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Ryzen Hopes Fallen

I am posting this here rather than on something like Reddit because I don't want to get involved in the usual internet fanboy wars but the plain fact is I find myself somewhat disappointed by the release of AMD's Ryzen 7 CPUs.

Brief background: My current gaming rig is long overdue an upgrade (currently running a 2009 era Xeon 3470). In 2014 I was due to replace this system completely but put it off in favour of an overhaul initially to wait for Windows 10 and then later to wait for AMD Ryzen. Well here we are in 2017. Windows 10 is old news and Ryzen 7 has finally been released. I have run out of excuses.

I am old enough not to have completely gotten lost in the hype about AMD Ryzen but I was very much looking forward to a new competitive CPU market that might bring bring high end CPU power down into my mid market price range.

I guess my hopes were that Ryzen would bring i7 level performance at i5 level prices. Realistically I was expecting half way between i5 and i7 performance at slightly better than i5 pricing. Instead the release of Ryzen 7 appears to be offering i5 level of performance in gaming at i7 prices.

To be fair Ryzen is a terrific step forward for AMD and is genuinely competitive with Intel in many applications that require multiple cores. Ryzen gives you far more cores for your money than i7 and excels in tasks such as video editing. Unfortunately gaming relies heavily on single threaded performance and Intel's CPUs still shine here because they have faster clock speeds and they do slightly more per clock cycle.

Bottom line is that for gamers AMD still has no CPU to compete with Intel's i7-7700k and because Ryzen 7 is priced to compete with i7 they dont even have a CPU to compete with the i5-7600k yet.

Having allowed my initial hopes to dash upon the harsh rocks of reality I will allow a bit of optimism to climb back into the boat.  Ryzen is a brand new product and there are indications that BIOSes and Windows itself have yet to be properly optimised for it. I wouldn't be surprised if Ryzen performance numbers get better as experience with the part grows and systems are patched. Even more significant from a gamer's perspective is that the next Ryzen parts to be released (Ryzen 5) will have fewer cores and cheaper prices. It is quite likely that these will be just as good for gaming as Ryzen 7 so these could finally be the i5 killers I am really hoping for.

There are other benefits attached to the launch of Ryzen: Competition is likely to bring down the price of Intel parts. Also AMD based motherboards have generally offered more options and more flexibility than Intel based motherboards for a cheaper price.

So I still don't know whether to upgrade with another Intel or switch to AMD but I have decided to wait a bit longer. Ah well My 7 year old CPU is still coping with modern games like Total War Warhammer but it won't win any benchmark contests.

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