When we first began benchmarking Ryzen CPUs, we already had a suspicion that disabling simultaneous multithreading might give a performance boost in games, mirroring the effects of disabling hyperthreading (Intel’s specific twist on SMT) when it was first introduced. Although hyperthreading now has a generally positive effect in our benchmarks, there was a time when it wasn’t accounted for by developers—presumably partly related to what’s happening to AMD now.

In fact, turning SMT off offered relatively minor gaming performance increases outside of Total War: Warhammer—but any increase at all is notable when turning off a feature that’s designed to be positive. Throughout our testing, the most dramatic change in results we saw were from overclocking, specifically on the low stock frequency R7 1700 ($330). This led many readers to ask questions like “why didn’t you test with an overclock and SMT disabled at the same time?” and “how much is Intel paying you?” to which the answers are “time constraints” and “not enough, apparently,” since we’ve now performed those tests. Testing a CPU takes a lot of time. Now, with more time to work on Ryzen, we’ve finally begun revisiting some EFI, clock behavior, and SMT tests.

As with any new technology, the early days of Ryzen have been filled with a number of quirks as manufacturers and developers scramble to support AMD’s new architecture.

For optimal performance, AMD has asked reviewers to update to the latest BIOS version and to set Windows to “high performance” mode, which raises the minimum processor state to its base frequency (normally, the CPU would downclock when idle). These are both reasonable allowances to make for new hardware, although high-performance mode should only be a temporary fix. More on that later, though we’ve already explained it in the R7 1700 review.

This is quick-and-dirty testing. This is the kind of information we normally keep internal for research as we build a test platform, as it's never polished enough to publish and primarily informs our reviewing efforts. Given the young age of Ryzen, we're publishing our findings just to add data to a growing pool. More data points should hopefully assist other reviewers and manufacturers in researching performance “anomalies” or differences.

The below is comprised of early numbers we ran on performance vs. balanced mode, Gigabyte BIOS revisions, ASUS' board, and clock behavior when under various boost states. Methodology won't be discussed here, as it's really not any different from our 1700 and 1800X review, other than toggling of the various A/B test states defined in headers below.

AMD’s R7 1700 CPU ($330) immediately positions itself in a more advantaged segment than its $500 1800X companion, which proved poor value for pure gaming machines in our tests. Of course, as we said previously (page 5, 8), the 1800X makes more sense for our tested production tasks than the $1000 6900K when considering price:performance. For gaming, both are poor choices; the 1800X performs on par with i5 CPUs in game benchmarks, and the 6900K is $1000. It’s about value, not raw performance: Multiplicative increments in price to achieve performance equivalence (gaming) to cheaper chips is not good value. Before venturing into the 1440p/4K argument, we’d encourage you to read this review. The R7 1700 – by nature of that very argument, but also by nature of a trivial overclock – effectively invalidates the 1800X for gaming machines, finally granting AMD its champion for Ryzen.

We are also restricting this review to one page, as a significant portion of readers had unfortunately skipped straight to the gaming results page without context. It’s not as good for formatting or page load times, but it’ll hopefully ensure the other content is at least scrolled past, even if still ignored altogether.

Enough of that.

In this AMD R7 1700 review, we look at the price-to-performance of AMD’s new $330 CPU, which was explicitly marketed as an i7-7700K counter in price/performance when presented at AMD’s tech day. We’re benchmarking the R7 1700 in our usual suite of gaming, synthetic, and render tasks, quickly validating average auto voltages and temperatures along the way. Overclocks and SMT toggling further complicate testing, but provide a look at how the R7 1700 is capable of eliminating the gap between AMD’s own flagship and its more affordable SKU.

We already explained this amply in our AMD Ryzen R7 1800X review, primarily on pages 2 and 3 (but also throughout the article), but it's worth highlighting in video form for folks who prefer not to read articles. It's unfortunate that the test methodology and logistical pages were largely overlooked in the review -- most folks just jumped straight to the conclusion or gaming results, sadly -- so we are highlighting again, in video format, some of the things discussed on those pages.

As stated several times in this new video, we strongly encourage checking out the article. We are delaying our R7 1700 review by a day because of the addition of this video to our release schedule. There's not much more to say here, so we'll just embed that below:

Intel has enjoyed relatively unchallenged occupancy of the enthusiast CPU market for several years now. If you mark the FX-8350 as the last major play prior to subsequent refreshes (like the FX-8370), that marks the last major AMD CPU launch as 2012. Of course, later launches in the FX-9000 series and FX-8000 series updates have been made, but there has not been an architectural push since the Bulldozer/Piledriver/Steamroller series.

