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AMD Ryzen CPUs will launch by March 3

Yes. There's ITX specific chipsets, with the X300 supporting overclocking, and subsequently will probably be the chiptype that most people in this thread will want. There's also A300 and B300, which won't support overclocking.

Hopefully these will be out around launch and be reasonably priced. I'm trying to convince my parents to let me upgrade their ancient Core 2 Duo (E7600) PC with something more modern in a SFF case.
 
As Rushersauce says, you could use it with any AM4 motherboard, but overclocking is only supported on B350 and X370, so I would imagine you would want to go with one of those to make the most out of the 1700X.



If it's a gaming PC I can't imagine there'd be any reason to upgrade from a 4790K at 4.8GHz. Hell, I just upgraded to a 4770K and I expect to get at least a couple of years out of it.

Yeah it's a gaming PC, I also do some video editing and rendering but it's not a major priority for me to upgrade for those reasons as my current CPU does a good job so far, maybe if I was gaming and rendering or streaming at the same time it would be but at the moment I'm not so I'm not to fussed.

Ivy and up i7s are pretty solid for 60 fps gaming, they shouldn't have any major issues for a few years unless a new game really hammers the CPU, but if you're gaming over 100 fps it can be pretty taxing on the CPU for some games such as Battlefield 1, which also happens to benefit from 4+ cores.

I'm curious about dipping my toes into 100+ fps gaming and I've seen that 6+ core i7s can pull away from their 4 core counterparts in some games, although they haven't quite pulled away as much as 4 core i7s have from i5 processors. Upgrading for two or three games wont really be worth it to me, and so far it looks like Battlefield 1 is the only game which my CPU struggles to run at 120 fps, however when I was doing some CPU benchmarking it held a pretty firm 100 fps.

If I get a 144Hz display and encounter any major CPU limitations in the pursuit of 120 fps I'll consider upgrading my CPU but for now I'm going to sit back and wait and see what happens with the CPU market and the performance of CPUs.

May I ask what the major importance of two extra PCIE 2 lanes are?

Additional PCIe lanes are beneficial for things like PCIe based storage, so stuff like NVME drives, with more lanes a motherboard could have M.2 slots capable of supporting higher speeds.
 

I never understand these benchmarks, becuase this site shows virtually no difference between 2133, 2666, and 3200:
http://techbuyersguru.com/gaming-ddr4-memory-2133-vs-26663200mhz-8gb-vs-16gb?page=1
And another (not the newest article): http://www.anandtech.com/show/8959/...-3200-with-gskill-corsair-adata-and-crucial/7

There was also another couple articles showing not too much of a performance difference between single and dual channel, as well.
 

Digital Foundry also had a really good video showcasing Ivy to Kaby CPUs at the same clock speeds with 2400MHz DDR3 memory and 3000MHz DDR4 memory.

Source (Video)

iNgEohA.png

It would be very interesting to see them test memory speeds above 3000MHz like Techspot did, you're possibly looking at gains upto 20-25% in CPU bound scenarios with 3600MHz+ DDR4 memory compared to Haswell with 2400MHz memory.

I never understand these benchmarks, becuase this site shows virtually no difference between 2133, 2666, and 3200:
http://techbuyersguru.com/gaming-ddr4-memory-2133-vs-26663200mhz-8gb-vs-16gb?page=1
And another (not the newest article): http://www.anandtech.com/show/8959/...-3200-with-gskill-corsair-adata-and-crucial/7

There was also another couple articles showing not too much of a performance difference between single and dual channel, as well.

Their testing is probably GPU bound, if you're GPU limited then a faster CPU or memory isn't really going to make much of a difference, but if you're CPU limited faster memory can help improve your performance. I got a nice boost with 16GB 2400MHz memory when I upgraded from 1333MHz sticks, in GTA V I got a boost of around 20% to my frame-rate.
 
Digital Foundry also had a really good video showcasing Ivy to Kaby CPUs at the same clock speeds with 2400MHz DDR3 memory and 3000MHz DDR4 memory.

Source (Video)



It would be very interesting to see them test memory speeds above 3000MHz like Techspot did, you're possibly looking at gains upto 20-25% in CPU bound scenarios with 3600MHz+ DDR4 memory compared to Haswell with 2400MHz memory.

