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[Mrbob]

The best thing about Ryzen is that you don't need to buy a new motherboard for Ryzen 2.

Intel are locking Coffee Lake out of existing compatible boards :/

I currently have 2 PCs, a i5 4690k and i7 4790k

I'm going to upgrade the i5 to a Ryzen 2 8/16 minimum.

I upgraded my 3570k to amd 1700 for my desktop PC (running at 3.9ghz). Did it mainly for productivity but the gaming upgrade has been really good. Especially with minimal frame rates. This CPU doesn't get hot either. It's never breached more than 59C in hardest stress tests with all cores going at 100 percent. I have a noctua uh14s on it so it's a good cooler but still the chip doesn't go crazy for heat.

It's really nice I can upgrade to Ryzen 2 if I choose to do so with the same motherboard.

 

[Datschge]

Mindfactory.de Ryzen sales are very impressive, no wonder that Intel is in a bit of a panic:

Just keep in mind that Mindfactory.de is just one German shop for enthusiast diy pc builders which is a rather small part of the overall market, and the introduction of Intel's Coffeelake chips is bound to narrow the gap again.

Clock speed appears to be the major issue AMD need to get a grip on. The Zeppelin die seems to max out at 4.2Ghz in turbo mode, whereas Coffee Lake manages to squeeze out 4.5-4.6Ghz in single and dual core mode.

This is a property of the process node 14LPP ("low power plus") which was not intended for higher frequencies. This will change with the process nodes used for upcoming Zen chips.

My concern is whether AMD will be able to keep their foot on the gas and make Ryzen 2 winner.

This is likely going to happen.
Pinnacle Ridge is planned for early 2018 and based on 12LP ("leading performance") which according to GlobalFoundries should improve performance/energy efficiency by over 10%. Zen on 14LPP is currently limited to 4.2GHz at best possible binning, which may move up to around 4.6GHz for Pinnacle Ridge.
Zen 2 is based on 7LP and should appear late 2018/early 2019. According to GlobalFoundries 7LP is intended for normal operation at around 5GHz. Compared to 14LPP they intend it to improve performance by over 40% or energy efficiency by over 60%.

 

[RumblingRosco]

Just keep in mind that Mindfactory.de is just one German shop for enthusiast diy pc builders which is a rather small part of the overall market, and the introduction of Intel's Coffeelake chips is bound to narrow the gap again.


This is a property of the process node 14LPP ("low power plus") which was not intended for higher frequencies. This will change with the process nodes used for upcoming Zen chips.


This is likely going to happen.
Pinnacle Ridge is planned for early 2018 and based on 12LP ("leading performance") which according to GlobalFoundries should improve performance/energy efficiency by over 10%. Zen on 14LPP is currently limited to 4.2GHz at best possible binning, which may move up to around 4.6GHz for Pinnacle Ridge.
Zen 2 is based on 7LP and should appear late 2018/early 2019. According to GlobalFoundries 7LP is intended for normal operation at around 5GHz. Compared to 14LPP they intend it to improve performance by over 40% or energy efficiency by over 60%.

Dear sweet CPU gods I hope this is true.

 

[thelastword]

Wow it even bests an overclocked 7700K with VLL setup. I wonder if Skylake-X benefits similarly~!

Well we all know that Ryzen performance is boosted significantly with higher clocked ram, but we know now, it's shoots even higher with not only higherclocked ram but HCR+VLL....I'd really want to see Ryzen's perf with 4000Mhz ram with VLL for e.g...that would be insane...

Intels chips seems to do pretty good even with 2666Mhz ram, so I dont think higher clocked or even VLL will help them as much as Ryzen......That inifinity fabric tech

His chip is not even at 4.0Ghz though, so perf could be even better as well......Ryzen 2 at 4.5 Ghz + 4000Mhz Vll ram, should be something magical on an AM4 board tbh...

 

[Newboi]

Are there any Threadripper 1900X reviews out yet? I've heard the overall performance is lower than the 1800X.

Also, will Threadripper see a Pinnacle Ridge update, or will the next Threadripper products be reserved for Zen 2 and the 7nm process?

 

[thelastword]

Not only Vega, but Ryzen seems to be doing very well in this game....Some are calling Forza 7, the first true DX12 game.....

 

[dr_rus]

So that's fundamentally different from GPUs then? How come?

