AMD RYZEN 7 Trifecta

Final thoughts and Conclusion

The new AMD RYZEN CPU series is a huge breakthrough for AMD and is the first time in a long while that they have been able to put up a good hard fight with what Intel has to offer. In our tests, the RYZEN 7 series really proved just how potent it was with its 8 core and 16 threads and then when you pair this with the modern support that is natively designed into the RYZEN architecture, things like DDR4, USB3.1. As mentioned the greatest asset of RYZEN is a number of cores and threads, this is key because of a number of applications that are multithreaded and are best able to utilize what the AMD RYZEN has to offer. Now while AMD will not win any MHz wars with Intel, AMD has proved that you don’t need to as long as you can offer more cores and threads.

With its new 14nm FinFet architecture being unlocked from the factory, we were able to overclock all 3 CPUs utilizing 1.5V and we achieved impressive results across the line. However, we don’t recommend this voltage unless you have a powerful liquid cooling system that is capable of dissipating the heat efficiently. Using air-cooling we would advise keeping the voltage under 1.4V, however even without Overclocking the performance was still exemplary with all 3 CPUs and the chipset is capable of temporally Overclocking (XFR) itself to give it a needed boost.

However, all of this being said the RYZEN is not without its faults, the biggest fault that we have witnessed is with memory performance. Part of this we feel is to blame on the rush and utmost secrecy surrounding RYZEN meant that there was not a lot of time for Memory and Motherboard manufacturers to iron out these issues and have memory kits certified for use on RYZEN CPU’s. Overall we do not see this as such a huge issue since improvements in product offerings, drivers and bios updates are correcting this issue and we suspect that if we retested the CPUs in 6 months there would be noticeable improvements to all the benchmarks.

AMD has priced the 1700 at $329, 1700x $399 and finally the mighty 1800x at $499 and is designed to go toe to toe with everything Intel currently has to offer. AMD’s theory behind its pricing is that the vast majority of users will never spend more than 500 which is why you see all of the RYZEN 7 series priced below this price point. Even with the memory issues we experienced that we are sure will be worked out in the near future, we have decided to award the AMD RYZEN 7 series CPU our honorable golden bear award and we look forward to seeing its improvements in the future. Overall the RYZEN 7 series represents the first major threat to Intel’s dominance in the CPU market for performance chips.

Pros	Cons
8 Cores 16 Threads DDR4 USB3.1 14nm Architecture Unlocked Multiplier	Support for Memory still lacking

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