I always wondered what is THE thing to look for in memory.
Some people say its the MHZ, some say latency, some say combination of both.
So what is it?

Like in those DFoundry videos they only say mhz, nothing about latency.

Im gonna upgrade PC soon when we know what AMD can do and im still not sure what memory to get.
3200mhz 14cl or some 4000mhz and 19cl?
Combination of 3200 14 is better than 4000 19 but is it better or not?
 
Their testing is probably GPU bound, if you're GPU limited then a faster CPU or memory isn't really going to make much of a difference, but if you're CPU limited faster memory can help improve your performance. I got a nice boost with 16GB 2400MHz memory when I upgraded from 1333MHz sticks, in GTA V I got a boost of around 20% to my frame-rate.

GPU bound with a 980Ti? I mean, I suppose. Either way, it's a shame the price difference for faster memory is slightly ludicrous, anyway. It also doesn't help that DDR4 prices went up like 80% (due to "mobile").

Edit: There's also this video, 1080FE with i7-5960X showing almost no difference: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cLg1YwH0QOA
 
I always wondered what is THE thing to look for in memory.
Some people say its the MHZ, some say latency, some say combination of both.
So what is it?

Like in those DFoundry videos they only say mhz, nothing about latency.

Im gonna upgrade PC soon when we know what AMD can do and im still not sure what memory to get.
3200mhz 14cl or some 4000mhz and 19cl?
Combination of 3200 14 is better than 4000 19 but is it better or not?

Techspot mentioned faster memory with looser timings is better, but do remember that DDR4 4000 is almost twice the cost of DDR4 3200. I personally don't think the small difference in performance is worth it.
 
I always wondered what is THE thing to look for in memory.
Some people say its the MHZ, some say latency, some say combination of both.
So what is it?

Like in those DFoundry videos they only say mhz, nothing about latency.

Im gonna upgrade PC soon when we know what AMD can do and im still not sure what memory to get.
3200mhz 14cl or some 4000mhz and 19cl?
Combination of 3200 14 is better than 4000 19 but is it better or not?

Hmm, I'm not really sure, I don't know too much about latency and haven't really experimented with it, however in TechSpot's conclusion they say this:

On the subject of memory timings, we didn't see a huge impact on performance when going from , say CAS16 to CAS19, and while the latency does start to creep up this is solved by going to the next speed grade. In short, low-latency DDR4-2400 won't match the performance of slacker DDR4-3000 memory.
We recommend Skylake builders aim for DDR4-3000 memory, but if you can go faster without paying much more then feel free to do so.

GPU bound with a 980Ti? I mean, I suppose. Either way, it's a shame the price difference for faster memory is slightly ludicrous, anyway. It also doesn't help that DDR4 prices went up like 80% (due to "mobile").

There's also this video, 1080FE with i7-5960X showing almost no difference: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cLg1YwH0QOA

Yeah they appear to be running pretty tough settings, if you were to push for over 100 fps you'll start to see CPU limitations a lot more in some games, you may have to drop some settings to get there or throw more powerful hardware at it though.

EDIT: Aha Bang4BuckPC Gamer? I love his videos and I've seen this one before.

You can see he's GPU bound if you look at the GPU usage, it's at 99% load throughout most of the video, a faster CPU or memory isn't going to improve performance much in these scenarios as you're GPU limited, however you see that he gains some performance in Rise of the Tomb Raider as it dropped to 57 fps somewhere vs 67 with the faster memory, however he's mostly GPU bound so these are fairly small gains.

I'm not even sure where it dropped below 80 fps to be honest.

In gaming performance or overall in everything?

Hmm, I'm not sure, I presume everything from what they said.
 

Only if you aren't GPU bound, which I assume most people are. Most people won't see any difference between DDR3 and DDR4.

I never understand these benchmarks, becuase this site shows virtually no difference between 2133, 2666, and 3200:
http://techbuyersguru.com/gaming-ddr4-memory-2133-vs-26663200mhz-8gb-vs-16gb?page=1
And another (not the newest article): http://www.anandtech.com/show/8959/...-3200-with-gskill-corsair-adata-and-crucial/7

There was also another couple articles showing not too much of a performance difference between single and dual channel, as well.

