AMD Ryzen R7 1800X 'Zen' and MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium Review
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AMD Ryzen R7 1800X 'Zen' and MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium Review
Jamshed Avari, 02 March 2017
HIGHLIGHTS
The Ryzen 7 1800X has eight cores running at 3.6-4.0GHz
AMD promises performance equal to Intel’s Core i7-6900K
Sensors allow the CPU to adapt to workloads on the fly
Everyone loves a good underdog story. AMD, famous for pipping Intel on price and performance back in the days of the Athlon XP a decade ago, has had a bad run since then. While the GPU performance crown has swung back and forth between AMD and Nvidia many times, things have been rather dire on the CPU side - to the point that barely any mainstream customers even look for AMD options anymore.
Even in its heyday, AMD was only really popular amongst enthusiasts, particularly those who built their own PCs and did their own research. Intel stole a huge lead when the market shifted towards readymade laptops, and has held on to it ever since. AMD is practically absent from the laptop market today, and its desktop chips have only been powerful enough to compete with the bottom of Intel's stack. That means it hasn't had any premium high-margin CPUs to sell in ages, compromising its bottom line and diminishing its ability to compete again.
Still, fans have rallied around AMD and have been excited for each new attempt to regain its standing. Efforts like Fusion and HSA, combining the power of heterogenous CPUs and GPUs, show that AMD has been thinking very differently about modern computer architecture. It has tried to position itself as the only company that can deliver compute and graphics power together. All of that has led up to this moment; the release of new CPUs named Ryzen which promise to not only catch up to Intel's most powerful current products, but blow them out of the water.
AMD disclosed many of the Ryzen line's unique features a few months ago, and claimed at the official launch of the premium Ryzen 7 series last week that its fastest model beats an equivalent Intel chip - that too for just under half the price. It's a massive claim, and if true, it means that AMD might have finally dug itself out of its hole. We're putting the brand new Ryzen 7 1800X through its paces in our lab today, and we can't wait to see how things turn out.
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The AMD Ryzen R7 1800X
AMD will flesh out its Zen architecture-based portfolio as 2017 progresses, adding laptop and server chips, APUs with integrated graphics, and more mainstream models. However for now, we have only three premium desktop CPUs at launch time - the Ryzen 7 1700, 1700X and 1800X. These are officially priced at Rs. 24,499, Rs. 29,499, and Rs. 37,999 respectively and are available for purchase in India already.
The main thing to note about the Ryzen 7 series is that all three models have eight physical CPU cores, each of which is multi-threaded for a total of 16 simultaneous threads. Intel's lone 8-core offering is the Core i7-6900K which sells for roughly Rs. 83,500. This is the model against which AMD is pegging the Ryzen 7 1800X - really putting Intel's steep price premium into focus. While the Ryzen 7 1800X has a rated TDP of 95W, the Core i7-6900 can dissipate up to 140W.
AMD points out that while not all games and apps will take advantage of eight physical cores, there's nothing wrong with having that much power on tap - and it might even help motivate software developers to push their limits. The company even agrees with Intel's "megatasking" premise, which argues that lots of people today want to play a game, encode and broadcast a live video stream and have a few other utilities running at the same time on one single machine.
The 1800X has a base clock speed of 3.6GHz and can jump up to 4.0GHz on demand. However, AMD has devised ways to push that even further, without manual overclocking. Each CPU has dozens of embedded sensors that measure temperature, voltage
