We're late with our Ryzen 7 review for a number of reasons, and some might argue that the key story has already been told. We can confirm that the top-tier Ryzen 7 1800X does indeed match and occasionally even exceed Intel's mighty Core i7 6900K octo-core/16-thread monster on a great many benchmarks and heavily multi-threaded workloads. By this measure alone, AMD's return to a competitive footing in the x86 processor market is a remarkable achievement. But equally, our own tests confirm less impressive results posted by many: Ryzen 7's gaming performance does not match up to Intel's on most titles. The question is - why?
One aspect we have to take into account is that the AM4 Summit Ridge platform is in its earliest days. We used two boards during our testing, an MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium and an Asus ROG Crosshair 6 Hero - both supplied by AMD - but try as we might, the supplied Corsair 3000MHz DDR4 modules in our press package would not work at anything like their stated frequencies. AMD suggested loosened latency timings and lower bandwidth, but we still couldn't get it to work as it should (despite other reviewers with the same kit getting better results).
Our review would concentrate on gaming performance and as all of our recent CPU reviews have revealed, in-game frame-rates have a close relationship with clock-speed and memory frequency. Things are improving though - GSkill provided new Flare X-branded modules that feature low C14 latency and 3200MHz speed. On our MSI board, equipped with a fresh BIOS, everything just worked - 'A-XMP' set-up almost everything to spec, though DRAM voltage needed to be manually set.
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