Well, with CPUs 7700K is The Fastest for gaming, it usually beats even the new $2000 18-core Skylake-X, there's little reason to go for something faster - if you're building a pure gaming machine. With GPUs it's different as the higher the price the faster the card usually is so there's no real reason to just avoid anything above 1060/580 for example and the sales tend to be spread out more thinly / equally.

Not only Vega, but Ryzen seems to be doing very well in this game....Some are calling Forza 7, the first true DX12 game.....

So "the first true DX12 game" would be running on once CPU thread exclusively?

 

[Sir Abacus]

So "the first true DX12 game" would be running on once CPU thread exclusively?

I always thought the "first true DX12 game" was Ashes of the Singularity because of how well it worked on AMD cards.

 

[dr_rus]

I always thought the "first true DX12 game" was Ashes of the Singularity because of how well it worked on AMD cards.

It's one of the better examples of what D3D12 allows in terms of multicore CPU load but when it comes to GPU load it's pretty weird if not straight up misleading because of a unique rendering approach it uses.

 

[Nostremitus]

Well,

So "the first true DX12 game" would be running on once CPU thread exclusively?

This is not true, it doesn't run exclusively on one thread. It will scale to as many threads as you have, it just prioritizes one or two over the rest.

While that's still not great, it's much better than it would be if it only ran on one core.

 

[Zojirushi]

So how bad is power consumption/efficiency if you overclock a 1600/1600x into the higher 3,x GHz regions?

If CFL turns out to be a complete clusterfuck of a launch I might cheap out for now and go the AM4 route but I need some clock speed for emulation

 

[dr_rus]

This is not true, it doesn't run exclusively on one thread. It will scale to as many threads as you have, it just prioritizes one or two over the rest.

While that's still not great, it's much better than it would be if it only ran on one core.

It does run on one thread and pretty much all games of the recent ten or so years run like you've described it - scale to as many threads as you have while topping out one or two of them due to bad engine parallelization (which is why you see 7700K leading in most of gaming benchmarks these days, btw). The issue which DX12 should be solving is the ability for the game's renderer to scale to all available threads evenly and this certainly doesn't happen in FM7.

In fact, considering that the game doesn't use D3D12's multicore scaling capabilities AND the fact that it only uses D3D12 feature level 11_0 makes this "first true DX12 game" hardly a DX12 game at all.

 

[Nostremitus]

It does run on one thread and pretty much all games of the recent ten or so years run like you've described it - scale to as many threads as you have while topping out one or two of them due to bad engine parallelization (which is why you see 7700K leading in most of gaming benchmarks these days, btw). The issue which DX12 should be solving is the ability for the game's renderer to scale to all available threads evenly and this certainly doesn't happen in FM7.

In fact, considering that the game doesn't use D3D12's multicore scaling capabilities AND the fact that it only uses D3D12 feature level 11_0 makes this "first true DX12 game" hardly a DX12 game at all.

I wasn't arguing that at all.

Your claim was that it ran exclusively on one thread.

That's still not true.

It's ok to call them out on the bullshit, just call them out on real bullshit. No need to make up your own.

 

[dr_rus]

I wasn't arguing that at all.

Your claim was that it ran exclusively on one thread.

That's still not true.

It's ok to call them out on the bullshit, just call them out on real bullshit. No need to make up your own.

If you've actually checked how it runs you would know that it is in fact true. Sometimes it spawns tasks which occupy a couple of other threads but it is constantly maxing out just one thread of a CPU. This is pretty typical behavior for many DX11 games of the last decade.

 

[Nostremitus]

If you've actually checked how it runs you would know that it is in fact true. Sometimes it spawns tasks which occupy a couple of other threads but it is constantly maxing out just one thread of a CPU. This is pretty typical behavior for many DX11 games of the last decade.

Would running it on my own PC count as checking how it runs?

 

[dr_rus]

Would running it on my own PC count as checking how it runs?

Posting a graph with CPU cores usage over the run of the game on your PC would.

Here's mine from the demo for example: http://i.picpar.com/pO4c.png

 

[Sir Abacus]

It's one of the better examples of what D3D12 allows in terms of multicore CPU load but when it comes to GPU load it's pretty weird if not straight up misleading because of a unique rendering approach it uses.

