AMD Ryzen discussion

Intel announced their high core-count Ryzen competitors today.

The 1800X competitor, the i7-7820X, is $599 with 8 cores/16 threads of Skylake-X cores. It will have a nice IPC advantage over Ryzen, and it has much higher clocks. It boosts to 4.5Ghz natively, and can likely overclock a bit higher than that. So performance-wise, it should smoke the 1800X. But Intel isn’t competing on price-- the Ryzen 1800X MSRP is $499 (and sells right now for $460.)

The 1700X competitor, the i7-7800X, is $380 with 6 cores/12 threads also of Skylake-X cores. It natively boosts to 4.0Ghz (which again is the absolute max overclock for Ryzen) and can almost definitely be overclocked to 4.5Ghz. It technically comes in $20 cheaper than the 1700X, which has a MSRP of $400, but you can actually buy a 1700X for like $350 so Intel isn’t directly competing on price here either.

Intel knows they have superior products here, so they are pricing them a bit over AMD. This is merciful of them. They could afford to match AMD’s prices and completely obliterate their competition.

Intel is also “recommending” liquid cooling for the i9s. I’m not sure when my system build is going to get done exactly (just, “this year”), but this is certainly welcome news for when that takes place. The I7-7820X is going to be too hard to pass up, I suspect. Really curious to see where the upper i9s end up spec-wise. Tech Report things the 7920X and up will come in at 165W TDP.

Bear in mind, more active cores under load = lower clock speed for all of them. Probably won’t matter for gaming since virtually nothing loads 4 cores effectively much less 6, 8 or 12…

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11472/dell-launches-amdpowered-inspiron-gaming-desktop

So after working a second job for 5 months I have decided to blow part of the money on a badly needed new PC for gaming. I can’t afford high end, and have no desire to build my own, and the local place that does build doesn’t really impress me.

What is your thought of this Dell system?

Alienware Alpha

versus this Ryzen system…

http://deals.dell.com/mpp/productdetail/fb4

The end cost on both is about the same. I play RPG,s …no MMO or multi-player stuff. The Ryzen seems to score much higher when the system is plugged into places like this…

http://gamesystemrequirements.com/game/dark-souls-iii#cresult

So any thoughts?

The RX-570 will absolutely smoke that GTX960. It is literally 50% faster. That Ryzen CPU is much, much faster than the T-series i5 in the alpha, but that matters less in games.

Only advantage of the alpha is its much smaller physical size.

The Alpha is great for what it is intended - to be a HTPC plugged into your TV. If that’s your use case, get it. If you want a traditional PC experience with a monitor and at a computer desk, there’s no reason to get something that small. I have the original Alpha and it is great for what it sets out to be; but at this point the parts are a bit dated (ie, overpriced) and the form factor life is questionable.

Well the original alpha had a 750ti, which is really ancient now, albeit roughly equivalent to current-gen non-Pro consoles. The GTX960 is dramatically more performant, and is a great 1080p GPU. But the RX-570 is a huge jump in performance from that.

Sorry I cross weave thoughts - I have the old one, but also the current one is dated as well (it needs 1050 leve upgrades).

So it sounds like you prefer the Ryzen option?

I wondered about cooling as well. The Alienware option looks like a heat machine, whereas the AMD setup is more traditional and is designed to handle the heat better.

Okay, I wondered about that too.

I asked about possible PC’s in a thread about a year ago (yea, I badly need a new PC), but the second job was late in coming. At that time the Alienware option came up, but the “non-traditional” aspect of it worried me. I have no plans to plug it into a TV.

This is the size of the Alienware Alpha:

Unless you specifically want to play on your TV the Alienware costs more and performs worse that than Ryzen box. The Alpha has DVI out only. It doesn’t have a headphone jack. It really is meant to be used with a TV.

So for your use case i think the Inspiron would be a great deal.

Thanks…damn that is small. :)

Definitely get the ryzen box yes.

Regarding the alpha, yeah, it should be quite a bit cheaper. If their $899 configuration currently selling for $749 came with a GTX 1050ti and cost $499, the same as a PS4 Pro, that would definitely be an attractive option.

I remember a couple years ago you could pick up the old alpha for as little as $250, and that was a real steal even with its anemic 750ti GPU.

Dell actually ran an ad for this system during something I watched over the weekend on TV.

And yea, I bought it. Delivery do at the end of the month. :)

I guess this can kind of go in this thread?


So apparently the Threadripper is a ridiculously badass processor, crushing Intel’s offerings? It’d be nice to see AMD get back in the game.

Ryzen crushes intel for the money too, in very specific usecases where you need tons of CPU cores. In other words, not for gaming or the usual desktop stuff.

AMD needs to do two things.

  1. Release competitive mobile CPUs at 35w/15w/7w
  2. Improve their IPC by a good bit

#1 is far more important than #2. Vanishingly few people buy desktops these days. Money is in volume, and volume is in laptops.

Anyone have an opinion on Ryzen for straming? It seems like it’d be the best bet to get a 1700 or 1700x if you’re a streamer. @Jason_McMaster ?

@tomchick was running into major dropped frame problems the other night on a stream. He eventually sorted it by dropping bit rate, but now it’s more artifacty. If you’re on an older i7, or worse, an i5, it seems like a Ryzen 5 series would be the ticket.

For that specific use-case there might be an argument for a 6-core Ryzen but if you’re buying a new CPU anyway, an i7-7700k will play and stream any game just fine.

If you both stream and render video for YouTube, that’s a different story altogether. The extra cores are immensely valuable for content creation.

I’m pretty happy with my i7 4770/GTX 1080 Founders combo, but I have thought about it. At the end of the day, I don’t trust AMD due to some issues I’ve had in the past. I’m curious but I’ll wait a bit.