It's a great CPU. I just hope that gamers will understand that it is a great gaming processor.
AMD seem not to understand that they will only buy things that are named after at least three predatory creatures, a torture method, and a misspelt version of the word "extreme" .

Voted hot for the post and for AMD's willingness to buck the trend.

PS4 owners: I've checked for you, it won't fit.

Overall as a cpu it is juts flat out better given the price ranges.

Instead of a 4 core 8 thread i7 you can run an 8 core 16 thread Ryzen for the same price. Play the same game twice over with no performance penalty, even if it runs slightly worse as people seem overly keen to mention. Not mention overclocking is good and the provided coolers are significantly better than what Intel give. Use that saving on a better GPU and really knock your performance upwards. Lets not forget about multitasking(recording video, using audio software and browsing whilst playing a MMo for example!). Benchmarks arent realistic in this sense and its why recommendations are given to Ryzen.

Its win win on the ryzen side.

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/amd-ryzen-7-1700-305-260-6-delivery-refundable-amazon-fr-2682884
15-20£ better priced

An overclocked FX6300 has kept me playing games at maximum settings for several years now and moving from a HD 7870 Tahiti to a 6GB GTX 1060 has let me retain this bargain CPU; I also expect I'll be able to play Prey at 1920x1080 res without issues using this 4 year old CPU that cost me £100 back then :sunglasses:

Something like this would be a good upgrade from my current beast, the 1055T.

Then you'll be aware there's plenty of Corsair AIO that work just fine, NZXT is the same. Noctua have had brackets since release.

If your want to use an existing cooler you may need to consider that, but if you're buying new it's not an issue.

I'm aware. But many will want to use a premium air cooler or AIO liquid cooler to push for a higher OC/lower temps to unlock more performance from the chip to enhance it's overall value proposition.

I do want to upgrade to Ryzen (upgrading my haswell rig to a 4790k would cost up to £255, plus I could also use a set of 2400mhz DDR3 also), so I feel it makes sense in my scenario.

However, I do want to sit it out for a while. Right now there are very few AM4 brackets for coolers and the ones that are available will set you back an additional tenner. Also I want to hold out and see if the teething problems the arch is having with DDR4 ram is resolved in the coming months.

Nic

I was under the same impression as well. The 6700k and 7700k are better for minimum frames. If anyone has any evidence to refute this it would be welcome as as I'm thinking about an upgrade to a 6700k.

From everything I've seen Ryzen is fine for gaming at 60hz. If you're not gaming at [email protected]+ you're probably better off spending the money on your graphics card. If you do demanding tasks other than gaming with your computer then Ryzen might make sense as well.

EDIT: TechReport have done some pretty extensive testing here:

https://techreport.com/review/31724/amd-ryzen-5-1600x-and-ryzen-5-1500x-cpus-reviewed-part-one/6

They do far more analysis on frametime than any other site I've seen.

And? What's the issue with expressing my opinion using sources?

I mean, what points here are invalid? You say "funky reasoning" but surely you can point to one of the reasons and *easily* defeat poor reason?

Pound for pound? 289.99 isn't cheap, I don't know how Ryzen jumps in and people start praising 300-500 pound CPUs.

Unless you have a specific workload, Ryzen is not an 'upgrade'.

People talk about gaming in a Ryzen thread, and then begin to discuss 'minimum frames' and I refute it, yet that's 'funky'? Wouldn't 'funky' be making unsupported claims?

I went through several of the recent ryzen deals and you are punctually trying to convince people that intel's offering are better, coming up with all sorts of funky reasoning and whatever fits your narrative, and ignoring anyone that brings notable points. I smell fanboying. FYI I upgraded my previous 5820k work box with a 1700 with twice the ram basically for free, as x99 parts still yield very high prices on the second hand market, and I could not be happier.

On the deal, one of the best cpus pound per pound, even cheaper. Heat added.

You're driving the thread off topic - I don't buy on a budget, I have money. If I wanted to buy something really cheap I'd probably just get an FX-8350, with an MSI 970 board, 16GB of RAM and an RX480, all for under £500.

Less than 500 combined? That's ignoring Mobo+Ram.

Here's a question, for gaming.

You got 500 quid. What do you buy?

You seem to suggest 480+1700.

How about: 1070+i5 7500? (running nearly exactly 500 right now) or 480+1700? I think it's an easy choice putting the extra 120 into a GPU rather than the CPU for gaming.

Or skip the 1700 and the 1070 altogether.

Pick up the Pentium G4400 for 50 quid and a AMD 470 for 150. 200 bucks on a sick 1080p gaming rig.

Not any different from people pairing a GTX 970 with an 6th Gen intel. CPU's at this level cost more than budget graphics cards. Perfectly reasonable combination on a budget, price vs performance RX480 1700 would slaughter most games at high and cost less than £500 combined.

I backed it up with a source, GamerNexus's Ryzen review, have a look before doubling down on your 'min frame are better on ryzen' comments.

