AMD Ryzen 7, Anyone using it?

[sum_guy]

I'm looking to build or buy a new rig, I'm not a gamer, but I'm approaching retirement and may take up PC Gaming, but for now, I mostly edit and convert (compress) video, is anyone using the AMD Ryzen 7 and your personal experience, or should I be looking for an i7?

[stonesfan99]

What's your budget? The Ryzen 7 offers more cores/threads than the i7. i7 is optimized a little bit better for gaming.

[KarMa]

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/384584-Ryzen-upgrade-with-X1700-CPU-DDR4-RAM-and-M-2-SSD

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/385842-AM4-Processors

Unless you need the absolute best single thread performance and are willing to pay potentially more for the same number of cores, then you should go high end Intel. Otherwise the Ryzen 7 should be more than enough. Two popular CPUs for about the same price would be the Ryzen 1700x vs Intel 7700k which both go for around $300 with the 1700x usually being the cheaper one. The 7700k has a noticeably better single thread performance but only comes with 4 cores. The Ryzen 1700x comes with 8 cores but with a bit worse single thread performance. Single thread performance tends to matter more with ultra high quality settings in certain case, or games that have poor optimization to begin with like PUBG, Arma 3, and probably Space Engineers. Pretty much any game with lots of people complaining about poor game performance, Intel i7 will be able to brute force it better at the single core level.

If all you do is make a living off playing video games on Twitch/Youtube and have no other uses for it (like a workstation), then Intel i7 might be a reasonable option in 2017. But as you talk about encoding videos, double the cores will certainly come in handy for the same price. Just be sure to get a high Mhz RAM if you go Ryzen, like 3200mhz RAM as Ryzen's CPU infinity fabric is locked at the RAM frequency.

I still game on a FX-6300 @1080p, with most games clocking higher than my monitor refresh rate of 60fps using Medium presets usually. And so don't feel super compelled to move to Ryzen at the moment but it's nice its there.

[redwudz]

I'm been using a Ryzen X1700 since August 2017.

[Selur]

I'm using a Ryzen 7 X1800 mainly for encoding and compiling since May 2017.
For gaming I would probably go for a cpu with less cores, higher clock speed and invest in a faster graphic card.

[sophisticles]

Funny I should come across this thread, up until 2 weeks ago I had a Xeon 1241 v3, which the cheap ASRock motherboard I paired it with always ran all the cores at 3.9Ghz (base clock 3.5Ghz, effectively over-clocked to nearly 4790k clock speed) and 16 Gb of DDR3-1600.

Microcenter had their Black Friday sale and I originally went in to buy a Coffee Lake cpu setup, but they were out of all the Coffee Lake's except for the high end expensive one and the motherboards are still very pricey so I bought a Ryzen 5 1600 with cooler for $170 and got $30 off a $60 Gigabyte motherboard plus $10 mail-in rebate (note to self, mail in rebate form). DDR4 is very expensive so I picked up 8 Gb of DDR4-2400.

I'l make this short and sweet, the 1600 is not that much faster than the Xeon under most of my encoding tests, the difference doesn't become apparent until we start talking about encoding 1080p with a bunch of filters, even if the filters are gpu accelerated, but even then it doesn't matter because neither cpu is anywhere near fast enough to encode in real time with the settings I use. On top of that the Ryzen still isn't fast enough to play back 4k content that isn't gpu accelerated, basically anything that is compressed using something other than a a delivery codec, such as h264 or hevc.

Then we have the reality that in Feb 2018 AMD is rumored to be releasing some Ryzen refresh models, maybe with some minor speed bumps; I doubt they will fix the sub-par AVX performance.

As for the advice you will see every where regarding ram speed, remember that the fastest ram Ryzen officially supports is 2667 Mhz and most of the cheaper motherboards only support 2400 Mhz and most tests I have seen show that faster ram makes little difference:

http://www.legitreviews.com/ddr4-memory-scaling-amd-am4-platform-best-memory-kit-amd-r...-cpus_192259/3

My personal opinion, considering the product refreshes coming from AMD in a couple of months and all the releases from Intel coming in 2018, including Coffee Lake updates, a Coffee Lake - AMD GPU hybrid cpu, cpu's that support AVX-512 and Optane DIMMS, I think if you do build a new system now go for the absolute cheapest thing that will get you by.

[Rev Jim Jones]

yes, but you can wait forever to build something. There is always the next round around the corner and coming soon.

I think the only potential change that may swing this towards waiting a little longer before doing a major build is Ryzen 2. Not sure if there will be enough changes to Coffee Lake to justify waiting if Coffee Lake is your chosen way to go. Ram prices coming down would sure help.