I don't post to Neogaf very often, but I'm finding the FUD about Ryzen pretty sad and would like to help clarify what's happened and what will probably happen.
First off, I'm an engineer; I design roads for a living. A LOT of thought goes into a road design. I'm also a mountain biker. I'll make that relevant below. Engineer's design to constraints and limits with performance targets for the applications to which their product is meant to be used.
If I need to design a road for 70 MPH traffic, that means longer curves, higher cross slopes, longer line of sight distances, etc. A 25 MPH road needs far less. A 5 MPH needs very little geometric consideration at all. A racetrack is a completely different animal. The structures have to be design to handle certain loads--primarily large tractor trailers weighting anywhere from 50,000 lbs to 100,000 lbs. All things are designed with a factor of safety as well.
What's my point? The road has to be designed for the application it is to be used for. Do you supposed CPU's are different?
Consider a mountain bike. It has a gear range that lets me climb the mountain at a snails pace. My bike, in particular, doesn't have very high gearing. I let gravity bring me down at a pace I could never achieve pedaling. Now a road bike, it doesn't have the low gear range of my mountain bike, but it has a high gear range that allows the cyclist to ride much faster.
Now suppose I review a road bike as though I want to use it to ride up a mountain. How would that look? I'd say that $10,000 bike is a piece of junk and not worth anyone's time. Now if I were to review a mountain bike for road cycling, what would that look like? I would say my $4,000 bike is a piece of junk.
The latest reviews of Ryzen using low resolutions is like reviewing a mountain bike on the road. It's not a real use case. It's similar to reviewing a mountain bike by seeing how fast it rolls straight down a mountain with no turns compared to another bike that does so a little bit faster. It's such a narrow use case that is unrealistic that it's surprising anyone would use it for comparison.
Yes, getting the GPU bottleneck out of the way to determine the actual CPU performance is good, using games to do it is bad. They require a GPU and are designed around one, so it's impossible to eliminate a GPU as a factor from a system designed around GPUs. Taking the GPU out of the GPU constrained system is like riding a mountain bike downhill in the lowest gear. All you'll end up doing is spinning out without actually contributing to your speed. Does it mean your bike sucks? Does it mean you have no power to contribute as a rider? No, it means the system isn't meant to work the way you're using it. Ryzen smashes a homerun in nearly all tests that aren't games where there are no GPUs. It isn't much weaker on the IPC front, and it's very solid on the multitasking front. It's not at all a weak CPU and is a complete bargain in the HEDT world.
Would you buy a car that can do 300 MPH when you can only drive it on the street at 75 MPH? If you were in the market for a grunt workhorse of a vehicle and saw that a Ford F-350 1-Ton truck only drives at 90 MPH and a Honda Civic can do 120 MPH, would you buy the Civic? Who do you think would try to convince you that the Civic is better for you? Perhaps the guy who's marketing income is paid for by Honda.
Ryzen is like a good pickup truck, it has all the grunt in the world for real work, but still drives well beyond the posted speed limit of modern GPUs. The Honda is great for people that don't have any use whatsoever for a pickup truck, but it's junk when you want to do real work.
I've never build an AMD system, but Ryzen is making me want one for the video editing I've started to do. I had no intention of getting into video editing a year ago, so buying a weaker CPU just for gaming would have been a mistake. It's as clear as day, the R7 1700 is the best CPU for the money out there today for a broad use case that includes gaming. It's not for every use case, however.
Instead of being dissapointed, be happy as hell that there is an option now. Make an informed decision, and not what the marketing world is telling you to do. If you really want the most bang for your buck, I recommend older corporate machines being sold out of warranty with Ivy Bridge and Haswell CPUs in them. Get the entire system with HDD and RAM for the cost of a new Ryzen. Throw in a low power GPU like an RX480 and you have a real gaming machine for under $500.
TLDR: AMD just did something awesome and you're too blind to know how or why.
