Well a load of Ryzen 5 reviews have just dropped and it seems that every reviewer under the sun has sustained a head injury or two between writing their ryzen 7 reviews and today. The same memory and clock speed mismatches, showing the 1600x beating the 1700x because they haven't retested the 1700x and still only reviewing with Nvidia GPUs when there are now several videos and articles out there that show that rx480 crossfire with ryzen is actually quite a good combination.
Agreed, with the bios improvements to get RAM up to speed and the power plan update all old Ryzen 7 data should have been purged and the whole testing done again from scratch.
480 crossfire setup has all the pitfalls of crossfire. if the game loves cfx then your in business if not your getting negative performance. Of anandtechs test setup only 2 of 11 games benefit from cfx enough to make it a worth while purchase over the single 1070 card. For a cpu test gpu should be the fastest single card solution 1080ti most likely they will have on hand. Most review sites do not have 2 480s on hand. Memory and clock speed matches is to do with AMD I am afraid they have not got the micro code out there for reviewers to use it yet. Was confirmed in the bit tech review among others that this is the case. Once that code is live all tests should be redone cannot see it happening though.
As pcper has proven, the power plan updates alone where more than enough to invalidate all Ryzen data from before it. As for RAM speed, there have been bios improvements to allow for more realistic RAM speeds since launch unrelated to the micro code update, while it doesn't matter too much in the case of bit-tech since they could run the RAM at acceptable speeds back when Ryzen launched already, lets not forget they where among the lucky few rather than the norm.
Disappointed in the power consumption figures for R5 to be honest. Was hoping the 1500X would undercut the 7600K in price and efficiency at the cost of a little out-the-box speed and less overclocking headroom. 1600X at least has a niche of extra cores for the workloads that can use it, but I think the 4c/8t parts are in trouble - Intel no doubt has a fairly decent amount of room to wiggle on price, if they drop to £200 on the 7600K it'll be fairly hard to argue Ryzen's case. And that's before you factor in the inherent platform instabilities right now...
I will be surprised if we get a retest of ryzen in general. Its just not a done thing in the review industry. Saw it before with varies products in the past. They hate admitting mistakes lol.
I think this time it's a bit different though. If we've seen like a single GPU from some one that performed badly due to a bios or what not (kinda like the RX 480 Devil) then we don't usually see amendments. However, Ryzen is a big release with lots of CPUs so I would imagine once the dust settles and things improve (if they do) then quite a few reviewers will revise their reviews/scores etc. Well, they did after the Sandybridge/chipset fiasco any way. I'm thinking B350 Tomahawk and possibly a hex core for my Ubuntu rig, though I have plenty of time to decide. Ram prices are volatile atm and I am just not paying those numbers so I can wait.
Five more MSI AM4 boards today lol http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/msi-launches-new-ryzen-x370-and-b350-gaming-motherboards.html I fear we might have to wait a long time for them to arrive, just look at the Intel Z270 chipset, one ITX board each from Gigabyte, MSI and ASUS and two from ASRock and that chipset launched ages ago.
I count two from Gigabyte, two from ASRock, one from Asus, ECS, MSI, and EVGA. 8 boards is not a bad selection, and that's not counting all the H270 boards if you're not overclocking.
Yeah, there are actually plenty of Z270 mITX boards, plus all the other chipsets for mITX. I certainly wouldn't say that it's a particularly under-represented area this time around.
And that's before you factor in the Z170 options - most (if not all) of which will support Kaby Lake chips. If I wasn't dead set on ITX, purely because it's the only format I've never worked with, I would go for a B350 Mortar today. But I'm not in so much of a rush in the sense that any R5 I go for will be more of a side-grade.
Yeah sorry, I missed the second Gigabyte and the EVGA one, my mistake (as for the ECS one, that doesn't count in my book, just like Acer and Thermaltake I wouldn't take their products for free). Butr overall the point still stands, the selection is nowhere near as good as with the bigger boards on the Intel side, so we shouldn't expect it to end up any different on the AMD side.
There's a big difference between "only 8 high-end boards to choose from" and "no boards for you with any chipset".
Not really a big difference once you correct for the marketshare between Intel and AMD as well as age of the platform. However, regardless of that I think mainboard manufacturers are really missing the signs of the times with their lineups, I bet no tears would be shed if Asus and co cut the number of ATX boards they churn out in half and in exchange gave us more mATX and mITX boards.
We'll see mITX AM4 boards once the Ryzen APUs launch, but no-one should be surprised that mITX, which is a niche within a niche, has been neglected at the launch of a brand new socket and chipset(s). And I would have loved to see some Ryzen mITX solutions by now, because I've just built a new mITX PC. Alas, it's not to be, so I've gone Intel again.
