CPU/Mobo AMD Ryzen CPUs launched

[Jasku]

Well, I am absolutely torn too, was waiting to upgrade from my trusty Sandy bridge, if not anything I would urge folks to support AMD even if it means you may lose 5-10% performance (if your life doesnt depend on it), purely from a competition perspective, else Intel will have a monopoly sit on their rears and take all your money.

@vishalrao which mobo and ram kit did you order with it, once you get it, please do report on the ram speeds, I am considering the Asus Prime B350 with a 1700.

 

[vishalrao]

@Jasku - mobo is the ASUS Prime B350 Plus, RAM will be my current 2133 mhz 8x2 (16GB) G.Skill Ripjaws V which I had got for my current Skylake setup. Not sure if I will have anything interesting to report about RAM speeds since I have the basic kit But note that there is a new BIOS v503 for the mobo released 4-5 days ago which mentions "improve memory compatibility" as some people saying either their faster RAM wasn't booting or being detected at lowest (2133) speeds.

I'll certainly be posting here about my "findings" once I get it up and running (probably mid week) about OS (Win10 and linux) and maybe compiling linux kernel with various thread counts. No gaming here.

@Jasku - what timeframe are you thinking about your ryzen build? Probably wise to wait a couple of months if you can. (unless you're like me - an impatient kid who wants a shiny new toy now).

 

[Jasku]

@Jasku - mobo is the ASUS Prime B350 Plus, RAM will be my current 2133 mhz 8x2 (16GB) G.Skill Ripjaws V which I had got for my current Skylake setup. Not sure if I will have anything interesting to report about RAM speeds since I have the basic kit But note that there is a new BIOS v503 for the mobo released 4-5 days ago which mentions "improve memory compatibility" as some people saying either their faster RAM wasn't booting or being detected at lowest (2133) speeds.

I'll certainly be posting here about my "findings" once I get it up and running (probably mid week) about OS (Win10 and linux) and maybe compiling linux kernel with various thread counts. No gaming here.

@Jasku - what timeframe are you thinking about your ryzen build? Probably wise to wait a couple of months if you can. (unless you're like me - an impatient kid who wants a shiny new toy now).

@vishalrao if you already have skylake why are you getting the ryzen? Anyways I was hoping you got something higher than 2666mhz.

As for me, I have waited this long can definitely hold back another couple months, but it's very tempting to pull the trigger.

I will be waiting to read your thoughts and impressions of the new platform. Btw - which etailer did you purchase from?

 

[Lord Nemesis]

It looks like the platform is pretty unstable right now. Lots of kinks to be worked out. Seems like the boards were rushed into the market before they are ready just to have a start-up line. Many people are having problems getting the boards to work with all 4 slots loaded or with RAM higher than DDR4-2400. Then there is also the problem of BSODs. I would suggest waiting a month for the issues to be worked out and also for the possibility for more boards to be introduced.

if not anything I would urge folks to support AMD even if it means you may lose 5-10% performance (if your life doesnt depend on it), purely from a competition perspective, else Intel will have a monopoly sit on their rears and take all your money.

That is irrational and AMD has gotten lazy just banking on that sort of irrationality from customers. This sort of "support the underdog even if they don't put out the best" is exactly the reason why the market has become what it is. Crap like Bulldozer would never have been put on the shelves if AMD didn't think there would be people willing to buy it just to support them. AMD thinks that its fine to stay 10~15% below the competition and still able to make sales and Intel thinks that its fine if they just stay 10~15% ahead of the competition in order to change an arm and a leg. This market situation is being created by customers who have been willing to give AMD a sale even when they are not putting out the best.

 

[Jasku]

It looks like the platform is pretty unstable right now. Lots of kinks to be worked out. Seems like the boards were rushed into the market before they are ready just to have a start-up line. Many people are having problems getting the boards to work with all 4 slots loaded or with RAM higher than DDR4-2400. Then there is also the problem of BSODs. I would suggest waiting a month for the issues to be worked out and also for the possibility for more boards to be introduced.



That is irrational and AMD has gotten lazy just banking on that sort of irrationality from customers. This sort of "support the underdog even if they don't put out the best" is exactly the reason why the market has become what it is. Crap like Bulldozer would never have been put on the shelves if AMD didn't think there would be people willing to buy it just to support them. AMD thinks that its fine to stay 10~15% below the competition and still able to make sales and Intel thinks that its fine if they just stay 10~15% ahead of the competition in order to change an arm and a leg. This market situation is being created by customers who have been willing to give AMD a sale even when they are not putting out the best.

I agree it is irrational, but it is with the future in mind.This time AMD has come with a new architecture that competes and betters Intel line up at 50% of the price in multi-threaded applications, and hence the support sentiment. I really dont think AMD would have put Bulldozer out there just for the heck of it, its probably the best they could do with that architecture.

 

[Lord Nemesis]

^^ My point is that you should be buying for the reason that AMD has a decent 8 core CPU for multi-threaded work loads that is currently better than what the competition has to offer in that price bracket and not for the mere reason of supporting AMD even if they have the inferior product. If Intel has a better product in the market, go for it. That is how competition works.