I was being facetious with how AMD always touted its performance on this game yelling to the heavens about how DX12 would enable a new AMD century blah blah blah.

 

[Paragon]

It took several weeks - so I'm thankful for Amazon's cross-shipment and generous return window minimizing how long I was without a CPU - but my replacement 1700X from the AMD RMA finally showed up. I am not in the US, so your experience may be better depending on where you are located.
It was manufactured in week 33, and while this is not long enough to be definitive, I ran the kill-ryzen script for a couple of hours without any errors. Both my previous 1700Xs would fail in under 30 minutes, and typically less than 5.
Ashes of the Singularity's DX12 CPU benchmark would fail 100% of the time on both CPUs and now passes without issue in DX12 or Vulkan on the replacement CPU - so it looks like that could be a quick Windows-based test if you have it installed, as it's only 3 minutes long. I wouldn't use it to confirm that your CPU is 100% fault-free, but if it's crashing, you're probably affected.
Creating an Ubuntu live-USB image and running the kill-ryzen script was a lot less complicated than I was expecting though, and keeping that on a thumb stick can be useful for other reasons too.

The new CPU seems to run at 3.9GHz stable using the same settings as the previous one, though it does run a few degrees hotter. I would have been very upset if it was slower.
I should do more thorough stability testing and overclocking again to see if it will clock higher or be stable at a lower voltage than the older CPU, but I'm just happy to have the system up and running again.

Oh, and while it probably doesn't affect many people, I also found that the Crosshair VI Hero's PCIe setup doesn't appear to configure itself correctly when set to "auto" - at least not with the SATA cards I'm using.
With an x1 card in the PCIe x4_3 slot, the port was running at x4 speeds and disabling the x1_1, x1_2, and x1_3 slots, rather than dropping to x1 speeds automatically. So if you have devices that don't appear to be working at all, that's probably why.
That was frustrating, as I had moved the order of the cards around when installing the new CPU and a couple of SSDs, and suddenly I had devices that weren't working or showing up at all.

 

[opticalmace]

It took several weeks - so I'm thankful for Amazon's cross-shipment and generous return window minimizing how long I was without a CPU - but my replacement 1700X from the AMD RMA finally showed up. I am not in the US, so your experience may be better depending on where you are located.
It was manufactured in week 33, and while this is not long enough to be definitive, I ran the kill-ryzen script for a couple of hours without any errors. Both my previous 1700Xs would fail in under 30 minutes, and typically less than 5.
Ashes of the Singularity's DX12 CPU benchmark would fail 100% of the time on both CPUs and now passes without issue in DX12 or Vulkan on the replacement CPU - so it looks like that could be a quick Windows-based test if you have it installed, as it's only 3 minutes long. I wouldn't use it to confirm that your CPU is 100% fault-free, but if it's crashing, you're probably affected.
Creating an Ubuntu live-USB image and running the kill-ryzen script was a lot less complicated than I was expecting though, and keeping that on a thumb stick can be useful for other reasons too.

The new CPU seems to run at 3.9GHz stable using the same settings as the previous one, though it does run a few degrees hotter. I would have been very upset if it was slower.
I should do more thorough stability testing and overclocking again to see if it will clock higher or be stable at a lower voltage than the older CPU, but I'm just happy to have the system up and running again.

Oh, and while it probably doesn't affect many people, I also found that the Crosshair VI Hero's PCIe setup doesn't appear to configure itself correctly when set to "auto" - at least not with the SATA cards I'm using.
With an x1 card in the PCIe x4_3 slot, the port was running at x4 speeds and disabling the x1_1, x1_2, and x1_3 slots, rather than dropping to x1 speeds automatically. So if you have devices that don't appear to be working at all, that's probably why.
That was frustrating, as I had moved the order of the cards around when installing the new CPU and a couple of SSDs, and suddenly I had devices that weren't working or showing up at all.

Thanks for the update. I'm doing an RMA for my 1700 right now. So far AMD is responding pretty quickly (getting details etc from me), but we'll see how it goes.

 

[kotodama]

Flashed my Asrock X399 Taichi to the new 1.7 Bios with Raid NVMe support and got in a boot loop. Thankfully, I was able to flash back to 1.5 using the Bios Flashback feature, so I didn't brick it. It's not like I have an NVMe raid, but I was resetting a borked Win 10 setup, so I figured I might as well update the Bios too. According to the Asrock forum, I'm not the only one with this boot loop issue on 1.7. Then again the 1.5 Bios is good enough for now.

