AMD Ryzen 7 1800X AM4 8-Core Processor Review

Introduction

The day of Ryzen has finally come and while I’m sure many of you have been eagerly awaiting this, we’ve been even more excited to be some of the first people in the world to get our hands-on the new hardware and see what it can really do. There have been many leaks and lots of speculation hitting the market, and we’ve seen some cherry picked benchmarks from AMD and other sources floating around, but now it’s time to put our best foot forward and see what all the fuss is really about!

We kick things off today with the flagship Ryzen chip; the Ryzen 7 1800X, which offers up 8 cores, 16 threads, and an incredible launch price of just $499, which comes in at less than half the price of a similar specification Intel Core i7-6900K. While we want to see AMD set some top scores today, even if it’s a close call compared to the performance of the Intel hardware, at half the price, we would still chalk that up as a huge win, both for AMD and consumers.

All Ryzen CPUs come with an unlocked multiplier, that feature is enabled by the motherboard rather than the chip itself. Of course, we’ll be putting the 1800X we have in one of the latest X370 motherboards, so we’ll be pushing this chip to its limits to see what it can really do. The chip can overclock itself using Extended Frequency Range (XFR) and can push the speeds up to a tasty 4.1GHz assuming that the CPU has thermal headroom, so a powerful cooler is recommended to get the most out of it, but that’s true of overclocking on any CPU or platform.

• 8 Core with 16 Threads
• 4.00GHz clock speed
• 14nm FinFet Process
• 16MB L3 Cache
• Dual Channel DDR4 Controller
• 3 Year Warranty

With the promise of greatly improved multi-threaded performance, AMD look set to bring more cores to the masses, along with the benefits that it can bring to multi-tasking, video editing, gaming, and much more.

Packaging and Accessories

Ryzen is a pretty special occasion for AMD and for us here at eTeknix, so we received this lovely Ryzen box with the sample in, it’s just a shame that consumers won’t get this kickass box!

The consumer box is a little more down to earth, with a simple and clean design. The SKU we have doesn’t come with the stock cooler, but we’ll be using our own AIO water coolers anyway.

Here’s the star of the show, the Ryzen chip, noticeably smaller than most 8-core chips, certainly a lot smaller than the high-end Intel offerings.

The build quality looks good and the top panel looks pretty heavy-duty too, which I’m hoping means good heat dissipation. The design itself is familiar to anyone who’s used AMD chips in the past and uses 1331 pins, seems they missed the opportunity to use 1337.

On the other side, pretty much what you would expect.