AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Review (2024)

Times have been tough for enthusiasts and power users in the CPU market for a long time—at least for those who crave impressive performance advancements. (And what enthusiast doesn't?) AMD's FX CPU architecture, which went under the successive names Bulldozer, Piledriver, and Steamroller, hasn't been able to match Intel's Core i7 chips for quite some years now, going back to the initial release of the AMD FX-8150 in 2011. This is subject to change with the launch of the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X ($349.99).

On the other side of the CPU-silicon fence, Intel's latest architecture, the seventh-generation Core, or "Kaby Lake," which is topped at the moment by the Intel Core i7-7700K . We saw mostly single-digit performance gains over equivalent sixth-generation chips. Those gains were gleaned from slightly higher clock speeds and…well, not a whole lot else.

The company's enthusiast-class E-Series chips, meanwhile, have pushed performance limits by adding ever more cores and threads, but at ever-more-outrageous prices, as well. The latest E -Series chips are known as "Broadwell-E," and the big dog of that crew is the 10-core, 20-thread Intel Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition ($449.00 at Amazon) . It is a monster chip for serious, highly threaded workloads, but its high price tag is enough to put off almost everyone other than well-heeled, CPU-dependent professionals.

AMD admittedly waltzes into this party later than we initially expected, as its new "Zen" chips were expected to arrive in 2016. But on its arm is a brand-new CPU architecture and three high-end Ryzen 7 chips, all with eight cores and 16 threads, starting at $329 and topping out at $499 for the Ryzen 7 1800X we're looking at here. The Ryzen 7 1800X's stock clock speeds and eight cores match up quite well, on paper, against Intel's $1,000-plus Core i7-6900K. And that chip is just one step down from the wildly expensive Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition.

Can AMD's new flagship take down an Intel enthusiast chip that currently sells for more than twice the price? Is AMD officially back in the big leagues of the consumer CPU business? The short answer to that first question is yes…mostly. The answer to the second question requires a deeper dive into what AMD has planned for the coming months and beyond. We'll tackle both those questions in fine detail below.

Chip Lineup Details: Ryzen 7, Ryzen 5, and Ryzen 3

The AMD Ryzen 7 1800X is the top end of the company's new processor stack, but it's by no means alone. At launch, AMD is rolling out two other Ryzen 7 chips, and all three feature eight cores and 16 threads. Here's a look at all three Ryzen 7 chips, along with pricing and their basic specs, direct from AMD.

Of course, not everyone has the budget (or the need) for a CPU priced at $329 or more. So AMD will be offering six-core and four-core Ryzen 5 chips, as well, although pricing on those hadn't been shared with us when we wrote this. AMD says those chips will be available in the second quarter of 2017, with lower-end Ryzen 3 offerings coming in the second half of the year.

A couple of features on all of these chips set them apart from Intel's competing offerings. For one: AMD says all the Ryzen chips will be unlocked for overclocking. And, at least from the details we have about the Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 chips announced so far, all those chips will feature thread-doubling simultaneous multi-threading (SMT). SMT is similar to the Hyper-Threading technology featured in most (but not all) of Intel's mid-to-high-end Core processors. Notably, the unlocked Intel Core i5-7600K lacks Hyper-Threading, leaving it stuck at four processing threads, while AMD's competing Ryzen 5 chips will have eight or 12 available processing threads, depending on the chip.

That will make testing those future chips against Intel's offerings very, very interesting. But of course, we're here to talk about Ryzen 7 for now, and the Ryzen 7 1800X in particular.

AMD is positioning its flagship $499 chip against Intel's Core i7-6900K. That's also an eight-core, 16-thread processor, but it has base (3.2GHz) and Turbo Boost (3.7GHz) frequencies that are both lower than the base (3.6GHz) and boost (4GHz) clock speeds of the Ryzen 7 1800X at stock settings. The Core i7-6900K is also based around the company's "Broadwell-E" enthusiast platform, running on an architecture that's technically two generations behind Intel's latest "Kaby Lake" design in chips like the Core i7-7700K.