I think this is the review: http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamersnexus.net%2Fhwreviews%2F2822-amd-ryzen-r7-1800x-review-premiere-blender-fps-benchmarks%3Fshowall%3D1&usg=AFQjCNHN16ShVvaD9JXtyEgnh3eOfWrSxQ&cad=rja

Also, your comments about 'many games supporting multi core gaming' is fairly untrue at present.

Also, I do find it interesting that you would consider a 289.99 CPU 'budget'? To me, this CPU is enthusiast level at that price. If you are looking for budget, the pentium chips are really good value at around 60-80 quid. But surely an rx 480, costing around 180, doesn't make much sense pairing with a 289.99 CPU.

I didn't claim it to be gospel.
It's very likely that the Ryzen Chips under heavy load would perform better in terms of raw processing power, notable, frames per second. I mean it does have 8 cores and there are plenty of games taking advantage of multithreads now.
I don't see how you could claim one way or the other - FPS would depend almost entirely on numerous OTHER factors outside of CPU power, notably GPU and RAM.

If you read my post properly you'll see that I said MINIMUM frames would increase marginally, that's not the same as AVERAGE as you said. Average is always going to be higher on an I7 because of the top end performance power of these chips.

Ryzen can still beat out an I7 chip on games with multithreading under heavy load though(on minimum frames): - It only becomes much more noticeable on machines with much weaker background hardware where the CPU is doing more pull work than the GPU itself. Of course this is where AMD thrive - on cheaper alternatives to intel so for someone who is running an RX480 and a Ryzen 1700, they are probably getting slightly better frames (5-10%) than the same machine with a GTX 970/980 and I7 6700K under extremely heavy loads.

Machines are just fickle like that and everyones machine will bench differently depending on branding and architecture.

Brazenly saying that Ryzen chips will always be slower than I7 chips on both minimum and average views is quite frankly, ignorance.

This isn't true. I don't know where this "lower average FPS but better Min Frames" discussion originated from, but there are plenty of reviews that include Min Frames, and the 6700k/7700k beat the Ryzen chips for Min and Average.

It's the perfect 'misinformation' to spread as you can't easily refute it with the average review.

Gamernexus did a pretty good review highlighting min frames.

Hardly anyone runs 8 core Ryzens though. It is enthusiast only and will be for a long time. A small percentage of gamers of a minute percentage of PC machines. Realistically if you are a major streamer and it's some big deal to you then yes, you can and should pay the £300+ for a 6 core Intel or 8 core Ryzen.

But I live in the real world where most people don't stream too seriously or buy expensive hardware specifically for it.

Most people that do stream casually have a much tighter budget, where most people have hardware constraints and where most people do just fine with hardware acceleration on even low end CPUs. It serves the purpose for the mainstream without expensive hardware.

You don't need to be a major time streamer to do things the right way.

Software encoding is always of better quality than hardware encoding at the same bitrate, why would you compromise the quality of your stream by choosing HW encode when running over Twitch?

Hardware encode has its place, especially given a CPU of limited capability, but given the right tool you can offer the better UX.

Anybody running higher end Ryzen shouldn't be choosing hardware encoding to stream.

IF you're a major time streamer that requires lots of in depth options for your stream and maximal quality, then you can use more CPU performance for higher quality at lower bitrates in something like OBS or Xsplit. Software wins.

But something like NVENC can really reduce CPU load here too, the tradeoff being the quality is weaker at lower bitrates. Saying that, IF you ARE a major streamer, then you'll probably have a kick ass net connection and run higher bitrates anyway at which point GPU/Hardware encoding (like Intel quicksync) works a treat....

So it really doesn't matter too much for most people. Shadow play links to twitch really easily and works really great for joe average streamer because it's quick, simple with reasonable quality and low performance impact.

Hardware acceleration is there for a reason. Throwing more dumb CPU cycles at it isn't the best way to do it for most people with limited hardware budgets. If it's a big deal for you then you should probably have an 8 core with a beast GPU and ultra fast internet etc...

Its a peace of mind thing tbh. If it can handle IBT,etc ok you can safely assume if can handle anything and probably at significantly lower temps. You never know when a game or something is going to put an unexpectedly high load on it even if just for a moment. I'd rather know its completely rock solid no matter what is thrown at it. They weren't the only things I ran to test it I also tested it with video encoding, 3Dmark and just playing some games such as Diablo 3(easy to run) and Rise of the Tomb Raider(more demanding). I only mentioned IBT and Realbench as they were the only 2 that it BSOD's on.

Yeah you quickly get to the point of diminishing returns for the extra volts and heat. Also if there could be any degradation of the CPU then the extra 100mhz or so is hardly worth it.

Whilst I do see some value of bench testing for stability I also have some reservations about it being the holy grail of necessary stability assurances.

The 6700k is a pretty damn good chip.

