AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Review

👤by Tony Le Bourne Comments 📅01-03-17
Conclusion

There we have it, the tests are in and Ryzen 7 gives a great right hook to the Blue team. In highly threaded performance, the 1800X often falls right between the i7 6900K and the i7 6950X. Considering its launch price is £489/$499. In some results, the 1800X falls between the Skylake/Kabylake 'high performance' position either because of lack of current support (such as experienced by the pop up warnings in Aida64), its marginally lower clock for clock performance, or simply because it is being compared against some CPUs that feature QUAD channel memory. Many will be wondering why AMD didn't implement quad channel memory for Ryzen 7, then logically it would be to reduce the platform cost by removing a feature that isn't largely required by the majority of people. So if you can get 95% of the performance at 50% of the cost, is it a winner?



Though, it ISN'T 95% of the performance, Ryzen 7 trades blows against Intel's entire lineup in all but low/single-threaded workloads, and it is regularly dancing between the i7 6900 and the i7 6950X in multi-threaded workloads.

We would argue that, while a perfectly viable option, the Ryzen 7 1800X isn't quite the 'gamers' chip. Mostly because from that perspective the price/performance ratio isn't that great, especially when even the FX-8350 can bring the goods. Though we need to consider that the alternatives are considerably cheaper. Even then, having a faster CPU such as the i7 6700/7700K may still be the preference of many people.

As 8 core+ CPUs become more widespread, developers will undoubtedly undertake the process needed for optimising applications to take advantage of the extra resources, not forgetting that games are still maturing on the current generation games consoles both equipped with 8 core CPUs, so it is highly likely that these optimisations will come rather quickly, causing a shift in the desktop performance paradigm, a shift that is much needed as consumers, content creators, and gamers move towards VR and 4/8K content.

To round up our thoughts, Ryzen 1800X gives the consumer fantastic choice, it performs wonderfully and is aggressively priced. The 1800X may not be the gamers choice regarding the Ryzen 7 lineup due to being relatively high in price still, but compared to the target competition it is an absolute steal. We hope AMD develop and continue on this route to bring competitive products to the market, and considering the delay of Cannonlake, and the steep price slashes of current i7 CPUs, Intel have certainly been rattled. As for the consumer, the future certainly has more cores.

AMD have returned to the fray, and with the Ryzen 7 they have officially ended the era of quad core computing.

Pros
+ Highly competitive multi-threaded performance
+ Competes against Intel's top tier CPUs
+ Supplied with RGB Cooler
+ Fully featured platform
+ 8/16 cores threads priced lower than the competition
+ Significantly improved performance per watt
+ Smart technologies (XFR+ headroom)
+ Easy to overclock

Cons
- Can be beat in memory intensive applications
- Not quite as fast clock for clock
- Specific memory requirements


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