The big deal, however, is in the pricing details. When we wrote this in the first week of March 2017, Intel's Core i7-6900K was selling for about $1,050, or more than twice the asking price of the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X that we're looking at here. At a glance, many things are working in AMD's favor with the Ryzen 7 1800X.

The New AMD Chipsets: X370, B350, and More

At half the price of Intel's Core i7-6900K, the Ryzen 7 1800X already appears to be a great value on paper (and as we'll see later on in testing, it solidly delivers on that value promise). But the motherboards AMD's partners are rolling out around Ryzen sweeten the deal significantly—especially when compared to the generally pricey X99 motherboards required to run chips like the Core i7-6900K. Those Intel-based boards generally start around $200, and can go up drastically from there, rising into and above the $500 range. These new boards use a socket called "AM4" and don't work with previous-generation AMD chips.

Want a Ryzen-based board that lets you overclock and install a single high-end graphics card like the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti or one of AMD's upcoming "Vega" cards? That will set you back as little as $79 for the MSI B350M Gaming Pro. And lest you think that's a feature-starved board, it features an M.2 slot for fast PCI Express x4/NVMe boot drives like the Samsung SSD 960 EVO , plus a metal-reinforced graphics-card slot and some red LEDs. You can certainly spend more; some initial AM4 boards are priced as high as $300. But we've seen several solid-looking options in the $100 range, which, once again, is about half of what you'd have to pay for a new X99-based board if you opt for Intel's enthusiast platform.

Technically four new chipsets are on offer with AMD's new motherboards. Here's a look at their primary features and how they differ, direct from AMD.

Note that if you want to install multiple graphics cards, you'll need to opt for the top-end X370 chipset, but even those boards start at around $150. The A320 chipset and the A300 don't support overclocking, and the latter lacks native support for USB 3.1 Gen 2, but those boards, when they arrive, will likely be even more price-aggressive, because they're a step down from the B350 boards, which start as low as $79.

These lower-end boards weren't up for pre-order when we wrote this, so we'll have wait to see where they land in terms of features and pricing. But we would not be surprised to see some of these boards priced as low as $50. Now, we're not suggesting you opt for the lowest-price board you can find, but the idea of dropping a $500 CPU into a $50 or $100 motherboard and getting similar performance to what you'd get with a $1,250 Intel CPU/motherboard combination is very appealing.

How is AMD able to get its board partners to produce such comparatively inexpensive motherboards? Primarily, it's because AMD's Ryzen chips (and its upcoming "Raven Ridge" CPU/GPU chips, or APUs, which will use the same AM4 socket) integrate much of the electronics required for interfaces such as USB, SATA, and PCI Express into the chips themselves. As a result, far fewer electronics need to be built onto the boards themselves.

Not everything here works in AMD's favor. These chipsets tend to have fewer PCI Express lanes and SATA ports than many enthusiast motherboard/CPU combos from Intel. The top-end X370 chipset natively supports six SATA III ports and 16 lanes of PCI Express Gen 2 for speedy SSDs (on top of the 24 lanes of PCIe on the Ryzen chips themselves). Intel's X99 platform, in contrast, supports 10 SATA III ports and up to 40 PCI Express lanes hanging off the CPU. (The junior Broadwell-E chip, the Core i7-6800K, has "just" 28 lanes.)

For those planning on shoving piles of drives and other hardware inside their systems, Intel's platform will still hold plenty of appeal. But for the vast majority of users looking to drop in a CPU, one or two graphics cards, and a few drives, AMD's offering should more than suffice—at a significantly lower price point than what Intel is charging today. And AMD expects more than 80 motherboards to be on sale at launch, so builders won't be starved for choice, not by a long shot.

The Architecture Basics

As noted earlier, the Ryzen chips represent an entirely new architecture for AMD. Gone are the paired modules of cores sharing an L2 cache that was a hallmark of the FX processor line. Ryzen's cores are more independent, and they also introduce the thread-doubling SMT we mentioned earlier. SMT is similar to Intel's Hyper-Threading, which allows demanding software that's written to take advantage of it to tackle two computing threads on each core.

