AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Review: Competitive Performance at an Amazing Price
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) appears to be back in the competition as it released the Ryzen 7 1800X. The new processor has everything a PC system builder is looking for — competitive performance and a powerful feature set that comes at a very attractive price.
In the last few years AMD has been relegated to a smaller corner of the PC market, the mainstream processor field being held at de facto monopoly by Intel. The previous Bulldozer design launched by AMD in the last five years was not considered competitive to Intel's offering, and the latter has taken advantage of the market by pushing incremental performance increases at steadily mounting prices. Techradar notes that Intel has been pushing a 15% price hike for every new iteration of its processors, and that is what consumers pay for what is essentially a 10% increase in performance.
AMD has now come back to disrupt this stagnation in the mainstream processor market with the launch of its Ryzen line of processors. The Ryzen is based on a new architecture built with a 14 nm chip making process. The very top-of-the-line Ryzen product is the 1800X, with eight cores, 16 threads, and 16 MB of L3 cache.
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On paper, the Ryzen 1800X has a base clock of 3.6 GHz that can be boosted up to 4.0 GHz with a new Turbo boost feature. This performance comes with a power draw of just 95 W, and is very aggressively priced at just $500.
Ars Technica has run a gamut of tests pitting the 1800X against a few Intel standards in the market today, including the Core i7-5960X, Core i7-7700K, Core i7-6900K and i7-6950X. Their tests used an Nvidia GTX 1080 as the graphics card among the five test rigs, and all tests ran on Microsoft Windows 10 as their operating system. In the comparison of their results, the i7 1800X did very well on rendering and multiprocessing tasks, and was competitive, if slightly behind, the eight and ten core processors from Intel.
For the most part, the Ryzen 1800X is seen as highly competitive with Intel's i7-6900K. For a system builder choosing between Ryzen's $500 chip and Intel's $1,050 processor, the Ryzen 1800X offers an amazing performance-to-dollar ratio.
