AMD's rejoin in performance for 2017! It's been a while since AMD had a competitive product against Intel's line-up of Core-processors. I've been waiting for the Ryzen for a while and upon release I decided to buy the Ryzen 7 1700 as a replacement for my overclocked Q6600 that was causing stability issues (either motherboard or RAM-wise). AMD's new (true) 8-core seems like a steady base for the upcoming years as a main desktop.

Performance-wise AMD did a good job with the Ryzen. Many reviews popped when the CPU was released on March 2nd, 2017 at 15:00 (UTC +1) and browsing through them I saw mixed outcomes. Several review sites focussed on games as benchmarks in which the Ryzen seems to fall behind on the Intel counterparts (as far as counterparts is the correct term) but on static benchmarks including various algoritms, compression, rendering and de/en-coding programs I found that the Ryzen was performing very good. Especially considering where AMD came from with the Bulldozer and Excavator based FX CPU's.

My Ryzen 7 1700 CPU feels at home in a MSI Tomahawk B350 motherboard that's currently running BIOS v1.15 and is equipped with 2x8GB Corsair DDR4 3000 RAM @ 2667 modules (CMK16GX4M2B3000C15). Along with a fresh PSU, graphics card and SSD (MP500, M.2 SSD) my desktop is fast enough for the next decade . > Read more