CPU-architecture details can get extremely technical as soon as you look any deeper than the the surface. But to give you a sense of how AMD has achieved its performance gains with its new Zen architecture, the company says it has incorporated an instruction-scheduler window that's 1.75 times larger, with a 1.5 times greater issue width, that enables AMD to send more work to the chip's execution units.

Here's a look at the Ryzen die layout, again direct from AMD...

Also, a new branch-prediction unit, which the company calls "neural-network-based," helps the chips be smarter about preparing and optimizing instructions and paths for tasks that the chip will need to tackle in the immediate future.

This all sounds good, to the extent that it can be parsed and appreciated without a computer engineering degree. But power efficiency is another area in which AMD's FX chips have lagged behind Intel. The company's FX-8370 ($278.02 at Amazon) chip has a thermal design power rating (TDP, a measurement of heat-dissipation requirements) of 125 watts, while Intel's (very roughly comparable) Core i5-6600K ($120.00 at Amazon) has a TDP of 91 watts. And Intel's chip includes integrated graphics, while the AMD FX chips (as well as the Ryzen 7 models) lack that feature, requiring an external graphics card to plug in to a monitor.

On the surface, at least, it seems AMD has made up that ground, and then some. The Ryzen 7 1800X ($235.00 at Amazon) (as well as the other Ryzen 7 chips) have a TDP rating of 95 watts. Intel's competing Core i7-6900K, meanwhile, has a TDP rating of 140 watts. Well, now.

How does AMD achieve its efficiency gains with Ryzen? For starters, these chips are built on a 14nm manufacturing process, the same as the Core i7-6900K, and a big, big leap over the 32nm process used for AMD's previous-generation FX chips. And AMD says this 14nm process has already been "density optimized" by the company's manufacturing partner, Global Foundries.

Other efficiency-focused features include a "micro-op" cache that keeps important instructions and data close to the cores, rather than having to reach out to comparatively far-off L2 or L3 caches; and aggressive clock gating, so there's less wasted power in areas of the cores that aren't being used. Here's a visual look at how AMD aims to keep power draw down.

Better Clocks With Better Coolers: XFR

You may have noticed that the entry-level Ryzen 7 chip, the Ryzen 7 1700, lacks an "X" at the end of its name, unlike the Ryzen 7 1700X ($195.00 at Amazon) and 1800X. This X indicates the inclusion of a feature AMD is calling Extended Frequency Range (XFR).

XFR makes use of what the company is calling "SenseMI," or sensors and algorithms that, among other things, measure voltage, power, and temperature in fine detail, a thousand times per second. The sensors monitor where the chip is situated within its power and heat envelopes, as well as where it expects to be in the near-term future.

When it comes to clock speeds, SenseMI allows the chip to "sense" when it has sufficient cooling and, assuming you have an XFR-enabled model (that is, one of those CPUs that end in "X"), to clock even higher than the top boost-clock speed. The idea, at least in part, is to reward buyers or builders who invest in large air coolers or liquid cooling to enjoy some performance gains.

Now, that sure sounds good. But, at least with this first round of Ryzen 7 chips, the XFR boost is locked at just an extra 100MHz. So the Ryzen 7 1800X can clock as high as 4.1GHz with a large cooler installed, rather than the 4GHz top stock speed with a more modest cooler installed.

We hope that future Ryzen chips get a bigger XFR boost, because the above seems like a long way to go, both in terms of underlying technology and the extra cost of a better cooler, to gain just an extra 100MHz. But of course if you do invest in a powerful cooler, you might be able to achieve more than 4.1GHz with overclocking, if you're willing to take the usual risk of voiding your warranty and/or frying your chip if you don't pay close attention to your thermals and voltages.

Note that we did our stock benchmark testing with XFR enabled, as AMD sent us a quite large and thick 240mm self-contained cooler (shown in the image above) for our testing, from EK Waterblocks (EKWB), paired with a Ryzen-branded EKWB Supremacy EVO waterblock. At the time we built our test system, it was the only cooler we had on hand that was designed for AMD's Ryzen chips.

