Conclusion

Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves if Ryzen is going to be a worthy competitor to Intel right now. I think the answer to that is yes. Intel will keep the single-thread crown, but AMD seems to have some nice perks going its way for multi-threading. Maturity is in Intel’s favor at the moment, but time will help remedy that issue for AMD, increasing clock speeds along the way. AMD is not that far behind in this bracket this time though. Clock for clock, it seems to be a bit of give and take for both sides. What surprises me about this is how AMD is the new champion of power efficiency. The Ryzen 7 1800X is an 8 core, 16 thread monster that operates on a 95W TDP. I noticed that raise a tiny bit with XFR in HWInfo, but between software not being necessarily as accurate as external equipment and the margin being so small, it seems AMD has tapped into some black magic here.

It looks like Ryzen is a win entirely on it’s own, with price points giving it even more of an advantage for consumers to consider. This seems like just the thing the CPU market needed to help kick it into high gear again, which should really help us builders out as well. Once again, this is just a preview so check back with us a bit later, since we’ll be working on the full official review with awards, we’ll take more detailed looks at overclocking, and take deeper dives into the X370 chipset. We’ll make sure to include some nice closer looks at the chips, the socket and motherboards then as well.