Today marks the initial start of AMD’s pre-sale of 2nd Generation Ryzen processors. The full launch is set for April 19th, which is when reviews and performance numbers will be officially available, but today we are able to tell you a bit about the processors that are coming, as well as some pictures, and link readers to where they can pre-order. We’re not overly fond of manufacturers offering pre-orders before revealing performance numbers, as with the Threadripper launch last year, however we can at least discuss the details of each part.
Good to see AMD continue improving Ryzen.
I think this Ryzen refresh could attract a few more gamers, because it closes the single thread performance gap with Intel’s rival processors. Add the fact that you get much better multi-threading performance with Ryzen, then these also look quite attractive if you do more than one major task at once.
Me? I’m on a now “obsolete” Ryzen 7 1700 and it’s plenty beefy enough for what I need to do for the next 5 years, so I’m probably not going to use the “compatibility to 2020” of my X370 board any time soon to do an upgrade. It did help I got 64GB RAM of DDR4 last year at 320 GBP, which turned out to be a “bargain” compared to today’s prices.
I think I could only get excited about a future CPU upgrade if there were more than 8 cores/16 threads on a desktop CPU at a sensible price (and, no, I don’t count Threadripper as a desktop CPU). I’d also want to go above 64GB RAM of course…
What do you do with 64GB? VM farm? Video editing?
Because if you don’t it’s a waste of 280 GBP
I’ve got 64 GB on my 5960x system.
I use it for virtual machines sometimes. Also good for playing Star Citizen, which is in Alpha and has memory bugs sometimes. It used 28 GB a couple of weeks ago but my game kept running.
And for the rest: Disk Cache. Windows has 30 GB of files cached at the moment.
My Ryzen 1700X has 32 GB of 2400 MHz ECC RAM on it. It runs a Linux NAS and my personal email and torrents. It generally has 5 GB in slab (btrfs inodes, dentries and extent buffers) and 22 GB in cache.
Cache is pretty important.
I really don’t get it sorry.
So you have a NAS with a lot files cached. Caching only works if it has been read once. Any movie you play won’t really benefit unless you watch it twice.
Maybe you do have a need for many files cached but if it is stored on a NAS, your network will be the bottleneck.
For email, torrents and file storage you don’t need much memory and also your electricy sucking processor is overkill.
I have a homemade NAS/torrent/nextcloud/vpn server too, 4GB RAM + Celeron J1900 processor. Memory and CPU are *never* the bottleneck. In fact it never went into swap disk ever
So except to run the buggy games I don’t see anything out there to have that much memory (unless video editing or running VMs)
A Ryzen 1700X may be a little bit overkill for a NAS. But I was fed up with the Bobcat E-350 I was using before.
Do you know how slow an “efficient” NAS is? I was lucky to hit 60 MB/s in file transfers over gigabit.
Now with the Ryzen and its X370-Pro motherboard all 6 drives have a full speed SATA link and it can copy files over encrypted connections at 110 MB/s aka 990 Mbps on gigabit.
Overkill is very very nice.
The power usage is not that bad. Measured by the UPS, with the E-350 it was about 25W at idle and now it’s 55W. Ryzen is pretty good about power use. I suspect the RAM and motherboard use more watts themselves than the smaller system did.
ok that electricity usage is much better than I thought. And yes you get higher speeds than me I only have 1 PCI lane used to give me 4 more SATA connectors.
But I have nothing on the LAN that warrants more expensive kit.
And it’s pointless to even have a connection that’s significantly faster than the bitrate of a movie…
I wonder if Intel processors aren’t now already on par with first Ryzen due to patching of Intel CPUs against Meltdown attack…
Related: and I suppose AMD didn’t have time to put in these new chips countermeasures that don’t impact performance (if such are even possible…) against Spectre attack?
I’m still on an FX-8350, so once these are out I’ll definitely have to think about upgrading. The main thing that puts me off is the current state of RAM pricing.