AMD Ryzen 7 1800X AM4 8-Core Processor Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The AMD Ryzen 7 1800X 8-Core 3.6GHz AM4 Processor is available now from most major retailers, and right now it’s sitting at just £488.99 on Amazon UK and $499 on Amazon US. While that’s certainly an exceptional price for such a competitive chip in terms of performance and features, it’ll be interesting to see how long it stays at that price, as Intel are sure to start nipping away at their own prices to compete, and we would expect AMD to start doing the same.

Overview

Ryzen has been hyped to the extreme for quite some time now, and it’s great to see that despite a few minor hiccups in our own testing, their new flagship chip has pretty much lived up to the hype, and we expect it’s going to get even better. There are a few minor issues with memory so far, we noticed high latency there, and A-XMP profiles need improvement, but we’re working on a pre-release BIOS and expect updates that will resolve these issues to be released in the near future.

The chip didn’t do as well as I expected in Ashes of the Singularity, but we’ve heard similar reports of a buggy benchmark, so we’ll revisit that, as well as FireStrike in the near future for more in-depth performance testing, especially so at higher resolutions. However, in other CPU/GPU testing, the Ryzen chip was able to stretch its legs and topped our charts with lightning fast benchmark times and scores. When it came to playing Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of Mordor, the 1800X @ 4.1GHz is the fastest thing we’ve ever tested from AMD, and that’s great news for the gaming masses.

Overclocking on the 1800X couldn’t have been much easier, just tap in your new frequency, bump up the voltage a bit, and you’re good to go. Keeping it at those clocks, however, was the tricky part. The chip does love to get quite hot, but that’s true of any Intel 8-core chip too, so investing in a powerful air or water cooler is recommended for any form of overclocking. We used a be quiet! Silent Loop 240mm on our Ryzen 7 1800X, but I think the 280mm may have helped us reach a stable 4.2GHz.

The built-in Precision Boost and the XFR features work great for those who don’t want to overclock. The chip is more than capable of checking its own temperature and giving you speeds of up to 4GHz on Precision Boost, and if you’ve still got the thermal headroom, XFR will push it to 4.1GHz when you need it.

While overclocking isn’t going to be something everyone wants to do, and for those not investing in a motherboard that features the overclocking capabilities, the 1800X still puts on a good show and will bring huge benefits to those who use multi-tasking applications a lot on their system. If you’re running a Twitch stream while gaming, running overlays, rendering, and more, all those extra cores are going to come in very handy indeed.

Performance is good, but also the introduction of many features to the AMD landscape, such as NVMe x4, USB 3.1 Gen2, DDR4, 24 flexible PCIe Gen 3 lanes, and full overclocking across the whole CPU range, all add up to a more consumer friendly package that’s sure to get even better as more games and applications increase their support for multi-threading. It’s great to see AMD back in the market with a competitive product.

Pros

• Competitive price
• 8-Core w/ 16 Threads
• Improved feature set and hardware support from AM4 Platform
• Easy to overclock (on B350 and X370 chipsets only)
• Precision Boost and XFR
• Excellent gaming performance

Cons

• None

Neutral

• Memory performance still has a few bugs, but we expect these will be fixed with a BIOS update
• Like all 8-core chips, it can get quite warm, so a powerful cooler is recommended

“The AMD Ryzen 7 1800X is one of the best chips we’ve ever tested from the red team, delivering impressive performance, features and overclocking at an even more impressive price that’s sure to appeal to content creators and gamers.”