500 on a CPU, which is what AMD’s Ryzen 7 series costs, you’re not going to be playing at 1080p. At least not at 60Hz. Otherwise you should take a moment to think hard about your priorities.

A properly specced out gaming system with a $330-$500 CPU is going to be equipped with a GTX 1070 or GTX 1080 at the very least, maybe even two of those in SLI. At that level of graphics performance we’re talking about smooth 1440p or even 4K gaming. If the data from Steam’s hardware survey is to be believed, more enthusiasts are choosing to adopt high resolution monitors and they’re doing it at the fastest rate we’ve seen yet. At those resolutions Ryzen already delivers more than enough performance to prevent any bottlenecking. At 1440p reviewers have found that Ryzen was in fact more often than not marginally faster than Intel’s fastest gaming chip, the i7 7700K, So unless you play on a high refresh rate 1080p monitor Ryzen will in most cases deliver more than enough performance than you’re ever going to need for gaming.

Pretty much sums up my feelings

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Pretty much sums up my feelings

I don't agree fully since they forget some massively popular games like Fallout 4,Skyrim,etc are massively CPU limited and these get worse once you do things like build stuff or mod(which 100s of 1000s or even millions of people do),play games like Planetside 2,etc. I play at qHD and see CPU bottlenecks with a IB Core i7. Very few review sites will test these games especially in more intensive areas. An example is FO4 testing where they should be testing areas like Far Harbour or even in settlements when you hit the settler cap - these push a big CPU load. But even then you get situations like this:

http://cdn.sweclockers.com/artikel/d...46a26671e89ceb

When you see my IB Core i7 beating or matching a Ryzen 7 in these scenarios,it really means for plenty of games you might as well stick with what you have sadly instead of getting Ryzen 7 in its current state.

Edit!!

ARMA III is another one:

http://pclab.pl/zdjecia/artykuly/mbr...y/nv_arma3.png

I was expecting better performance in these games,since AMD FX CPUs tended to do badly in them and remember as with many of these games big fire-fights won't be as easy to test due to the nature of them.

Now we are waiting on the windows updates and BIOS updates to rectify this in hope.

I wasn't expecting AMD to match or beat AMD in these titles,but ATM performance isn't really great either.

[aniilv]

How is "oh but its fine at 4k atm" even used as argument? 1080ti is gonna be here in few days and with the performance that this card will have, you will be back to 1080p situation of noticable performance difference. Performing same as intel at high resolutions does not mean cpu is as good, it's simply a gpu bottleneck which is going to disappear in max 1 year when next nvidia beast at reasonable price comes out.

Oh but yeah, what about 8k, they perform the same at 8k. lol..