Threadripper has been pretty stable without me screwing around with it for the months I've had it. It's been fun recently just giving VMs a core here and there because why not. Here's a core, here's 2, you want 4? all right lol.

 

[Mr Swine]

So uh my 1600x is not turbo boosting anymore. It’s stuck at 3.6ghz (3.7 according to Ryzen master) and it never goes up to 4ghz turbo boosting. So what the heck should I do? I have a gigabyte AX370 gaming k3 motherboard

 

[DemonCleaner]

great video about the impact of memory latency on ryzens performance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6yp7Pi39Z8

 

[Tomasoares]

I'm thinking of replacing my fx-6300 to a ryzen 5 1600. Do you guys think it's a good idea for gaming? I've a 970 gtx and I'vd been getting several CPU bottlenecks in games such as Dark Souls 3 a d Rise of Tomb Raider, and regardless of the graphics configuration, the min FPS doesn't increase.

 

[Nostremitus]

Posting a graph with CPU cores usage over the run of the game on your PC would.

Here's mine from the demo for example: http://i.picpar.com/pO4c.png

Here you go.

I started Afterburner once the game was running, ran a race, then immediately captured the graph. You can see some slight spikes at the end as it's ALT-TABing to Riva and ALT-Print Screening the graph.

http://i1156.photobucket.com/albums/p578/Jason_Nostremitus/Forza 7 Demo Chase the Storm.png

I've been working 14 hour days, so I wasn't able to take the time to sit down at my home PC and do this until this morning.

To be honest, even if it was just maxing out 1 core and only hitting 15 or so on two others, your claim of it running exclusively on one thread would still be misleading.

I'm not claiming the game is a multi-threaded phenomenon or anything, they really do need to be called out for not pushing their company's own technology forward, but exaggerating the issue with false claims doesn't add anything to the conversation.

Exclusively on a single thread would mean it doesn't use any other threads at all, what-so-ever. That's just false.

 

[Frankfurter]

I'm thinking of replacing my fx-6300 to a ryzen 5 1600. Do you guys think it's a good idea for gaming? I've a 970 gtx and I'vd been getting several CPU bottlenecks in games such as Dark Souls 3 a d Rise of Tomb Raider, and regardless of the graphics configuration, the min FPS doesn't increase.

The 1600 is a very capable CPU, so yeah that's a pretty good idea. Depending on the settings, it might actually be your GPU that's limiting, though.

 

[Tomasoares]

The 1600 is a very capable CPU, so yeah that's a pretty good idea. Depending on the settings, it might actually be your GPU that's limiting, though.

I see, I'm more worried about having good min fps, even if I need to reduce graphics due to some GPU limitation.

 

[LelouchZero]

I'm thinking of replacing my fx-6300 to a ryzen 5 1600. Do you guys think it's a good idea for gaming? I've a 970 gtx and I'vd been getting several CPU bottlenecks in games such as Dark Souls 3 a d Rise of Tomb Raider, and regardless of the graphics configuration, the min FPS doesn't increase.

The Ryzen 5 1600 is a really good CPU, it's a great idea for gaming! What other games do you play and what frame-rates do you wish to target? Also, what other things do you do with your PC?

The i5 8400 and 8600K look like great options too if they fit your budget! From the reviews I've seen the i5 8400 is a strong performer and appears to be able to run all of the six cores at 3.8GHz, however it lacks SMT and loses to the Ryzen 5 1600X in workloads that rely heavily on multi-threaded performance. However the gaming performance I've seen so far appears to be mostly in the favour of the i5 8400.

If the next generation of Ryzen CPUs are supported on the current chipsets then that will likely be the most future proof platform with regards to future CPU compatibility.

Paul's Hardware - 8700K vs 1800X, i5 8400, 1600X & 7700K
KitGuru - Intel Core i7-8700K and Core i5-8400 Review
PCPer - Intel Core i7-8700K and Core i5-8400 Review
Overclockers Club - Intel 8th Generation Core i7 8700K & Core i5 8400 Review

 

[RumblingRosco]

Really feels like the lack of low/mid-tier boards for the Coffee Lake line-up is what is holding them back. That, and the lack of stock. Once the i5-8400 can be paired with a cheaper H370/B370 instead of a Z370, I think I'd more strongly be recommending people look into the Coffee Lake line-up for low-to-mid-range builds.