Two things to note about the Ryzen 7 chips as a whole: These are CPUs only, with no onboard graphics, in the same mold as Intel's CPU-only E-Series chips. You'll need to use them with a discrete video card.

Meanwhile, the underside will look familiar to the AMD faithful. The Ryzen chips still use pins on the CPU itself, not the socket-side pins and on-chip contacts that Intel has long since moved to.

Performance, Overclocking, and Conclusion

For our test setup, we dropped the Ryzen 7 1800X into a Gigabyte-made Aorus AX370-Gaming 5 motherboard, along with 16GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 memory running at 2,933MHz. An AMD Radeon RX 480 ($410.00 at Amazon) video card handled display output, and a Samsung SSD 750 EVO ($99.00 at Amazon) was the SATA-interface boot drive. We could have used a faster NVMe drive, but as we tested previous chips from Intel and AMD using SATA SSDs, we didn't want to drop in a speed demon and give the Ryzen 7 1800X an unfair advantage. SATA SSDs are still very respectable.

Cinebench R15

First up in our testing regimen: Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads, using the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Along with the usual test that makes use of all available cores, we've added the single-core results here to get a sense of how AMD's new chip fares in lightly threaded workloads.

Single-core performance was a sticking point of AMD's previous-generation chips, as evidenced by the AMD FX-6350 and FX-8370 here. Those older FX chips placed much lower than anything else in our chart. AMD's new Ryzen 7 1800X chip landed 62 percent ahead of the higher-clocked (4GHz-to-4.3GHz) AMD FX-8370 on the single-core test. And the new AMD chip also managed to edge out its main competition, the Intel Core i7-6900K, by more than 6 percent.

The newer Intel "Kaby Lake" Core i7-7700K did better on the single-core test, thanks to its high clock speed (4.2GHz to 4.5GHz) and newer architecture. But when taking all cores and threads into account, the Ryzen 7 1800X pulled over 60 percent ahead of the Core i7-7700K, and landed just behind the Core i7-6900K. The Intel eight-core Core i7-6900K chip is a few percentage points ahead of AMD's offering when both are using all their cores, but given the Intel chip's around-$1,000 price, that hardly looks good when going up against competition that costs just $499.

Intel's highest-end consumer CPU, the 10-core Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition, landed at the top here, as we'd expect. But at about $1,700, it arguably looks worse against the Ryzen 7 1800X, which delivers 90 percent of the Intel chip's performance here at less than a third the price.

iTunes 10.6 Conversion Test

We then switched over to our venerable iTunes Conversion Test, using version 10.6 of iTunes. This test taxes only a single CPU core, as much legacy software still does.

Music encoding doesn't exactly push a modern CPU to its limits, and certainly not one like this. But this test still illustrates that, for programs that are older or haven't been written to take advantage of multiple cores, the Core i7-7700K is still king, thanks to its higher clock speed and Intel's newest architecture.

That said, the AMD chip here managed to keep pace with Intel's $1,700 Extreme Edition CPU, and it beat the time of its previous-generation AMD counterpart, the FX-8370, by more than 30 percent. We'd still like to see the AMD chip do better here, but considering it's about 14 percent behind the Core i7-6900K at less than half the price, we're chalking this result down to "good enough." That assumption is especially justified since most software that can take good advantage of lots of cores and threads has been updated to use two or more, at this point.

Handbrake 0.9.9

These days, our traditional Handbrake test (run under version 0.9.8) now takes less than a minute to complete with high-end chips. (It involves the rendering of a 5-minute video, Pixar's Dug's Special Mission, to an iPhone-friendly format.) So, we've switched to a much more taxing (and time-consuming) video-crunching test that uses a nice, big hunk of 4K video.

In this test, we switched to the newer Handbrake version 0.9.9, and tasked the CPUs to convert a 12-minute-and-14-second 4K .MOV file (the 4K showcase short film Tears of Steel) into a 1080p MPEG-4 video…

If the previous test left us wishing for a bit more performance from AMD's new chip, this result left us stunned by what AMD was able to deliver.