The difference is in their test system: 1 980TI vs SLI 980TI.
 
Digital Foundry also had a really good video showcasing Ivy to Kaby CPUs at the same clock speeds with 2400MHz DDR3 memory and 3000MHz DDR4 memory.

Source (Video)



It would be very interesting to see them test memory speeds above 3000MHz like Techspot did, you're possibly looking at gains upto 20-25% in CPU bound scenarios with 3600MHz+ DDR4 memory compared to Haswell with 2400MHz memory.



Their testing is probably GPU bound, if you're GPU limited then a faster CPU or memory isn't really going to make much of a difference, but if you're CPU limited faster memory can help improve your performance. I got a nice boost with 16GB 2400MHz memory when I upgraded from 1333MHz sticks, in GTA V I got a boost of around 20% to my frame-rate.

Wow there really is no difference betwenn the 6000 and 7000 series CPU's from intel other than clock speeds..... Yeesh.
 
Nope.
Doesn't have the DRM support, and I believe you have to connect your display to the iGPU with a Kaby Lake system for UHD Blu-ray or 4K Netflix.

So, in order to have DRM protected video playback with an AMD system, the only hope at this point is to have a video card that supports that?
UHD drive units have begun trickling to the market, I need to investigate further into the matter as it seems stupid to not being able to use them on the AMD platform.
 
I just got a 4790k with a decent motherboard and 16GB ram for about $250, as my current 2500k@4.5Ghz is struggling with BF1 above 100fps.

I like the thought of having something "good enough" for a couple of months to see how Ryzen and eventual Intel price drops pan out, but I don't know if I can restrain myself if the Ryzen benchmarks are in fookin hell territory..
 
Is there any chance Apple might switch to Ryzen if it's competitive?
Considering that Apple put Thunderbolt into all their products, it seems unlikely.
I bet that's why Intel backtracked and decided to keep Thunderbolt exclusive instead of opening it up and allowing other companies (i.e. AMD) to use it.

This is why I'm really concerned about those leaked benchmarks.
The memory performance seemed really poor, and the specs of the leaked motherboards so far are listing DDR4-2666 and DDR4-3000, compared to the latest Z270 boards which support DDR4-4266.

I never understand these benchmarks, becuase this site shows virtually no difference between 2133, 2666, and 3200:
http://techbuyersguru.com/gaming-ddr4-memory-2133-vs-26663200mhz-8gb-vs-16gb?page=1
And another (not the newest article): http://www.anandtech.com/show/8959/...-3200-with-gskill-corsair-adata-and-crucial/7
There was also another couple articles showing not too much of a performance difference between single and dual channel, as well.
Many sites don't know how to do proper performance testing in games and often set up their tests to be GPU-limited or only look at average framerates.
When you care about minimum frame rates, memory latency/bandwidth becomes quite important - same thing as CPU performance.
Anandtech's gaming tests are so bad they show practically no difference in 5 years of Intel CPUs.

Techspot and Digital Foundry generally do good performance testing for games.

I always wondered what is THE thing to look for in memory.
Some people say its the MHZ, some say latency, some say combination of both.
So what is it?

Like in those DFoundry videos they only say mhz, nothing about latency.

Im gonna upgrade PC soon when we know what AMD can do and im still not sure what memory to get.
3200mhz 14cl or some 4000mhz and 19cl?
Combination of 3200 14 is better than 4000 19 but is it better or not?
Generally, the faster RAM speed makes up for slower CAS latency, while having more bandwidth.

There's a great chart on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAS_latency#Memory_timing_examples

DDR4-3200 CL14 has a 3200MT/s data rate and 8.75ns latency for the first word. By the fourth word, latency is at 9.69ns.

DDR4-4266 CL19 has a 4266MT/a data rate and 8.91ns latency for the first word. By the fourth word it has made up the difference due to its higher speed and has 9.61ns latency.

So it generally offers a 33% higher data rate and similar latency when speed is factored in.

So, in order to have DRM protected video playback with an AMD system, the only hope at this point is to have a video card that supports that?
UHD drive units have begun trickling to the market, I need to investigate further into the matter as it seems stupid to not being able to use them on the AMD platform.
In theory you should be able to drop in a compatible GPU, but NVIDIA's current GPUs apparently support PlayReady 3.0, while 4K Netflix only works with Kaby Lake iGPUs right now.
 