 

[Datschge]

Really feels like the lack of low/mid-tier boards for the Coffee Lake line-up is what is holding them back. That, and the lack of stock. Once the i5-8400 can be paired with a cheaper H370/B370 instead of a Z370, I think I'd more strongly be recommending people look into the Coffee Lake line-up for low-to-mid-range builds.

I feel at the point Coffee Lake 6 core chips and non-refresh chipsets are readily available they will be competing against 12LP based Zen+ chips that again change the landscape.

Related dig by AMD:
https://twitter.com/AMDRyzen/status/915977053463343104

 

[StereoVsn]

So I was at Microcenter tonight getting PCIE SATA3 and USB 3.1 cards and instead walked out with Ryzen 1700, Gigabyte X370 Gaming K7 and 16GB Corsair DDR4 3000mhz RAM for about $600. I justified it thinking that I would have spent $120-130 otherwise anyway .

Now to overclocking guides and such. Figure I will shoot for 3.9 or so.

 

[JohnnyFootball]

Really feels like the lack of low/mid-tier boards for the Coffee Lake line-up is what is holding them back. That, and the lack of stock. Once the i5-8400 can be paired with a cheaper H370/B370 instead of a Z370, I think I'd more strongly be recommending people look into the Coffee Lake line-up for low-to-mid-range builds.

Coffee Lake seems like a stop gap that was released solely as a response to AMD as opposed to the next step for Intel.

 

[Mr Swine]

Does anyone own a AX370 gaming k3 motherboard? I want to over lock my CPU to 3.9GHZ but I simply can’t find any guide to do so. And i’m Quiet disappointed in my MOBO choice. Wish I didn’t buy this one

 

[Tomasoares]

The Ryzen 5 1600 is a really good CPU, it's a great idea for gaming! What other games do you play and what frame-rates do you wish to target? Also, what other things do you do with your PC?

The i5 8400 and 8600K look like great options too if they fit your budget! From the reviews I've seen the i5 8400 is a strong performer and appears to be able to run all of the six cores at 3.8GHz, however it lacks SMT and loses to the Ryzen 5 1600X in workloads that rely heavily on multi-threaded performance. However the gaming performance I've seen so far appears to be mostly in the favour of the i5 8400.

If the next generation of Ryzen CPUs are supported on the current chipsets then that will likely be the most future proof platform with regards to future CPU compatibility.

Paul's Hardware - 8700K vs 1800X, i5 8400, 1600X & 7700K
KitGuru - Intel Core i7-8700K and Core i5-8400 Review
PCPer - Intel Core i7-8700K and Core i5-8400 Review
Overclockers Club - Intel 8th Generation Core i7 8700K & Core i5 8400 Review

Thanks!
Looks like that i5 is definetly in interesting coice, although they're off my budget (at least here on Brazil, where everything is quite expensive)

 

[Kaako]

So I was at Microcenter tonight getting PCIE SATA3 and USB 3.1 cards and instead walked out with Ryzen 1700, Gigabyte X370 Gaming K7 and 16GB Corsair DDR4 3000mhz RAM for about $600. I justified it thinking that I would have spent $120-130 otherwise anyway .

Now to overclocking guides and such. Figure I will shoot for 3.9 or so.

Nice. For that price, you can't go wrong with that build. Great performance and value per dollar. New build time is the best time.

 

[JohnnyFootball]

I feel at the point Coffee Lake 6 core chips and non-refresh chipsets are readily available they will be competing against 12LP based Zen+ chips that again change the landscape.

Related dig by AMD:
https://twitter.com/AMDRyzen/status/915977053463343104

Yes.

That is a HUGE advantage for AMD. As I have said being able to upgrade in pieces is the main turn on for me and using Ryzen.

 

[StereoVsn]

Nice. For that price, you can't go wrong with that build. Great performance and value per dollar. New build time is the best time.

That's what I kind of figured. Now I am double guessing myself though and thinking if I should change the board or get higher clocked RAM since he latter has large impact on Ryzen from my understanding.

