Ryzen Release Thread

[SteelCrysis]

Ryzen 7 1700 undervolts well, and can be passively cooled:



http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2993-a...ing/page-2

In this way, Intel’s CPU has now become the “project car” product. AMD Ryzen started its life as a project car – the product you buy because you’re OK with being under the hood a few hours a day, just to get the thing running perfectly. Now, with Ryzen’s initial launch issues somewhat smoothed out (but not completely), the CPU is holding well in streaming performance with minimal out-of-box tweaks. To get the 7700K to hold performance, we need quality tweaks, overclocks, and other “under the hood” modifications.

Our testing is by no means fully definitive of all approaches to streaming, but we can draw at least some firm conclusions based on the numbers we’ve collected thus far. Right now, today, Intel’s 7700K is getting crushed by the R7 1700 in our DiRT Rally test stream. The field levels a bit with DOTA2, but requires playing with process priority and forces Intel up against a wall. DOTA2, as a reminder, leans heavily on higher frequencies and isn’t as abusive as most other games on the market.

For game streamers – people who hope to live-stream output while simultaneously using the same host CPU to play/render their content – we absolutely recommend the R7 over the ~$300 class i7 CPUs. We’d recommend the R7 approach for folks who wish to avoid using NVENC for their livestream encoding. For professional streamers who absolutely must hold both tight frame latencies and quality stream output, we’d still recommend a dedicated capture box. The low-end frametimes drop with live encoding on the system, producing variable frametimes (0.1% lows, in our metrics) that can impact the experience for professionals concerned about framerate/frametimes in CSGO or DOTA2, for example. This is likely a non-issue for a lot of the more casual streamers or for people less concerned about high framerate consistency, but may matter for ultra-competitive players in an environment where money exchanges hands for shooting first. In those scenarios, a stream box fixes the latency challenge.

If that’s not a concern – and it may well not be one – then the R7s get our recommendation over the i7-7700K presently, hands-down, based on today’s testing. The R7 1700 didn’t need an overclock to produce its consistent stream output while maintaining relative gaming performance (“relative” because, like the 7700K, we still see reduced frametime consistency). Overclocking would further bolster numbers, of course, but may end up being unnecessary for most folks. We’d still recommend the 1700 over the 1700X or 1800X, purely because a simple OC gets any 1700 within range of both alternatives. The money can be put toward something else, like RAM.