 

[vishalrao]

@vishalrao if you already have skylake why are you getting the ryzen? Anyways I was hoping you got something higher than 2666mhz.

As for me, I have waited this long can definitely hold back another couple months, but it's very tempting to pull the trigger.

I will be waiting to read your thoughts and impressions of the new platform. Btw - which etailer did you purchase from?

Why get a Ryzen when I already have Skylake? Moving from a boring quad core to a tasty octa core makes me feel all warm and tingly inside. I get the same kick I got when I first moved to quad core 9 years ago with the Core2 Quad Q6600. It's been way too long (9 years) to get my hands on relatively affordable octa cores. But yeah, no real practical/sensible reason other than the occasional software code compilations I run which should speed up immensely.

I ordered off primeABGB - should get it around mid week - will post about how it goes - fingers crossed it isn't too unstable and makes me regret jumping the gun on this

 

[Jasku]

^^ My point is that you should be buying for the reason that AMD has a decent 8 core CPU for multi-threaded work loads that is currently better than what the competition has to offer in that price bracket and not for the mere reason of supporting AMD even if they have the inferior product. If Intel has a better product in the market, go for it. That is how competition works.

Well, like I said previously, support them for offering an attractive platform, with a decent well rounded processor. If you dont, you may not have competition.

Why get a Ryzen when I already have Skylake? Moving from a boring quad core to a tasty octa core makes me feel all warm and tingly inside. I get the same kick I got when I first moved to quad core 9 years ago with the Core2 Quad Q6600. It's been way too long (9 years) to get my hands on relatively affordable octa cores. But yeah, no real practical/sensible reason other than the occasional software code compilations I run which should speed up immensely.

I ordered off primeABGB - should get it around mid week - will post about how it goes - fingers crossed it isn't too unstable and makes me regret jumping the gun on this

That is why I love this forum, gives me inspiration to spend, eagerly awaiting your first impressions. **must resist**

 

[vishalrao]

Hopefully the parts should reach later today I had ordered on Saturday morning but payment confirmation only came yesterday morning, they (prime abgb) shipped it yesterday by Blue Dart where the tracking info is showing it has reached town and expected delivery today.

For preparations I've been backing up my data to other disks because I'm going to wipe out and fresh partition/format my main m.2 SSD to install Win10 version 1607 and also the current Insider preview ISO build 15042 (with updates of course) to see how they behave. Also will try a few linux ISOs - Fedora latest ISO should have decent kernel support for the CPU. Will also try a few other of my favourite distros but they might have issues due to older kernels.

In the mean time I ran the CPU-Z benchmark on my current 4-core i5-6500 and linux kernel version 4.10.1 compilation takes 2.5 minutes, so I have those numbers handy to compare.

Will try running some OSes inside virtualization like VMware Player and/or VirtualBox and linux QEMU/KVM to see if those are supported/stable at this time.

 

[mav2000]

Nice...have fun. Always a kick to make a new build and set up everything.

I was wondering, any real advantage to the x370 chipset over the B350...specially in terms of OCing? I really dont need all the extra sata ports or PCIE lanes etc. Also thinking if a 7600K with a Z170/Z270 setup wont be a better option?

 

[vishalrao]

If you're into serious OCing, probably worth going x370 as I've been reading that x370 boards have some better "VRMs" for more stability at higher temps/voltages/clocks. If going 7600k maybe still makes sense for gaming focus, but IMHO for "workstation" (and close-enough gaming perf) scenarios I'd say Ryzen (and the 1700) probably the best VFM option for the time being.

 

[mav2000]

Was thinking more on the lines of a 7600k at around 21K plus an asus strix z270 at 16.5k. Good at overclocking and great with gaming. I am looking to update from the Z97 setup I have now.

Confusion galore.

 

[vishalrao]

Good news. Prime shipped via Blue Dart whos delivery person called me at 2:45 this afternoon saying he will deliver within 5-10 minutes and to confirm my address. Got an email stating "shipment delivered" but nobody showed up at my place. Woohoo. I've called both Prime and BD customer service to let them know. I guess people have faced similar situations, seeing the other "courier service feedback" thread.

 

[vishalrao]

Got the parts a few minutes ago, finally. So two panic attacks, one for thinking my stuff was lost, the other for thinking they forgot to ship the CPU but it was tucked away inside the cabinet

Will start assembling now, if all goes well, will install an OS, boot from there and post about it too.

 

[vishalrao]

Assembly took me a couple of hours. Installed Win10 (v1607) with all updates and latest drivers etc but both my PCIe x1 cards (wifi adapter and sound card) are not being detected in device manager nor Linux live sessions.

Tried updating BIOS and BIOS settings, both cards look to be seated properly in the slots (but will check again tomorrow). In the mean time, I posted on ASUS forums and also sent a support email. Will get back to this in the morning.

Older BIOS 0406 was showing idle temps of 40-45 C and after updating to v0503 its showing 50-55 C though other folks online seem to suggest something wrong in temp readings.