Not only did the Ryzen 7 1800X shave more than 10 full minutes off the time of its FX predecessor on the same test, and outpace the twice-the-price Core i7-6900K by more than 10 seconds, AMD's new flagship chip pulled within just 2 seconds of the $1,700 Intel Core i7-6950X. We would have thought the latter chip would do better, given its two extra physical cores and four extra threads. There's little doubt that the Intel chip technically has more computing muscle (as it should, at more than three times the price of AMD's part), but it seems not even the very optimized Handbrake can take full advantage of more than eight cores and 16 threads.

POV-Ray 3.7

Next up, using the "All CPUs" setting, we ran the POV-Ray benchmark, which challenges all available cores to render a complex photo-realistic image using ray tracing. After that, again to get a sense of how AMD's new chip handles single-core performance, we ran the same benchmark using the "One CPU" setting.

Once again, the Ryzen 7 1800X looks extremely impressive here. It tied the Core i7-6900K in the All CPUs test, and it landed just 4 seconds behind the Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition. On the single-core test, the Kaby Lake Core i7-7700K is still king, with an edge of roughly 20 percent over the AMD chip. But with twice the cores, the Ryzen 7 cleans the Kaby Lake i7's clock on the All CPUs setting by 46 seconds, or roughly 60 percent.

Blender 2.77a

Blender is an open-source 3D content-creation program that can be used to design and create visual effects, animation, and 3D models for use in video games or 3D printing. We open a standard test file (it's of a flying squirrel) and time how long the test processor takes to finish the render.

We may be reaching the limitations of this benchmark. Either that, or Intel's chips have a strong edge here, because all the Core i7 chips here took the same 24 seconds to finish. That's interesting, considering the Core i7-7700K has 12 fewer threads than the Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition. While AMD's Ryzen 7 1800X didn't look its best here, particularly against the lower-priced Core i7-7700K, it still landed just 5 seconds behind the showing of the two pricier Intel chips here (and the lower-cost Core i7-7700K). It was also well ahead of both the Core i3 processor and the previous-generation FX parts.

7-Zip 16.04 Benchmark

Last, we fired up the popular 7-Zip file compression software and ran its built-in compression/decompression benchmark, which is another useful test of a CPU's multi-core abilities.

On this test, the much pricier Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition flexed its extra cores and threads to pull about 30 percent ahead of the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X. Intel's eight-core Core i7-6900K also pulled about 8 percent ahead of its AMD Ryzen competition here. But again, when your "bad" showing sees you less than 10 percent behind competition that costs more than twice the price, your silicon is having a pretty good day.

Based on our tests, it would be an understatement to say that with Ryzen 7 here, it's tough to argue for Intel's highest-end Core i7 Broadwell-E chips at their current price points. We suspect they'll see some rather dramatic price dips in the near future.

Overclocking

As is almost always the case with CPU reviews, we didn't get the chance to spend as much time as we'd like overclocking, due to the realities of review deadlines. But we did fire up AMD's new Ryzen Master Utility (which bears a striking resemblance to the company's also relatively new Radeon Wattman graphics overclocking software).

After enabling the High Precision Event Timer (HPET.bat) file to enable most of the CPU's overclocking features (something that, at least for the moment, must be done via the command line), we started adjusting the core clocks, inching up the slider for all CPU cores as a unit. We liked that you can adjust clock speeds in 25MHz increments rather than winging it, so you can get pretty fine-grained in your tweaking, if that's your thing.

That said, we seemed to hit a hard wall at 4GHz, or 400MHz above the chip's stock base clock of 3.6GHz. Running any benchmarks beyond that resulted in a black screen requiring a hard reboot. No amount of adjusting the voltage seemed to allow our review chip to remain stable above that. Even at 4.025GHz, the system refused to remain stable.