AMD Ryzen, then, has understandably generated an impregnable wall of excitement from the enthusiast community. This is AMD’s chance to recover a market it once dominated, back in the Athlon x64 days, and reestablish itself in a position that minimally targets parity in price to performance. That’s all AMD needs: Parity. Or close to it, anyway, while maintaining comparable pricing to Intel. With Intel’s stranglehold lasting as long as it has, builders are ready to support an alternative in the market. It’s nice to claim “best” on some charts, like AMD has done with Cinebench, but AMD doesn’t have to win: they have to tie. The momentum to shift is there.

Even RTG competitor nVidia will benefit from this upgrade cycle. That’s not something you hear a lot – nVidia wanting AMD to do well with a launch – but here, it makes sense. A dump of new systems into the ecosystem means everyone experiences revenue growth. People need to buy new GPUs, new cases, new coolers, and new RAM to accompany any moves to Ryzen. Misalignment of Vega and Ryzen make sense in the sense of not smothering one announcement with the other, but does mean that AMD is now rapidly moving toward Vega’s launch. Those R7 CPUs don’t necessarily fit best with an RX 480; it’s a fine card, just not something you stick with a $400-$500 CPU. Two major launches in short order, then, one of which potentially drives system refreshes.

AMD must feel the weight borne by Atlas at this moment.

In this ~11,000 word review of AMD’s Ryzen R7 1800X, we’ll look at FPS benchmarking, Premiere & Blender workloads, thermals and voltage, and logistical challenges. (Update: 1700 review here).

With the impending release of AMD Ryzen comes a wave of related product reveals. CyberPower is now offering preorders for several varieties of prebuilt PCs that take advantage of the new CPUs.

The four models below were described in CyberPower’s press release, and an additional four can be found on their website: the AMD Ryzen 7X Configurator, Mega Special III, Mega Special IV, and Winter Gaming Special II. Each of these configurations can be customized with alternate or additional parts, including “high-performance gaming memory, solid state drives, graphics cards, and gaming peripherals.” During the pre-sale, Corsair Hydro H60 AIO liquid coolers are included as a free upgrade, considering the limited launch-day support for AM4. CyberPower will in fact do a general “Pro OC” for a price, but there are plenty of free resources online for those interested.

Following months of nonstop leaks and speculation, AMD today has officially announced its Ryzen R7 lineup, base specifications, and pricing for 8C/16T products. AMD is expected to follow-up later with lower-end SKU launches – if the leaks are to be believed, that’d be R3 and R5 – leaving today’s focus entirely on the 8C/16T “R7” lineup. The three primary CPU SKUs announced are the R7 1700, R7 1700X, and R7 1800X (in order of price/performance), each of which we hope to test in short order.

To get the immediate question out of the way: The processors will be made available on March 2 (shelf availability) at the following prices:

We’ve got a lot of Ryzen news confirmations leading into the product’s inevitable launch, and will today be focusing on the stock coolers, ASUS X370 motherboards, and die shots of the Ryzen architecture.

And there’ll be more soon, of course!

We previously noted that some motherboards at CES contained text indicating support for an AMD “S3.0 Radiator,” which we could then only assume would be a stock cooler bundled with high-end Ryzen CPUs. This was plainly on display at CES, though we couldn’t get any official information on the cooler from AMD.

AMD may have inadvertently given out information today that could narrow down the release window for their upcoming Ryzen CPUs. The possible release date information was provided by a panel description for the upcoming Game Developers Conference (GDC), where AMD will host a panel detailing Zen optimization techniques for programmers. GDC 2017 takes place from February 27-March 3. This coupled with the AMD panel description from the GDC website (and our own digging while at CES) tells us that Ryzen will ship at the end of February.

In the original panel description (that has since been changed), AMD was asking session attendees to join their “Game Engineering team members for an introduction to the recently-launched AMD Ryzen CPU.” “Recently-launched” is the key phrase and indicates that the Ryzen CPU would likely already be available prior to GDC 2017, which again is February 27-March 3.

AMD’s Ryzen platform is on its march to the launch window – likely February of 2017 – and will be pushing non-stop information until its time of delivery. For today, we’re looking at the CPU and chipset architectures in greater depth, following-up on yesterday’s motherboard reveal.

First, let’s clear-up nomenclature confusion: “Zen” is still the AMD next generation CPU architecture name. “Ryzen” is the family of CPUs, comparable to Intel’s “Core” family in some loose ways. Each Ryzen CPU will exist on the Zen architecture, and each Ryzen CPU will have its own individual alphanumeric identifier (just like always).