AMD Ryzen 7 1800X CPU Review

Conclusion

From start to finish the Ryzen 7 1800X was a revelation and you can’t begin to understand how happy it makes us.

This isn’t an AMD processor that you have to find the good points of. This isn’t an incrementally better one which requires some give and take. This isn’t even a processor when you end up saying “it’s good but…”. There isn’t a but. It’s just great. Finally dispensing with the AM3 socket which is so old we think Methuselah had one in his younger days has been a revelation, and the ASUS Prime X370-Pro that we tested on comes with all the very latest technologies. It’s current. It’s up to date. It isn’t an old foundation with an extension hastily bolted to the side. From the ground up it matches anything you might find on the market.

Of course having the latest and greatest would mean little if the processor was a wheezy heat pump. Something that was only good when encoding video. On a cold Thursday. If you’re water-cooled. And patient. There are no such issues, asterisks or qualifiers with the Ryzen 7 1800X. It’s blisteringly fast, in every scenario, end of discussion.

There was talk all over the technology news sites before launch that the Ryzen was suffering in 3D results. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how it wont be any good for gaming, how the single core performance isn’t a match for the Intel’s so you’ll be really disappointed if you plan to game on it. Blah blah blah. That’s why we test first, then tell you what we think, rather than regurgitate 3rd hand news like a cow chewing its way through the fourth stomachs worth of cud. We bring you accurate findings, all other websites are left with a mouth full of sick and a guilty look for having plagiarised each other.

It’s been so long since we had to test an AMD CPU that we had to go back into the darkest corners of the office to find our old CPUs and run them on our newest benchmarks. Otherwise you’d have been reading about 3D Mark 05 performance and how many FPS you could expect in Quake 3 Arena. It speaks loudly about the quality of the Ryzen hardware that we had to significantly lengthen our graphs just to fit the older AMD offerings in such is the performance differential between the top of the range Intel CPUs and the AMD processors you could buy yesterday. You can now include Ryzen 7 1800X into the list of “top of the range processors”. It’s so much better than all that has come before that it has, in one fell swoop, rendered all current AMD products obsolete.

If we had to be supremely nit-picky – and we checked the small print and we do – then the DDR4 speeds could do with a little tweaking. Hopefully that is something that can be easily sorted with some BIOS tweaks as the hardware matures. It’s not that the DDR4 speed is bad, 2866 MHz is nothing to be sniffed at, but if you’ve got used to the gobs of bandwidth you get when running nearer to 4000 MHz then you might be slightly disappointed. However, we have to point out that if you look at the real world results this minor deficiency isn’t really having an effect beyond taking the gloss off your forum signatures.

There might have been a few false dawns in the recent AMD CPU releases. Lots of CPUs arrived with promises unfulfilled. The Ryzen burns through the fog that has clouded AMD and brought forth a warm glow of blistering performance at competitive prices. The Ryzen 7 1800X is a match for anything Intel has. AMD, it’s great to have you back.

  

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