But even though 4GHz isn't technically higher than the 4.1GHz top boost speed with XFR, we did get higher benchmark scores from our Ryzen chip sample at the 4GHz overclock settings. At that setting, in Cinebench R15 we saw the All CPUs score jump from 1,625 to 1,688 (an increase of about 4 percent), and the timed POV-Ray All CPU benchmark dropped from 1 minute and 17 seconds (1:17) to 1:13. That's not a huge change, but it was enough to exactly tie the performance of Intel's Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition running at stock speeds. Not bad considering you could buy the AMD chip three times over for the current price of that Core i7, and still have a couple hundred dollars left over.

AMD aimed the Ryzen 7 1800X at the Core i7-6900K, which makes sense given that the two chips have the same core counts. But the chip that AMD's part really makes look bad is the much costlier 10-core Core i7 Extreme Edition CPU. At this point, with its new $499 competition from AMD, the only thing "extreme" about the Core i7-6950X is its $1,700 asking price.

Gaming Performance

We don't ordinarily run graphics tests when testing processors without integrated graphics. That's mostly because graphics performance typically has much (much) more to do with what graphics card you have installed than what processor you're using—especially when you're using a high-end processor like the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X or Intel's competing Core i7-6900K.

But, as this is an untested platform, and AMD has been out of the high-end consumer CPU business for years, we wanted to see if the Ryzen 7 1800X could deliver acceptable frame rates with a high-end video card. So we swapped out the AMD Radeon RX 480 that we used for the bulk of our benchmark testing and dropped in an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition ($549.00 at NVIDIA) card and ran a few of the tests that we also use for graphics-card testing.

For comparison numbers, we did the same thing with our Intel Broadwell-E testbed. Alas, we didn't still have a Core i7-6900K chip available on hand to run graphics tests. So we used the stepped-up 10-core Extreme Edition Core i7-6950X instead. Given that games usually don't take full advantage of lots of cores and threads, the 10-core chip should perform roughly similar to the eight-core Core i7-6900K from the same chip family.

First, we fired up late 2015's Rise of the Tomb Raider in DirectX 11 mode at the Very High preset and ran the built-in benchmark. In short, we found that—at least at 1080p—the Ryzen 7 1800X's performance wasn't as great as it could be.

With 16GB of RAM and the same Nvidia graphics card in both systems, and the resolution set to 1080p, the Ryzen 7 1800X-based rig averaged 107 frames per second (fps), while the Core i7-6950X averaged 127fps. Obviously, knocking 20fps off your gaming performance is never a good thing—particularly considering how expensive high-end graphics cards are these days. The AMD-based system delivered both lower minimum frame rate performance (56fps), and lower maximum performance (145fps), compared to the 76fps (min) and 180fps (max) with the same card in the Intel machine.

But when we stepped up to 4K resolution (3840x2160), performance evened out, with the Ryzen 7 1800X system delivering an average frame rate of 47.6fps while the Core i7-6950X machine managed a mere extra frame, hitting 48.6fps. That one frame is well within our general 2-percent margin of error.

Next, we switched to the game Far Cry Primal, on the title's High preset, and saw similar results as Tomb Raider. Things looked a tad dicier for AMD this time—though, again, still only at 1080p. Here's a look at the performance of our test system with the Ryzen 7 1800X installed.

At 1080p in this title, the Ryzen system managed an average of 83fps, while the Core i7-6950X machine tacked on 25 more frames, hitting 108fps. Jumping up to 4K resolution on Far Cry Primal, however, both systems delivered the same frame rate: 49fps.

What do we glean from this? In short, the Ryzen 7 1800X's gaming performance isn't as good as we'd expect at 1080p. But note that, as we mentioned earlier, AMD has been out of the high-end CPU realm for years, and we did our testing in the days around this processor's launch. Just as games aren't always optimized for brand-new graphics cards as soon as they launch (particularly if you happen to have a multi-card SLI or CrossFire setup), but are patched in the weeks that follow to deliver better performance, the same will likely happen on the CPU side of things.

