What is life like with an Ryzen CPU?

[Grimlakin]

This is a question you may have if you are somewhat new to the IT world and build it yourself, or more so if you remember back in the day when there were Pentium, Athalon, Cyrix, 486, Celeron, and Itanium cpu's all in the market at the same time.

Chances were if your software was written and compiled for the instruction sets on CPU 1 it my not work on CPU 2. OR... you would see strange performance or less system stability with the different vendor CPU.

I will say this as we all know in gaming the raw compatibility from the Intel CPU's to the Ryzen or Threadripper line of CPU's is not 100% painless.. well it wasn't.

What I mean is that the game makers that wrote their code, and the developers that made the CPU's and the drivers for them have realized the pain points that have been ran into... and by and large fixed them.

I have had an odd hangup with 7 days to die... but that's an alpha program and I would expect that. I can't recall if I had the same problems on my Intel CPU or not so I can't count that against AMD.

Another game I logged some real hours on was Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Again I never had an issue with it. I did have a few times the game locked up or crashed during normal operation... well normal. I MAY have been running a cheat from CheatHappens at the same time. So again I can not attribute the one off lockups to AMD.

FFXIV I've been logging some hours in as well with the new build.. and it's been rock solid, even using 3rd party applications with the game.. (It's against the Terms of Service so I don't say do this.) and it's been rock solid.

Some other programs I've been running.
MS Office 365 suite: Rock solid
Discord: Rock Solid
Origins: Rock solid
Uplay: Rock Solid
Icue: Rock Solid
Blizzards launcher: Rock solid
Steam: Rock Solid
Twitch: Rock Solid
GOG: Rock Solid
EPIC Games store: Rock Solid
Steel Series Engine: Rock Solid
Samsung Magician: Rock Solid
Nvidia Control panel and Experience: Rock Solid
The Crew 2: Rock Solid
Destiny 2: Rock solid (This was fixed before I made the jump to Ryzen)
Borderlands 3: Rock Solid

....

I think you get the idea. I had zero real pain when changing over to the new build. Yes I wiped my drive and started over with a fresh OS install and had your normal configuration hoops with Windows 10. Beyond that it's been... well... Rock Solid.

That first boot after a bios update or new install... that takes an VERY long time and I ended up power cycling to get past it because I'm impatient.

That would be my biggest pain point.

So I just wanted to share that today with every program I've tried it has been amazing and a great experience and no noticeable issues.

 

[Dan_D]

The days of massive software compatibility problems like we saw with older AMD and Cyrix CPU's in the i386-Pentium eras are a thing of the past. Once in awhile you get a weird one like the Destiny 2 issue, but that's on Destiny 2's code rather than an AMD issue. Last time I ran AMD in my personal machine, it was a Threadripper 2920X. It was a fantastic processor outside of gaming. It was simply a weakness of that CPU which was the problem. Too much latency going across CCX complexes and that sort of thing.

 

[David_Schroth]

The days of massive software compatibility problems like we saw with older AMD and Cyrix CPU's in the i386-Pentium eras are a thing of the past. Once in awhile you get a weird one like the Destiny 2 issue, but that's on Destiny 2's code rather than an AMD issue. Last time I ran AMD in my personal machine, it was a Threadripper 2920X. It was a fantastic processor outside of gaming. It was simply a weakness of that CPU which was the problem. Too much latency going across CCX complexes and that sort of thing.

So.. interesting thing here that I was going to ask you about. What does the default gaming mode profile do on the 2920? I just tried it on my 1950x to diagnose some bf5 things and it cut down to 8 cores instead of 16 and seemed to smooth out the lag spikes I was getting...

 

[Grimlakin]

Even on the Ryzen it cuts out a CCX and drops you down to 6 core in the 'gaming' profile... but for me it hasn't made a difference and I'm not going to loose half my cores for it.

 

[Dan_D]

So.. interesting thing here that I was going to ask you about. What does the default gaming mode profile do on the 2920? I just tried it on my 1950x to diagnose some bf5 things and it cut down to 8 cores instead of 16 and seemed to smooth out the lag spikes I was getting...

Gaming mode on any of the CPU's that have it cuts down the number of active CCX complexes to reduce cross CCX latency penalties which are generally the biggest problem with Ryzen's performance in games. There are some other issues on the Threadripper side. CPU's like the 2990WX compound those issues with their NUMA style memory architecture. All first and second generation Threadripper CPU's benefit from game mode for this reason.

 

[Eduardo_Domingot]

Got a 2600x for my friends rig (he was on Haswell i5 and couldnt play Modern Warfare) and its been a night and day improvement. Honestly Ryzen is great and there is no reason to be scared of AMD.

 

[Grimlakin]

You're a good friend Fidel.

 

[Snowy]

I was an early adopter of Ryzen, I built my computer in March of 2017 -- My 1700X CPU has been fantastic. I've never once experienced any weird issues or any crashes. I came from a Phenom II and the difference of course is night and day. The first thing I noticed performance wise that really was awesome was the ability to stream a game with any noticeable performance difference. Overall I'm very happy and I am very tempted to upgrade to a 3700X.

 

[Bloax]

Besides the Beta Tester period of Zen2, it's been indistinguishable from a simply much faster Haswell system.