How behind is global foundries in regards to intel in their process? I am liking the ryzen leaks so far but I really don't have a convincing case for upgrading honestly. So I will wait until whenever 10nm ryzen happens I guess. Hope is before late 2018.
 
Techspot mentioned faster memory with looser timings is better, but do remember that DDR4 4000 is almost twice the cost of DDR4 3200. I personally don't think the small difference in performance is worth it.
It's not from a video editor, gamer and programmer you would need deep pockets to warrant the price to performance gap.

Speed is better over latency unless you have crazy gaps which simply won't happen.
 
How behind is global foundries in regards to intel in their process? I am liking the ryzen leaks so far but I really don't have a convincing case for upgrading honestly. So I will wait until whenever 10nm ryzen happens I guess. Hope is before late 2018.

Globalfoundries is skipping 10nm and going to 7nm, so it will be a while, at best 2019 or latter. I would go with late 2019 or 2020 given the troubles TSMC and Samsung are having with their 10nm (nodes that are on par with Intel's 14nm).
 
Globalfoundries is skipping 10nm and going to 7nm, so it will be a while, at best 2019 or latter. I would go with late 2019 or 2020 given the troubles TSMC and Samsung are having with their 10nm (nodes that are on par with Intel's 14nm).

Oh that's a bummer, hope I can wait without a second gen ryzen or cannonlake convincing my otherwise.
 
How behind is global foundries in regards to intel in their process? I am liking the ryzen leaks so far but I really don't have a convincing case for upgrading honestly. So I will wait until whenever 10nm ryzen happens I guess. Hope is before late 2018.

GFs 14nm process is physically close to what Intel had with 22nm so they are one step behind here, as usual. And yes, they plan to skip their 10nm step and go with 7nm with risk production starting in 2018 which means that full production capability is unlikely till the end of 2018 or 2019 even. So for the next ~2 years Ryzen will be stuck at GloFo's 14nm most probably. Cannonlake won't come till 2018 either according to the latest Intel's roadmap update.
 
Oh that's a bummer, hope I can wait without a second gen ryzen or cannonlake convincing my otherwise.

I am pretty sure that Zen+ and any other near future AMD CPUs will be socket compatible with Ryzen motherboards. The only big motherboard features on the horizon that will not be available this year are PCIe 4.0, 10 Gigabit ethernet, and DDR5 (maybe late 2019 for servers, probably far later for desktops), though I don't see these feature being all that important for anything but special cases. For these reason this is a good year to buy a desktop if you are looking to get value out of your purchase. Same thing applies if you go with Intel, the Z170/Z270 platforms are supposed to be socket compatible with Cannonlake which likely won't show up for a while on desktops (another 14nm+ part this year for desktops). If you go with the HEDT platform wait until August when Intel launches Skylake-E since that platform will require a new socket.
 
For the same price ($200, I am looking at newegg.ca) you can buy a kit of 16GB DDR4 3600 with CAS 16 timing (CAS 10 @ 2400 is equivalent to CAS 15 @ 3600).

So which one would be worth it?

I'm looking at teh corsair dominator's with CAS 10, and the G.Skill Trident 3200mhz with cas 14?

Which one would give me better performance? I always in the DDR days went with tight timings.
 
In that case go with the 3200mhz G.Skill. The bandwidth advantage outweighs the latency advantage in that case (3200/2400 ~ +33% vs 14/13.33 ~ +5%).
 
It's been over 10 years since I have used an AMD CPU and I am still leaning towards a Kaby Lake build, but damn the more I read about Ryzen, the more I may consider switching.

Their 4core/8thread CPU is expecting to cost around $200, that is damn tempting.
 
Would anyone reccomend DDR4 2400MHZ WITH CAS 10 latency?

Or should I forget about tight timings and go DDR4 3200?
I have the same issue with my Intel setup but realized Speed compensates Latency.

DDR4 3200 CAS 14 is faster than DDR4 2400 CAS 10 in my opinion.
 
Would anyone reccomend DDR4 2400MHZ WITH CAS 10 latency?
Or should I forget about tight timings and go DDR4 3200?
3200CL14 has lower latency than 2400CL10 by the eighth word, and a 33% faster data rate.

