Rising from the ashes of disappointment, AMD has finally returned to the high-end CPU market with a new portfolio that challenges the best of Intel and with prices that’s hard to ignore. The Summit Ridge Ryzen 1800X is currently the fastest processor that AMD has to offer you today.
Though they have taken a lot of years for the development of the ZEN, the outcome of the project is exciting. The 14nm R1800X is here to take on the expensive $1000 Intel i7-6900K processor that’s still a hard price to swallow.
For those who have been disappointed with the previous AMD FX CPU performance, the new Ryzen’s are based on an entirely new architecture developed from scratch.
The raw specifications of the AMD Ryzen 1800X consist of eight main cores and 16 threads. The processor is clocked at 3.6 GHz as its default and can increase to 4.0 GHz as Precision Boost, AMD’s answer for the Intel Turbo Boost.
But that’s not the only technology that increases the clock speed. AMD has the XFR (extended frequency range) that is designed to go beyond the processor’s original Precision Boost clocks, provided that you have a better cooling solution in place.
There is more to the new AMD Ryzen processor than just cores and speed. For adaptive control of real-time performance, AMD has the “Pure Power” which monitors the temperature and speed for lowering the processor’s power consumption while the system performs low-priority tasks. AMD has also managed to include a form of artificial intelligence called “Neural Net Prediction” that can anticipate the preload instructions and be ready for faster processor instruction executions.
The “Smart Prefetch” is also capable of anticipating data access and executions and then preloads the cache with the vital data needed, based on the application used. I’ve tested the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X processor on the AX370-Gaming 5 AM4 motherboard from Gigabyte with the AMD Wraith Spire cooler. The graphics card used is the latest Nitro Radeon RX 580 from SAPPHIRE. The system also features two 8GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4 RAM chips and a 2TB MX300 SSD from Crucial with Windows 10 Pro operating system.
We are quite amazed with the performance of the R7 1800X on CineBench R15 Multi-Core benchmark that scored 1575 cb.
However, the single-core performance lags a bit behind Intel’s latest Kaby Lake performance chips.
GeekBench 4 multi-core performance is also sky-high, something that we may not expect from a $500 processor. This even concludes that the Ryzen 7 1800X shines at multi-core computing.
Benchmarking with Blender proved that the R7 1800X is far better than the latest Radeon 580 itself. Our Sony Vegas video editing time of a 1080p 60p video output project took around 7 minutes to render.
Overclocking the Ryzen 7 1800X easily reduced the time down further to 6 minutes. It took over 15 minutes for a quad-core processor to render the same project.
Our handbrake conversion tool took around 5 minutes to finish the work for the same output video file of Sony Vegas with an average 42.8fps.
The main question arises if AMD’s fastest processor is good for gaming and whether a Radeon 580 goes well with the processor. The following GPU intensive benchmarks prove it and the gaming frame-rate performances for both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12/Vulkan API is good too.
While the SAPPHIRE Nitro Radeon RX 580 did perform good for some of today’s latest games, certain heavy-duty titles such as Crysis 3 and GTA 5 did not hit the 60fps mark.
All these games were tested at maximum settings available so that we can compare the scores with more cards and processors in the future. We are sure these graphics-heavy games will perform better with the Ryzen 1800X and a faster card like the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080.
So, should you switch from Intel to the AMD Ryzen 1800X processor? That depends on whether you’re looking for a cheaper alternative for the Intel i7-6900K processor for faster video editing jobs. It will also take some time for game developers to create games that can take full advantage of multi-core processors for better performance. For me, the Ryzen 7 1800X has a much better value and price as compared to Intel’s equivalent processors and definitely far way better than AMD’s previous FX processors that were quite disappointing.
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