AMD Ryzen 7 1800X CPU Review: The Wait is Over

Test System and Benchmarks

Before proceeding with the regular benchmarks, we should take stock of the current prices. The AMD Ryzen 1800X is being marketed to go head to head against the i7-6900K despite costing less than half, and even less so when the platform is calculated since X99 motherboards cost quite a bit more than the X370 motherboards. Even the ASUS Crosshair VI which is in the top-end of AM4 motherboard prices is $254.99 while the lowest priced ASUS RoG Rampage X99 motherboard costs at least $480 in NewEgg.com. Entry level X99 motherboards retail for $229 and up.

Initial run via CPU-Z. Interesting to see that the built-in benchmark favorably puts the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X ahead of the Intel Core i7-6950X reference by quite a bit in both single and multi-threaded load.

AIDA64 has not officially released an update yet to support Ryzen, not even a beta version so take these results with some grain of salt (the program even lets you know after running it), particularly the CPU AES and the CPU Hash benchmarks. The other results are reasonably close however and are within the tail of the 6900K processor. The 1800X outperforms the 6900K in Zlib but loses out quite a bit on CPU Photoworxx benchmark. The 4.5GHz 7700K Kaby Lake falls short of the 1800X in some instances including the Zlib and CPU queen benchmark, but gains ground in CPU Photoworxx.

In terms of floating point load, the 1800X falls behind in the FPU mandel benchmark but trounces the i7-7700K, i7-6700K and even i7-6900K in the SinJulia benchmark.

It is not just AIDA64 that is not updated to benchmark Ryzen properly in our test suite but SiSoft Sandra as well so I am skipping the cache and memory benchmark for now but will revisit that shortly once the other Ryzen 7 CPUs arrive. Consider this a preliminary placeholder for now:

Maxon’s Cinebench R15 is one of the more popular CPU rendering benchmarks available for free. The single core performance shows the significant lead in per-core performance of the latest generation Intel CPUs (Kaby lake is newer than Broadwell-E) with the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X sticking close to the 6900K single core result, although not quite matching it yet. Multi-threaded performance is another story entirely as the 1800X shows what a 16-threaded monster can do, trouncing the i7-6900K convincingly.

In x.264 performance, the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X shows its most impressive performance yet, matching the i7-6950X and handily beating the i7-6900K. It also more than doubles the performance over the once-popular AMD FX-8350 and leaves the highly clocked i7-7700K close to 15 fps behind.

The compression results are a bit of a mixed bag here as well with the WinRAR performance just slightly below the i7-6700K and the Intel HEDT’s perform significantly faster. The 7-zip compression benchmark on the other hand shows the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X handily beating the i7-7700K and moves closely behind the i7-6900K.

In 3D performance, the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X nearly matches the i7-6900K under 3DMark’s CPU physics score. The improvement is also quite a bit of a leap from the FX-8350 and has a nice healthy almost 5000 point gap between the i7-7700K.

In terms of temperatures, the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X was very manageable unlike the i7-7700K which could barely be prevented from throttling with most air coolers. Using a Noctua NH-U12S 120mm CPU cooler with a Noctua 2000RPM iPPC fan, there were no CPU throttling detected and the peak temperature detected by the AMD Ryzen Master overclocking/monitoring software peaked at 72C. The CPU readout on AIDA is most likely the T-case which has a 60C limit. Power draw from the wall on idle with Windows set to Balanced is 71W while under full AIDA64 load and x.264 encoding load, power draw from the wall averaged at 152W for the full system.

Undoubtedly with Ryzen’s release, there will be talk once again of AMD being necessary to end Intel’s monopoly and steep prices. While true to some extent, AMD deserves a lot more credit than that especially with the Ryzen as the 1800X and the AM4 platform itself stands on solid ground and holds down well on its own. It is not just a matter of having half the price either but the multi-core performance enhancements are palpable while in use. Although the XFR feature might not sound like much, overclocking 100MHz on top of the regular boost, it is surprising how seamlessly it moves in depending on the workload. It is particularly obvious in media handling.

The platform now also supports USB 3.1 Gen2 and PCIe x4 m.2 natively like the latest Intel motherboards, while priced in the same competitive bracket as well. Since I am constrained for time for this review, I have delayed game testing further (these usually take several more days), but there will be no short supply of game benchmarks for you to read come launch day anyway. Besides, if most games only require an Intel i5 equivalent to run a game and the previous generation FX-8350 itself is “VR ready”, the 1800X is more than qualified in that regard that it is even insulting to question its credentials as a gaming CPU. That is one of those simple logic things you have to work out in your head and benchmarks will just serve as comparison to other CPUs rather than whether it is a “gaming processor”.

The wait is over, but this is only the beginning, especially for AMD who has delivered on their promise. I will be conducting further testing as well over the next few days and weeks as I have had only three days with the new CPU so far. For $499, the Ryzen 7 1800X is truly one of the more impressive pieces of hardware in the market however, not just because of the price discrepancy vs Intel, but because it simply, undeniably performs like a modern CPU should. It is lean, fit, and draws significantly less power compared to previous Bulldozer CPUs (as it should), but it is also thermally manageable without having to be delidded. The only bad news is that it appears to be sold out almost everywhere already by the time this article comes out.