Wait and see what the Ryzen platform can use though.
The lower-end Biostar boards only support DDR4-2666, and the high-end one only supports DDR4-3000.
I'd wait and see what the ASUS boards can handle before making a decision, as they tend to support the fastest RAM.
 
As many others have suggested, memory speed is mostly beneficial to build with the best of the best.

Of course, if you pair 2133 DDR4 sticks with an overclocked 6700K coupled with a Titan X Pascal, 1080 or SLI 1070 and compare it to the same scenario, albeit 4000mhz modules, you'll see a significant difference in performance on most occasions.

But if you replace the graphic card with a more affordable, mid-range 1060 or even a 980TI, things don't get so bold anymore. Of course you might still see an improvement, but not to the point where it makes sense to invest further for faster DDR4 modules.



Here's an example:
F680taT.jpg

f8XwxI2.jpg


Full article here.

Basically, one of the most important factor is whether or not you have a GPU that could benefit from the additional bandwidth. Most don't. Some do.
 
Yeah it's a gaming PC, I also do some video editing and rendering but it's not a major priority for me to upgrade for those reasons as my current CPU does a good job so far, maybe if I was gaming and rendering or streaming at the same time it would be but at the moment I'm not so I'm not to fussed.

Ivy and up i7s are pretty solid for 60 fps gaming, they shouldn't have any major issues for a few years unless a new game really hammers the CPU, but if you're gaming over 100 fps it can be pretty taxing on the CPU for some games such as Battlefield 1, which also happens to benefit from 4+ cores.

I'm curious about dipping my toes into 100+ fps gaming and I've seen that 6+ core i7s can pull away from their 4 core counterparts in some games, although they haven't quite pulled away as much as 4 core i7s have from i5 processors. Upgrading for two or three games wont really be worth it to me, and so far it looks like Battlefield 1 is the only game which my CPU struggles to run at 120 fps, however when I was doing some CPU benchmarking it held a pretty firm 100 fps.

If I get a 144Hz display and encounter any major CPU limitations in the pursuit of 120 fps I'll consider upgrading my CPU but for now I'm going to sit back and wait and see what happens with the CPU market and the performance of CPUs.

Yeah, if you were moving up to 120/144Hz then an upgrade may make sense, although you'd definitely want to pay close attention to benchmarks so you know exactly how big a benefit you're getting (if any) on the games you're actually going to play.


I was assuming 60Hz gaming (although I should have clarified that). There is some gain to be had at higher refresh rates, but Fallout 4 seems to be the only game around at the moment which fails to hit 60fps on DDR3 at max settings. I'd actually be interested to see which in-game settings affect this, just as FO4 seems to be such an outlier in terms of bandwidth requirements.
 
So I'm reading that AM4 motherboards have an HDMI port. But how does that work without an integrated GPU? Will we have a graphics-capable motherboard chipset like in the old days, or is it just an inactive port here for the future ryzen APU?
 
So I'm reading that AM4 motherboards have an HDMI port. But how does that work without an integrated GPU? Will we have a graphics-capable motherboard chipset like in the old days, or is it just an inactive port here for the future ryzen APU?

It'll be for future Zen-based APUs (and possibly existing Bristol Ridge APUs if they ever get a retail release). It won't be active if you're using a Ryzen CPU without IGP.
 
3200CL14 has lower latency than 2400CL10 by the eighth word, and a 33% faster data rate.

Wait and see what the Ryzen platform can use though.
The lower-end Biostar boards only support DDR4-2666, and the high-end one only supports DDR4-3000.
I'd wait and see what the ASUS boards can handle before making a decision, as they tend to support the fastest RAM.

If asus, Asrock, MSI can't do beyond DDR4-2666 then automatic fail. I want to go big, and want to go AMD not intel.

Hopefully they are not the short sighted with AIB partners and support the higher bandwidth memory.
 
If asus, Asrock, MSI can't do beyond DDR4-2666 then automatic fail. I want to go big, and want to go AMD not intel.

Hopefully they are not the short sighted with AIB partners and support the higher bandwidth memory.

Asus is saying 3200+ for Crosshair.
 
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