Blogs AMD offering competition is great, but it presents challenges for us all

Keep up the good work! We're counting on your information for our future acquisitions!

 

Just something that has come up in a recent review, and is relevant to this piece, is that you, reviewers, need to keep your benchmark results current with new AGESA / BIOS / software releases as well as retesting overclocks whilst there is so much flux in the performance from such updates.

Just keep the reviews coming, I'm loving it

 

I'm not feeling the love for the motherboard manufacturers - this sort of thing should be their bread and butter. Yes, times of austerity and all that, but it's a poor excuse for delivering half baked products.

I love Ryzen, and I'm very happy with my R5 1600 but if I enable XMP profile 2 to run my RAM at it's rated 3200MHz my motherboard sh!ts itself and enacts a failed overclock sequence. Now in the grand scheme of things, it isn't a huge deal - XMP1 runs the RAM at 2933MHz without batting an eyelid - but rushing to market with clearly unfinished products is piss poor IMO.

Where are the X370 mATX boards? Why is it taking so long? Biostar have released, or least announced, an X370 ITX board.

 

Yeah, although imho the blame lies with a combination of the motherboard manufacturers and AMD. There have been loads of stories of Ryzen's launch being a bit rushed, in terms of board manufacturers being notified of changes late in the day and struggling to incorporate or adapt to them. Ryzen's struggles with RAM are one facet of this.

Now I'm not saying that Intel are always perfect with these things, of course, but they do have a good track record generally of working well with board partners so that launches go (relatively) smoothly.

Was reading in this month's CPC that the forthcoming X399 platform is also giving board partners some real headaches, which doesn't sound promising.

 

Ryzen's launch and lack of initial motherboard availability were due to the manufacturers dealing with the production of another pointless series of mother boards (Z270) and Intel's introduction of another generation of medicre refresh CPU's - yes AMD's timing was off but ultimately the motherboard manufacturers are equally to blame for being caught short.

As has been stated the industry has only had to be Intel compliant for years (far to long to the detriment of the consumer in terms of pricing) - I'd also like to point out Asus have really upped their game to support and embrace Ryzen, their current BIOS's are a breath of fresh air.

 

Hmm, I wasn't meaning each sample, but in CPU reviews, such as recently comparing the 7900X, it would be nice to have an up to date sample of CPU performance in there (I was only guessing that it's not up to date as the figures were off for the 1700 vs the figures in the MSI B350 Tomahawk review and seem to be the same as those from the original reviews of the processors. Understandably this would be a problem if you don't have a sample to hand which you could use as a baseline of each CPU's current performance.)
From what I can see you do have a Ryzen R7 1700 sample to hand, for example, and whilst I wouldn't expect you to keep retrospectively updating the past reviews the snapshot of performance that you indicate in the graphs in a review should be the current performance of the platforms in those graphs; of course this would limit what you could put in the graphs based on what samples you have available.

As you say, normally BIOS updates don't really bring anything much to the table in terms of performance and so this wouldn't be an issue, you could just keep reusing the same performance figures across reviews, however, with the release of Ryzen, and now X299, with its updated cache layout, (and in the near future X399) software updates between reviews can end up introducing a greater variance than occurred historically (as the chip manufacturers work with the software developers to refine their software; sometimes to the benefit of all parties such as with AotS) and this more dynamic performance can mean that future reviews might highlight where maturing CPU performance might cast a different light on a new release as well as highlighting how more mature CPUs are aging.

When Ryzen was announced, there were two additional chipsets also announced to specifically address the ITX motherboard format but they have not yet been released as far as I can see, and I have no idea whether they will be.

 

Like every thing tech related in the Intel dominated years, there was great stagnation, this led to tech magazines and the like restructuring, including many lay-offs. Now we will probably see an increase in the number of tech journalists again as well as a result from the increased competition.

I really think Ryzen has lit a fire under the whole tech industry and consumers are beginning to buzz about PC's again. With the previous intel performance control, consumers had no reasons to upgrade, now they do, and long may it continue.