****ing around with stupid **** with PCs not included

 

[Grimlakin]

What is that a picture of and is your haswell system the faster system?

 

[Bloax]

It's indistinguishable from being a much faster Haswell system - ergo; it suffers from no "bizarreties", simply goes faster.

And that's a picture of me (not yet zip-tie'ing, but that did happen) putting a fan over my memory sticks because they run a little hot at 1.57v

Between the rather extensive RAM overclock, and Zen2 just being a monster CPU architecture - it runs circles around my old Haswell.


somehow i didn't comment on my Morpheus II'd 5700 XT silly me
Yeah don't do that kids, it was just something I wanted to try for ****s and giggles.

 

[Zarathustra]

Mine is a Threadripper, but my experience has been no different from my old i7-3930k, except the cores are way faster, and there are 24 of them.

Only difference I can think of is that overclocking is a whole lot less effective and/or fun, but that's it.

Everything works just as well as it did before. No quirks, no oddities, nothing like that.

 

[Eduardo_Domingot]

I bought a 3700x (tester before getting 3900 or 3950x) and so far I enjoy it. Performance stock was better than my previous CPU in multi by a ton and a tad bit faster in single core.
I lean towards the same opinion that Zarathustra has, overclocking is not as fun and a whole lot different from what I have been accustomed too.

 

[Brian_B]

I lean towards the same opinion that Zarathustra has, overclocking is not as fun and a whole lot different from what I have been accustomed too.

Yeah, I think "overclocking" as we knew it in the 90's and 00's is more or less dead. Running up against Moore's Law, and just plain old competition, chip manufacturers can't leave that much performance on the table, and the "battle" will be won by the company who can push their silicon harder and faster than the other, without going over the line into instability.

Long live Turbo/Velocity/PBO/Boost, by whatever trademarked name marketing comes up with. The control algorithms will get more sophisticated to push chips to their physical limit, and with the sensor packages in place to ensure you don't trip over the limit. The "new" overclocking will just be a matter of optimizing your thermal solution and ensuring you can feed it enough power, so the sensors and algorithms have enough headroom to boost.

It's a big win for consumers - faster chips, better energy management. For us old overclockers that remember using a #2 to unlock multipliers and tweaking with voltages and timings, it's a bit boring. They have turned our art into science.

I guess there is still RAM overclocking - they haven't entirely taken that away from us yet.

 

[Bloax]

There's still Art in there, it's just a matter of delidding soldered IHSes, sanding dies, direct-die'ing without cracking the dies and all combinations of these funny things and Cooling Solutions that may be applicable.

Certainly no Funny Tricks For (Not Actually) Free Money ; -)

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

I've had my 3700x for almost six months now. Been awesome. Everything I wanted out of it. Got precision boost running from the motherboard and I keep the wraith at 100%. Clocks to 4125-4325 MHz at all times and have re-defined gaming for me. I've seriously not seen it go below 4125 MHz.

AMD just keeps on impressing me in the CPU realm and especially when it comes to value. I normally overspend on my GPUs since max performance is on my mind for visuals and I feel like I got a steal with this build. The only complaint is that I should've read a bit more about the MSI MPG 570's because I'm pretty sure some of the temp challenges I've had are because of that now that I know about them. For the moment it's doing its job and let both the CPU and MOBO gave no hassle for using 3600 MHz RAM but we'll see how long it lasts.

I want to say that when I did this build it was coming from nearly ten years of Intel builds. With those, I pretty much slap 'em together and turn on, install drivers, etc. I was a little nervous about it. Worked perfectly. I honestly would not have known the difference.

 

[Niner51]

I want to say that when I did this build it was coming from nearly ten years of Intel builds. With those, I pretty much slap 'em together and turn on, install drivers, etc. I was a little nervous about it. Worked perfectly. I honestly would not have known the difference.

Same here with Intel builds. I used to build with AMD years ago with the last one I believe was an Athlon 64. The more I keep reading the more I am leaning on going back to AMD. I think I can squeeze more life out of my 8700K, but when the 4000 series comes out I might be a buyer.

 

[Dan_D]

I keep the wraith at 100%. Clocks to 4125-4325 MHz at all times and have re-defined gaming for me. I've seriously not seen it go below 4125 MHz.

 

[_k_]

Same here with Intel builds. I used to build with AMD years ago with the last one I believe was an Athlon 64. The more I keep reading the more I am leaning on going back to AMD. I think I can squeeze more life out of my 8700K, but when the 4000 series comes out I might be a buyer.

I am back on a 4770k paired with a 1080Ti. Still can't definitively tell if my cpu is holding me back as my play experience has been very high. Looking at jumping on the 4000 train myself which should bring my video encoding times down.

 

[Dan_D]

Same here with Intel builds. I used to build with AMD years ago with the last one I believe was an Athlon 64. The more I keep reading the more I am leaning on going back to AMD. I think I can squeeze more life out of my 8700K, but when the 4000 series comes out I might be a buyer.

The only time you'll run into any major issues setting up a modern AMD system is if you want to install the OS to a bootable RAID volume. At that point things get messy driver wise. You can certainly do it, but the experience will be far more frustrating than it is on the Intel side of things. But, that's about it. Otherwise it's the same basic experience.