 

[Durante]

I finished my first Ryzen build a few days ago:

This is the first time I built a computer for some specific purpose rather than being my main gaming, development, and everything else system. That's why it has more money put into its SSD and RAM than any other component.

Build was rather trouble-free except for the mainboard needing a bios upgrade to get even close to running the memory at its advertised specs. (And even so, it only runs stably at 2.8GHz rather than 3)

(the nondescript boxes in the back are 2 HDDs for Raid 1 storage)

That is a HUGE advantage for AMD. As I have said being able to upgrade in pieces is the main turn on for me and using Ryzen.

I really don't see it. By the time you can make an actually meaningful CPU upgrade you'll also want a new platform.

 

[RumblingRosco]

I really don't see it. By the time you can make an actually meaningful CPU upgrade you'll also want a new platform.

It's an advantage, but only for a small subset of consumers because of exactly the reason you've mentioned.

 

[Paragon]

I finished my first Ryzen build a few days ago: http://abload.de/img/4uk7y.jpg
This is the first time I built a computer for some specific purpose rather than being my main gaming, development, and everything else system. That's why it has more money put into its SSD and RAM than any other component.

Nice. What's the purpose of it?

I really don't see it. By the time you can make an actually meaningful CPU upgrade you'll also want a new platform.

That's what people say, but I regretted not upgrading my i5-2500K to an i7-3770K when they were new, and most people with 6 and 7 series processors wish they could upgrade to an 8-series processor with an extra two cores.
I have every intention of upgrading my R7-1700X to whatever the fastest thing is that current AM4 boards will take, until DDR5 and PCIe 5 is here.

 

[Irobot82]

I made some starter gaming PCs for my kids using Ryzen 3 1200's. Being able to one day upgrade that up to an 8 or 6 core in a few years is a huge plus.

 

[BeeDog]

This might be the wrong place to ask, but I hope it's alright:

I am gonna build a new PC soon, not really for gaming but mainly for music production (Ableton & FL Studio + tons of synths/plug-ins). Running that kind of environment, is it better for me to look for Ryzen solutions or the upcoming i7 CPUs? Don't really care much for gaming performance, mainly looking at utility/application (multithreading) performance.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Paragon]

This might be the wrong place to ask, but I hope it's alright:
I am gonna build a new PC soon, not really for gaming but mainly for music production (Ableton & FL Studio + tons of synths/plug-ins). Running that kind of environment, is it better for me to look for Ryzen solutions or the upcoming i7 CPUs? Don't really care much for gaming performance, mainly looking at utility/application (multithreading) performance.
Thanks in advance.

As I understood it, many of these types of programs are heavily reliant on single-threaded performance for most tasks.
I don't know about Ableton & FL Studio specifically, but you're probably better off with Intel.

 

[BeeDog]

As I understood it, many of these types of programs are heavily reliant on single-threaded performance for most tasks.
I don't know about Ableton & FL Studio specifically, but you're probably better off with Intel.

Yeah, your post and some further Google searching seems to strongly indicate music software focuses on single-threaded performance. Intel it is then, many thanks!

 

[Micael]

I finished my first Ryzen build a few days ago:

This is the first time I built a computer for some specific purpose rather than being my main gaming, development, and everything else system. That's why it has more money put into its SSD and RAM than any other component.

Build was rather trouble-free except for the mainboard needing a bios upgrade to get even close to running the memory at its advertised specs. (And even so, it only runs stably at 2.8GHz rather than 3)

(the nondescript boxes in the back are 2 HDDs for Raid 1 storage)

I really don't see it. By the time you can make an actually meaningful CPU upgrade you'll also want a new platform.

Had the same issue with the ram on mine, I suspect 1 or 2 more updates to the XMP profile related stuff and motherboards will get there. The only ram that seems to be doing the trick right now for everyone is ram with samsung chips.

Fortunately in my case I ended up returning the 16gb of corsair ram I had bought for 32gb of gskill ram due to a price mistake on amazon (ended up paying just like 50€ more for 32gb) and these new ones work pretty ok at the 3200mhz after a very slight voltage tweak, while my last ones wouldn't reach 3200mhz regardless of what I did to them.

