Your Take on Ryzen? Worth buying or stick to Intel

[GoodRevrnd]

I was seriously waiting for this chip to do a full rig rebuild, but what I'm seeing now just isn't compelling enough. I think it's a great offering and has very real use cases, but I don't understand all the gamers doing backflips trying to justify how this is a viable gaming cpu *right now*. Sure you'd have to be mental to buy a 6950 over an 1800 for a workstation, but why would you take a 10% FPS hit for $170 more over a 7700K? Will Windows patches, BIOS patches, and mobo revisions close the gap? Maybe. I can wait two months to reevaluate though. The "futureproofing" argument has to be the worst one. Hoping game developers make better use of multithreading has something we've all been clamoring for since Core2 debuted. I suppose there's been moderate progress in the last couple years, but it's still a bad argument because even if Ryzen is the future here, by the time we get there we'll have Ryzen2 and maybe even a serious Intel response.

I will absolutely be looking at Ryzen again after Windows, BIOS, mobo, stepping revisions are all made. If the perf/$ is close enough to 7700K I'll probably be all over it. But for now I'm inclined to wait with cautious optimism rather than jump in head first and hope everything works out. Everyone always claimed AMD was more futureproof in the GPU space, and while those cards have certainly gained ground I don't think they ever made the gains people unrealistically expected of them.

 

[Geegeeoh]

For gaming most should aim for the R5 6C/12T.

 

[guachi]

You don't take a 10% hit for $170 over the 7700K. Because you buy the 1700 and OC it using the included cooler. Sure, you'll lose a few features. but you'll take a 2-10% hit (looking at various benchmarks) and save money.

CPU $330 vs. 340
HS/fan $0 vs. $30
mobo $120 vs. $170

So you take a 2-10% hit for $90 less.

Plus, there isn't any "hoping" games take advantage of more cores. We've seen it with the FX-8350 surpassing the vaunted 2500K. 10% worse is now 10% better. It's certainly not because game developers coded specifically for the AMD chip. It's because of more threads. It's the same reason the 2600K has pulled away from the 2500K. A few % better is now about 15-20% better.

Where once the 4/4 2500K was the chip of choice, now we are up to a 4/8 CPU being the best bet. So more threads is the future. It's possible 6/12 will be the best bet for the next five years, but the R5 isn't out yet.

The question isn't do I save $90, it's do I save $190 and wait for R5 for $229. Though waiting for all the bugs to be ironed out before you get Ryzen isn't a bad idea. And, who knows, maybe the R5 will be out by then, anyway.

 

[bystander36]

You don't take a 10% hit for $170 over the 7700K. Because you buy the 1700 and OC it using the included cooler. Sure, you'll lose a few features. but you'll take a 2-10% hit (looking at various benchmarks) and save money.

CPU $330 vs. 340
HS/fan $0 vs. $30
mobo $120 vs. $170

So you take a 2-10% hit for $90 less.

Plus, there isn't any "hoping" games take advantage of more cores. We've seen it with the FX-8350 surpassing the vaunted 2500K. 10% worse is now 10% better. It's certainly not because game developers coded specifically for the AMD chip. It's because of more threads. It's the same reason the 2600K has pulled away from the 2500K. A few % better is now about 15-20% better.

Where once the 4/4 2500K was the chip of choice, now we are up to a 4/8 CPU being the best bet. So more threads is the future. It's possible 6/12 will be the best bet for the next five years, but the R5 isn't out yet.

The question isn't do I save $90, it's do I save $190 and wait for R5 for $229. Though waiting for all the bugs to be ironed out before you get Ryzen isn't a bad idea. And, who knows, maybe the R5 will be out by then, anyway.

If you are going to OC one CPU, you are going to OC the other too.