Also, if you're buying a $499 CPU (one that, let's not forget, otherwise competes with $1,000-plus CPUs) and you care at all about gaming, you probably aren't gaming on a 1080p screen at this point—unless, perhaps, you're a fast-paced twitch-game aficionado with a very high-refresh-rate 1080p monitor.

If the latter sounds like you, this Ryzen chip probably isn't your best choice right now. (The Kaby Lake Core i7-7700K would be a better fit, at a lower price.) But everyone with a very high-resolution (1440p or 4K) monitor should see much less variance between what Ryzen and Broadwell-E/Kaby Lake deliver on the CPU front when it comes to games running on these high-end chips.

Plus, let's not forget: Even if you are gaming on a 1080p screen, the near-triple-digit performance we saw in testing is still very smooth, and close enough to what Intel delivers that you'd need both a very fast monitor and extremely good eyesight to see it. Down in the real world where most of us still game, in the 60fps range, what AMD delivers here is far more than "good enough" for serious gaming performance. And over time, it will almost certainly get better as developers patch their games for AMD's brand-new hardware. So while this is a red-flag area, it's only really an issue in certain edge cases.

Conclusion

Based on the Ryzen 7 1800X alone, it's hard not to be exceedingly impressed with what AMD has been able to deliver.

After years of lagging well behind the competition in the high-end-CPU market, Ryzen proves it was worth waiting for, even if that wait was overly long. The top-end Ryzen 7 1800X doesn't technically deliver a new level of performance. But, for the most part, the Ryzen 7 1800X delivers performance comparable to Intel's highest-end consumer chips at a price that makes Team Blue's $1,000-plus enthusiast offerings just seem silly-priced for reasonable applications (and most unreasonable ones, too). We reached out to Intel to ask about possible price cuts, and the company wouldn't confirm anything officially. We were, though, reminded that "the channel sets its own prices." And if the channel wants to move its high-end Intel offerings, those prices will likely be adjusted soon. Serious PC gamers who want the highest possible frame rates at lower resolutions (such as 1080p) may want to wait a bit to see if most games get patched for improved performance at or near 1080p, or opt for the Core i7-7700K instead. But unless you have a 120Hz or 144Hz gaming monitor and your eyesight is eagle-like, the gaming performance the Ryzen 7 1800X delivers at launch is still very good.

That issue aside, though, pricing remains the toughest question for AMD, in the long run. While the Ryzen 7 1800X is very competitive, if Intel and its partners can slash prices and still make a profit, that will—of course—be a problem for AMD if it can't do the same. It's worth a reminder, though, that you also need to factor in the low cost of new AMD motherboards—as low as $79 at this writing, with more basic A320-chipset boards presumably coming soon at even lower prices. That additional enticement makes AMD's Ryzen chips (and the Ryzen 7 1800X, in particular) even more enticing from a performance-per-dollar standpoint. As long as AMD can keep up stock of its silicon and keep prices in their suggested ranges, the Ryzen 7 1800X and its other two Ryzen 7 counterparts are almost certain to shake up the high-end CPU market in a big, big way.

It's been quite a while since we've seen more than incremental processor-performance gains, generation over generation, in the arena for enthusiast processors. And compared to AMD's near-geriatric FX processors, the first Ryzen 7 we've tested feels like an almost supernatural leap. But to be fair, that jump, in part, seems so impressive only because the FX architecture has been dragging down the chip maker for years.

This is a very impressive first showing, and we're loading Ryzen 7 1700X and 1700 samples into our test-bed tower for more Ryzen 7 reviews in the coming days. But we're also curious to see how AMD follows up, both with its 2017-model Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 parts, and if it can maintain momentum versus Intel in the years to come with its second- and third-generation Zen-based silicon. With the Ryzen 7 1800X, though, AMD has made a Godzilla-size step back into the battle.

Editors' Note: This review was originally published without gaming tests, due to time constraints. But because this is a substantial new platform from AMD, and because some reviewers have seen issues with the Ryzen 7 1800X's gaming performance, primarily at 1080p, we felt the need to add gaming tests and discussion, which you can find near the end of the second page of this review.