I visited my Son last night and he was encoding with a 3570k and that i5 at 4.5ghz was doing a mighty fine job, with Cuda support.

IIrc mine goes up to 1.344 to maintain a stable 4.6Ghz, looks like your chip is slightly better than mine at OCing. I noticed the same thing though that it too a significant jump in volts and heat to push from 4.5 to 4.6. I can also run stable 4.5Ghz at around 1.25. While stable at 4.6 I decided the extra 100Mhz weren't worth how much extra Voltage and heat it took and settled on 4.5. I've only ever managed to BSOD mine in the toughest setting on intel burn test and in realbench when I had it at [email protected], upping to 1.344 fixed it but it also increased the heat. Under extreme loads during intel burn test is was hitting 83-84 with a 212 evo. Out of curiosity I did try for 4.7 and gave up when I reached 1.44 and 93 degrees and that still wasn't enough.

I didn't remember correctly....



the above is totally stable and rock solid, has been for quite some time. At 4.5Ghz 1.25v under load is stable also.

Checking back just raising the multiplier to 46 and not touching the voltage it is stable but with LLC only on 4 it seems to drop very sightly in voltage and that might (?) be the time when heavily bench testing to get an odd error. Never a BSOD but either I up the LLC or just up the voltage slightly. Not gone into the detail to see which might be the issue, if indeed there is one.
With the voltage at the above it is rock solid and doesn't vary enough voltage wise to make any difference.

However I'm not sure if that should apply to normal usage though as it didn't error when encoding video etc but just a rare time when bench testing. But the voltage being used isn't excessive anyway.

I'd keep an eye on that at [email protected], thats a very low voltage for that speed. It usually takes somewhere between 1.31 and 1.4 to be 100% stable but it is possible you just have an exceptional chip. Mine takes close to 1.4. It can boot and I can use the PC at lower but under extreme load like the maximum setting on intel burn test or realbench it blue screens the PC. I know theres the arguement that they are unusually high loads and thats true, but if its not able to run balls to the wall its not really stable.

built my new server around this CPU, awesome performance.

may want to catch up with some of the latest news from hexus.net and some YouTube videos, there's already talks about certain games have improved between 10-15% just by a BIOS update.

Now idSoft talks about evening better gaming development with the Ryzen is very promising

If you're recording locally to then edit and upload HW encode is beneficial as you can increase the bitrate enough to offset the lower PQ, it removes the load from your CPU.

If you're streaming (which is the point you're making) using popular tools like OBS then you would always select software encoding to ensure you can provide a good enough feed to your audience, higher quality and higher FPS at the cost of CPU utilisation.

Not sure specifically how the 1700/6700k face off in the SW encoding stakes, but there's good reason to use SW if you're actually streaming games to Twitch/YT.

CPU-Z reports the 4.6Ghz at around 1.25v, or something like that IIRC. So yes pretty low voltage and thus little noise required for cooling.

For video conversion I use Xilisoft Video Converter Ultimate which supports the NVidia 1070 GPU for CUDA support and makes it a pretty good setup for my needs.

It is nice tho to see AMD back in the game.

Phenomenal CPU loving mine since I upgraded from my 6700k - Yes upgraded I strongly stand by the term as gameplay is smoother, and I can stream in high quality without dropping frames. My 6700k dropped frames so I was forced to use the crappy hardware encoder option.

4.6ghz is the average sort of OC for a 6700k without going mad on the voltage. I don't think any Ryzen gets too close in games at least with that sort of speed. For streaming I'm really not into it but I have tried recording and streaming with Shadow play and it's very fast even if you record in 4K.

I also use something called StaxRip for transcoding video. You can use an Nvidia GPU for H.264 or HEVC. It's brutally fast with a good Nvidia GPU compared to any CPU on something like handbrake, even an 8 core is no match for it......

Yes this is my understanding of it as well - The extra threads mean you get an increase in MINIMUM FPS (marginally) but the 6700K gives you a huge boost to MAXIMUM FPS.

For streamers I think it's still better to use a 6700k and use hardware accelerators, Nvidia have some great little applications themselves for boosting performance whilst streaming. Like I said, this CPU is not considered 'excellent' but it's still going to be a powerhouse when comparing PricevsPerformance.

6700k destroys 1700 in games.

If you are using heavy software streaming though it won't be as fast. But why you wouldn't use hardware accelerated I don't know, it is better quality for the power consumption and resource use. Nvidia Shadowplay is the dogs and GPUs are precisely the kind of hardware you want to use for video encoding, they are massively parallel.

In any case 1700 is an ok CPU for games, not amazing but not bad. I wouldn't buy it specifically for games, but it will do the job.

It's a great CPU. I just hope that gamers will understand that it is a great gaming processor.
AMD seem not to understand that they will only buy things that are named after at least three predatory creatures, a torture method, and a misspelt version of the word "extreme" .

Voted hot for the post and for AMD's willingness to buck the trend.

PS4 owners: I've checked for you, it won't fit.