It’s finally happened, the leaks are true. March 2, 2017, the world finally get’s it’s hands on AMD’s Ryzen CPUs and accompanying motherboards.
At a private press event on Feb 21, AMD shared their R7 line up, the R7 1700, R7 1700X and the R7 1800X. All three CPUs are 8 core, 16 thread CPUs with a TDP of 95W for the 1700X and 1800X, and a 65W TDP for the 1700.
For reference, here’s the March 2 line up of the Ryzen R7 CPUs
Combine this with the promise of 82 AM4 Motherboards available at launch, and two of the available chipsets allowing for Overclocking, B370X and B350, the options for enthusiasts, both extreme and budget conscience alike, will have options to fit their needs.
This news also comes with some promising anecdotal benchmarks, showing the 1700x performing almost 40% faster than the Intel Core i7 6800k and 4% faster than the Intel Core i7 6900K, their $1050 flagship CPU.
Even the R7 1800X is performance shows higher than the i7 6900K, with a slightly higher margin, and equal single core performance.
Again, this is all anecdotal, as we haven’t seen this reviewed by independent 3rd parties such as myself, PC Perspective, Gamers Nexus or any other hardware reviewer.
The final piece that has me excited is the comparison of the Intel Core i7 7700k to the Ryzen R1700, showing almost 50% increased performance over the 7700K, at $20 cheaper.
There is a lot to get excited about if you’re in the market for the best price to performance PC you can build, and AMD might be on the right path the Ryzen and the AM4 platform.
As of writing this article pre-orders are open from most online retailers, but I would caution anyone from pre-ordering, as it’s always best to wait until the reviewers have had time with the product to run it through it’s paces and verify what the vendor, in this case AMD, is promising. That said, if you do want to go ahead and pre-order, you can grab them on Amazon here – http://amzn.to/2lxDOxw.
AMD Press Release: http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/ryzen-7-2017feb22.aspx
AMD Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v44wWAOHn8