"I really don't see it. By the time you can make an actually meaningful CPU upgrade you'll also want a new platform." while not entirely untrue, certainly not when talking about intel, AMD here does have the advantage that they didn't lock the i7 stuff behind a different motherboard socket, so for people that might go with a more low end AMD ryzen, they can then later get a 1800x or what ever next processor comes along second hand for pretty cheap, making for a pretty meaningful upgrade, in the past intel used to have something like this, when they still allowed OC of xenon processors on their i7 motherboards.
With that being said I really wouldn't be making any hardware purchase based on way down the line upgrade-ability, that is fantasy and usually a waste of money.

 

[LelouchZero]

This might be the wrong place to ask, but I hope it's alright:

I am gonna build a new PC soon, not really for gaming but mainly for music production (Ableton & FL Studio + tons of synths/plug-ins). Running that kind of environment, is it better for me to look for Ryzen solutions or the upcoming i7 CPUs? Don't really care much for gaming performance, mainly looking at utility/application (multithreading) performance.

Thanks in advance.

Yeah, your post and some further Google searching seems to strongly indicate music software focuses on single-threaded performance. Intel it is then, many thanks!

Hey, I'm not sure if you've seen this already but The Tech Report did some Digital audio workstation performance testing for the Ryzen 7 CPUs, as well as the i7 8700K, 7700K, 4790K, 3770K and the 2600K.

The Tech Report - i7-8700K review - Digital audio workstation performance

We used the latest version of the Reaper DAW for Windows as the platform for our tests. To simulate a demanding workload, we tested each CPU with a 24-bit depth and 96-KHz sampling rate, and at two ASIO buffer depths: a punishing 64 and a slightly-less-punishing 128. In response to popular demand, we're also testing the same buffer depths at a sampling rate of 48 KHz. We added VSTs or notes of polyphony to each session until we started hearing popping or other audio artifacts. We used Focusrite's Scarlett 2i2 audio interface and the latest version of the company's own ASIO driver for monitoring purposes.

 

[dr_rus]

I really don't see it. By the time you can make an actually meaningful CPU upgrade you'll also want a new platform.

There's one apparent use case for a stable platform guarantee: someone low on cash can get Ryzen 3 today and upgrade to Ryzen 2 8C next year.

Generally though, if you go with the best a platform has from the start (not the same as most expensive mind you), it's highly unlikely that you would get anything from upgrading this CPU to a new one in 1-2 years and thus this compatibility would be very much useless to you. So I wouldn't call it "huge" but it's nice to have sometimes.

 

[RumblingRosco]

There's one apparent use case for a stable platform guarantee: someone low on cash can get Ryzen 3 today and upgrade to Ryzen 2 8C next year.

Generally though, if you go with the best a platform has from the start (not the same as most expensive mind you), it's highly unlikely that you would get anything from upgrading this CPU to a new one in 1-2 years and thus this compatibility would be very much useless to you. So I wouldn't call it "huge" but it's nice to have sometimes.

Yeah, this is where I'm at. I love my Ryzen 1700 and would be surprised if I upgrade it in the next two years. Ryzen 2 in 2019 would have to have an absolutely massive IPC/single-threaded improvement to make me able to justify an upgrade.

 

[Durante]

Nice. What's the purpose of it?

It's still multi-purpose, just not all-purpose

It's a

• Development machine (hence the 8 Ryzen cores)
• Asset build system (hence the extremely fast SSD and amount of RAM)
• AMD GPU compatibility testing system (hence the AMD GPU )

Asset builds are around 3 times faster on this than on my main system (after rewriting the toolchain a bit to parallelize the process) thanks to the throughput and IOPS of the SSD. Which means they are now down to ~7 hours for a full rebuild, which is a huge improvement over ~22 (since it means you can run it overnight and actually be done in the morning).

 

[RumblingRosco]

AMD/Ryzen crew, just wanted to say I appreciated all the good discussions. I was late to finding this thread, but it was very helpful and really a nice ride. I'll be bowing out of GAF within the next few days as I tie up some loose ends, but just wanted to say good bye and thank you for all the discussion/help.

 

[Papacheeks]

AMD/Ryzen crew, just wanted to say I appreciated all the good discussions. I was late to finding this thread, but it was very helpful and really a nice ride. I'll be bowing out of GAF within the next few days as I tie up some loose ends, but just wanted to say good bye and thank you for all the discussion/help.

Hope to see you around on possibly other forums and talk AMD shop.

Good luck.