From my limited understanding of Ryzen, its a CPU that is brand new and motherboards manufacturers had only 3 weeks to work on the bios side of things (bare in minds that Intels enthusiast platform is X99 is still broadwell-E, and that is 2.5 generations behind the current gaming flagship, the 7700K).
So, I think that if you only want to go gaming, the 7700k is better today. Amd "may" improve their CPU or motherboards may improve but that is not a guarantee.
In terms of encoding, streaming and everything else Ryzen does look very good and it performs better than Intel in performance per dollar.
I personally will wait a bit longer and make my decision for next upgrade later.
In terms of core count vs core speeds (and also instructions per core efficiency), people were talking about going higher than 4 cores in 2006. We are at 2016, and still no high core count Games are out.
Why? Because its damn hard to code a game for many cores. This is because even if you manage to perfectly (and this is almost impossible) split the work load between cores in a particular game, you still have to:
A) Make sure Windows understands that correctly and uses the resources correctly. (So Microsoft has to do its job right as well, and that does not depend on you) B) Make sure that antivirus, firewall, etc (additional load from other sources) does not mess up the core load balance. (Again, outside of your control). C) Make sure that the shortest command sent to a core is done fast enough that it wont block other cores from going on with their next command (this is a problem even in GPU-CPU communication, HDD/SSD-CPU, RAM-CPU, Kernel-CPU, USB Inputs-CPU. Basically what most people call battlenecks) D) Manage each different hardware set up so it works balanced with the CPU and the load it has. E) Make sure it will still work well on lower core count CPUs (other way you wont sell your game to a lot of potential customers).
On the flipside, faster cores means.... its just faster. Thats it. No additional coding, no additional balance or hardware.... you see why this is the easier thing for game developers.
The good news (or bad) is that the core speed is limited by the hardware itself. So eventually there will be no way but to increase core counts and balance loads. Now, when will that happen, is anyone's guess.
Thats my take on it.
I will personally wait a bit and most likely go for Ryzen. Either 1 or dual socket Ryzen (1700). no rush here :D.
On March 05 2017 15:50 Cyro wrote: CPU performance is also at a relative standstill compared to GPU performance. We've got maybe +40% in 6 years between the 2600k and 7700k; in that same time period the gap between the 680 and 1080ti is more like +300%. It's easy to overpower GPU-bound games by brute force 2-5 years later but a 7700k still struggles at times with some older titles that were CPU demanding in their day.
I'm curious. I did hear that the performance improvement between 2nd to 7th generation is around 10% or less per generation. What's the improvement between my ancient 1st gen and the 2nd gen? My understanding is that it is more substantial.
It was a fair jump and it all came from core performance so it pushed benchmarks up across the board. A mix of performance per clock gains and increased clock speeds at both stock and overclocks - around 20-25% IIRC
Digitalfoundry review that i've been waiting for. So far looks like some good comparisons and large anomalies w/ Ryzen
~0-7% gains when going from 6 core to 8 core as well, that's +33.3% more cores. That shows off how underutilized 8c16t actually is for these games and how close the much cheaper 6 core version could be
Excited about the Ryzen 5's coming out in less than a month. The i5 7600k is still gonna beat it in gaming, but it's cool for us, the consumer, that there are different products that do different things at various prices out there. I'm a little bit torn between the 4 core and the 6 core. I think I'll go with the Ryzen 5 1600 (6 cores 12 threads at $219 USD)
For motherboards, when I see something like "Supports DDR4-3200+(OC) Memory," does that mean that 3200 RAM will work without me fiddling with anything? I sometimes see things like "Supports 2400, 2677 (OC)" and I'm not really sure what that means
This means that if I buy 2x8GB DDR4 RAM at 3200 MHz, I can just stick it in and it'll just run at that speed, right? I don't have to OC or tinker with anything?
My current processor lasted me 6-7 years and counting (i5 760k) and I'm expecting my next upgrade to last me about that long or longer, especially considering how slowly CPUs have been progressing lately. So I'm OK with splurging a little bit on more expensive RAM
On March 19 2017 05:02 Purind wrote: Ah, so just to be clear, when I'm shopping for RAM, I should look for 2666, and if possible overclock above that?
I don't mind tinkering with things. Just wanna make sure I don't buy the wrong parts
No
The overclocked part is the CPU memory controller (specced for up to 2666mhz) that has to run at 3200mhz or whatever to match the RAM sticks. You should buy sticks of the speed that you want to run
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We have confirmation from AMD that there are no silly games going to be played with Ryzen 5. The six-core parts will be a strict 3+3 combination, while the four-core parts will use 2+2. This will be true across all CPUs, ensuring a consistent performance throughout.