Meanwhile task manager seems to be showing correct CPU info/speeds (cores/threads, cache etc) and CPU-z benchmark looks good - single core perf is better than i5-6500, around 10% slower than a i7-7700k and the multithreaded test with 8 threads is around 7x faster and with 16 threads is 8x faster than single core benchmark.

 

[Emrebel]

Assembly took me a couple of hours. Installed Win10 (v1607) with all updates and latest drivers etc but both my PCIe x1 cards (wifi adapter and sound card) are not being detected in device manager nor Linux live sessions.

Tried updating BIOS and BIOS settings, both cards look to be seated properly in the slots (but will check again tomorrow). In the mean time, I posted on ASUS forums and also sent a support email. Will get back to this in the morning.

Older BIOS 0406 was showing idle temps of 40-45 C and after updating to v0503 its showing 50-55 C though other folks online seem to suggest something wrong in temp readings.

Meanwhile task manager seems to be showing correct CPU info/speeds (cores/threads, cache etc) and CPU-z benchmark looks good - single core perf is better than i5-6500, around 10% slower than a i7-7700k and the multithreaded test with 8 threads is around 7x faster and with 16 threads is 8x faster than single core benchmark.

Can you post gaming benchmarks?
Hope to hear more about zeeeeennnn

 

[vishalrao]

So the PCIe x1 problem was because I didn't seat the wifi and audio cards into the socket properly, fixed now. Looks like my old Logitech C270 webcam isn't getting detected on a USB 3.x port, will try to use the second USB 2.0 port for that. Using one USB 2.0 port already for the wireless keyboard/mouse dongle.

And now looks like Edge browser (or is it Flash) has a problem on this site, after a few moments (in the middle of typing this post) my screen went blank but monitor and PC were powered on with SSD activity ongoing, so had to reset. Happened twice. Now typing this (picked up from draft) from fresh Firefox install, so far seems stable.

Can you post gaming benchmarks?
Hope to hear more about zeeeeennnn

Oh come on! There are already plenty of game benches online in articles and videos

Kidding aside, I don't want to download games due to severe data cap crunch - plus not sure what new info I can add that others haven't already covered Can you suggest any free games/demos/benchmarks which I can download which are not too large - say under 1-2 GB? Note that I have a basic RX460 2GB GPU so it will need to be something with a CPU focus please!

Now, I'm going to try installing some linux OSes to check stability there and to check kernel compilation times, but in the mean time posting this CPU-z benchmark with a comparison to intel 6900k. Seems pretty good, maybe scope for improvement in the multithreaded area assuming there really is some thread scheduling fixes needed in the Win10 OS:

 

[vishalrao]

So installed ubuntu and fedora linux, ubuntu running the "older" 4.8 based kernel and fedora running a newer 4.9.13 version which includes some minor fixes for ryzen.

Both OSes result in kernel compilation times of just a bit less than half of my i5-6500 which means it's about double the speed. Does not look like this "SMT" (hyperthreading style) is really helping here, so not sure if it's due to lack of proper OS support or the CPU itself is pretending to give you 2x logical threads

There may be stability concerns as sometimes during cold boot (happened a couple of times today but not after that) there was a BIOS error message like "could not auto overclock the CPU - please check settings" during startup but could not figure out any settings issues, rebooting and no error after that.

Also during linux compilation, there was a kernel error and the desktop froze with some file system error as well. Now can't say what caused this if it's due to the older 4.8 kernel or some other hardware issue - but hasn't happened since.

Not to mention the earlier black screen during browsing TE on Edge browser on Windows10 - could be due to Flash or AMD graphics drivers which I've not updated to latest - but Firefox is OK.

Will be interesting to see how this platform turns out after 2-3 months of people using it and revealing their experiences and stability with it.

 

[MrGhost]

Where gaming is concerned, I've read some reviews and came to the conclusion for Ryzen benchmarks in gaming and it looks bad for me cause in some games they are falling behind comparing to "Kaby Lake" proccy and even if Ryzen series have 8/16 cores but they're losing in CPU core clock speed and most of the games prefers core performance than number of cores so Ryzen have probably very less chance to outperform Intel 7th gen or any of their upcoming CPU's in for gaming performance, and i think if you're into serious Gaming / Heavy graphical usage and don't want to upgrade CPU every year or two and like to overclock your CPU now and then so i'd say definitely go for "Kaby Lake" with "K" period IMO.

But let's not jump to the conclusion where AMD sucks in gaming? No, It's not but for now you're into multitasking also if it's better enough in gaming for some games to keep the GPU on 100% load and offers extras cores and threads for other workloads then right now it's a pretty big win for Ryzen and you should get it plus at a compare to Intel previous gen high end proccy price i mean come on 90k for an i7 ?? that's a big laugh....where Ryzen is pretty sweet in VFM if you've budget above compare to Intel 7700k.

 

[Emrebel]

Well, obviously I have seen benchmarks but just wanted to confirm with someone on forums. Ps I am not looking for ultra performance in games, but more into rendering where Ryzen has provided with Blender results.