Ryzen Release Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd...u-review/5

At stock settings, the Ryzen 3 3300X offered nearly identical gaming performance (based on a geometric mean of our benchmark suite) to the Ryzen 5 3600, and actually squeaked past it in our 99th percentile measurements. If you're interested solely in gaming, the Ryzen 3 3300X takes the shine off of purchasing the Ryzen 5 3600, even though the 3600's twelve threads would come in handy for multi-tasking, streaming, and/or recording. We do have to keep in mind that the performance deltas are slim as we reach the top of the chart, so any of these chips could push a mid- or low-end graphics card along quite nicely. As usual, any extra performance matters if you plan on upgrading to the next-gen GPUs like AMD's Big Navi and Nvidia's Ampere.

The Ryzen 3 3300X also exhibited a great balance of performance in both lightly- and heavily-threaded applications throughout our benchmark suite. If you don't frequently use heavy productivity applications, you shouldn't be left wanting. The Ryzen 3 3100 isn't nearly as agile because its single-thread performance holds back some applications that require snappy responsiveness, like web browsers and office applications.
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The industry has come a long way in a few short years. Now you can get what used to be flagship-class $350 performance for a mere $120 with the Ryzen 3 3300X. That's a value that's hard to beat, and we don't think Intel's looming Comet Lake will change the calculus much, especially in light of Core i3's slightly higher pricing. But we'll find out soon enough, and since most people looking at the Ryzen 3 3300X will want a B550 motherboard to go with it, waiting for our Comet Lake benchmarks makes sense.

The Ryzen 3 3300X certainly sets a new bar for low-end gaming processors. Suddenly, they don't seem so low-end after all. High-end chips like the Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 9 3950X might make a bigger splash, delivering new tiers of performance, but budget shoppers will find a lot to like in AMD's new Ryzen 3 processors.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/31...ryzen-cpus

When AMD launched Ryzen in April 2017, it declared it would support Socket AM4 at least through 2020. Many fans read this as a promise that AMD would support the same motherboard chipsets for the duration of the AM4 socket. That difference of interpretation has caused some confusion about what kind of support matrix AMD would offer for Ryzen motherboards as the CPU family evolved.

With the launch of the B550, AMD is making a break between current and future CPU support. The following chart explains which motherboards support which CPUs, now and in the future:
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AMD may not have promised to provide chipset support through 2020, but plenty of people heard the statement that way. So, did the company provide the upgrade path it implied existed? I would argue yes.

In April 2017, a top-end Ryzen system consisted of an X370 motherboard and an eight-core Ryzen 7 1800X CPU. Today, just over three years later, that same motherboard is likely capable of stepping up to a Ryzen 9 3950X. In well-threaded tests, the 3950X can hit over 2x the speed of the 1800X. Even in single-threaded tests, the 3950X is often 1.25x – 1.35x faster than the 1800X.

None of this automatically makes a 3950X a great upgrade for an 1800X owner — if you don’t have any workloads that can scale up to 12-16 cores, you aren’t going to see the same benefit as someone who does.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a motherboard deploy with support for, say, dual-core CPUs, only to add support for quad-core or even six-core chips as those solutions became available, so I can’t say that Ryzen 7 delivers a completely unprecedented upgrade. But it’s certainly one of the best overall upgrade values that we’ve historically seen. Realistically, I’d expect an X370 system rebuilt on Ryzen 9 3950X to still be an effective performer in 4-6 years. Desktops don’t age like they used to — I’m typing this on a Core i7-4960X that’s continued to provide perfectly adequate performance for gaming and desktop work. Even if a person swaps out in 2024, that’s a seven-year lifespan for the AMD system.

Granted, it is a little annoying to have to keep track of all the different support diagrams, so make certain you know what you are getting into before you buy. It’s not clear how many more product cycles we’ll see on AM4, but the relatively slow rate at which desktops age makes this much less of an issue than it used to be.